Are you also feeling the year go by rapidly? Has it always been this way? It seems like I made the big move to Aotearoa only yesterday, but it’s been well over a year now. A year of meeting people and rethinking how I’d like to live my life. After six months of vagabonding last year, my depleting funds and the winter weariness grounded me in Wellington and nudged me towards a steadier job.

Though the excitement has waned, I’m trying to keep the adventure alive by giving myself tasks, mostly around pursuing a creative life.

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I’ve moved into a centrally located flat in the city. From where I can walk everywhere. I was also beginning to enjoy biking around town, until my bike got stolen. I had started leaving it at the bike stand under my apartment building instead of taking it upstairs. I left it there when I went away on vacation earlier this month, a tiny part of me knowing that I was testing my luck. I didn’t notice its absence till a few days after I got back. It was my first day back at work, and I rushed down the building with my helmet in one hand, pushing close to 9 am but confident that it wouldn’t take me more than a 5-minute ride. Imagine the look on my face, dear reader, when I was greeted by an empty stand. My trusty old bike, which a German traveller I had befriended offered me for $50, was nowhere to be found. Why didn’t I leave it at home before going away? Easy come, easy go. How sad.

It would’ve affected me more, I suppose, had I not been such a fan of walking. It was one of those rare bright and crisp mornings, as still as can be hoped for in Wellington. I clipped the helmet, now useless, to my backpack and took a deep breath. With the swagger of having been wronged but not hating the world for it, I made my way to my desk job. With the soft wind in my hair as I spotted familiar faces on the streets, I felt happy to be back.

Even the little residual indignation was wiped clean later that week. When a friend from the Writers’ Studio graciously let me have two framed canvases. She was giving away a few extra ones she had. At 30x40inches, they’re big enough for broad cathartic strokes without feeling too ambitious.

The blank canvases look pristine, they face me as I sleep in my bedroom and remind me of their limitless possibility when I wake up every morning. And I dread the day I have to finally make a mark on them with my amateur hands. Can’t I just leave them empty, give them a name and call it art? Is it not art if it’s been done before?

“If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.”

Oscar Wilde

Well, making a painting is up to me, calling it art or not is for the people. So no abstract pieces out of laziness or fear. I’ll have to be intentional about it. I haven’t painted in a long time, and the idea is to enjoy the process. Of course, I’ll put in the hours. But the pleasure and challenge of making something of those empty whites has to wait till later this year. I’ll stick to editing and submitting my stories to journals over the next couple of months. Meanwhile, I’ll keep going to my weekly drawing classes on Cuba Street and let ideas percolate in my mind.

Talking about the drawing classes, I’ve made a habit of getting takeaway asian food after every class. I’ve been here long enough to have settled on my preferences for food joints. If it’s a quick lunch I’m after on a weekday, I keep it simple and choose between a Malaysian or Turkish restaurant near my workplace. Mainly for their service and consistency. I don’t want to make any more choices than necessary. What I observed last week when I went to those two places was the marked difference in the way their managers greet guests. The guy at the Malaysian place seems to have a script. He asks the exact same questions and has a well-rehearsed small talk. The guy at the Turkish takeout on the other hand barely says anything. But every once in a while when a regular walks in he talks to them as though continuing where they had left off from the last time. This, of course, is not a complaint about small talk.

For the most part I’m a willing participant. We can always talk about the weather. But sometimes, I respond to a casual ‘how are you going’ with a monologue. A litmus test to know whether they’d steer clear of me next time or whether the conversations can build into a familiarity, a friendship.

Which brings me to what is perhaps universally regarded as the most difficult thing to do, making friends as an adult. Sticking to a routine has surely helped me find people. I have the folks at the Wellington Writers’ Studio, the drawing school, and a few colleagues with whom I hang out now and then. A few of those I met when I had just arrived in the city are still around and I enjoy catching up with them.

Beyond the usual life admin, I’ve been trying to carve out time for reading. The idea is to focus on reading material that aligns with my primary writing project. I’m working on a collection of short stories that draw on the cultures and history of Southern India. Though I want to be deliberate with what I’m reading, I can’t help myself from straying. Currently I’m reading,

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel Dennett. A collection of interesting ideas and ways of thinking. Not the easiest read not because of complexity but because of the writing. Found it at the library.

Buddhist Philosophy - Essential Readings. A brilliant compendium of Buddhist thought over the centuries and from various traditions, put forth in segments such as Epistemology, Metaphysics and Ontology, and so on. I am seeing many parallels between Buddhist metaphysics and Daniel Dennett’s take on consciousness and philosophy which he arrives at through science.

The Essential Tales of Chekhov - Not enough can be said about Chekhov, but let me say this, his stories can be confidently prescribed as remedies for most cases of the blues, there is some discussion over the efficacy of the different translations though. Speaking for myself, if the Buddha doesn’t save me, I’m counting on Chekhov. I’ll elaborate in a separate post.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness - I don’t remember the last time I read a complete novel. At ~120 pages, this is one step closer to reading long fiction again.

Recommendations from recent finds:

• Wife-wooing - Story by John Updike. Found this in an old collection of American Short Stories. A brief sketch of everyday marital life where the narrator looks on eagerly and lovingly at his wife. Sensuous articulation of the ordinary. LINK

• The Piano Teacher - Film - A story of a single woman who lives with her mother in a wildly maladaptive relationship. She’s pursued by a younger man. She reveals her inclination towards sadomasochism. He flips out. The plot, the cinematography, and the acting, all stand out.

• Hell is the absence of God by Ted Chiang - Novella - Fantasy fiction
  Recommended by a fellow writer at the Studio, which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed and been recommending to everyone. It’s a remarkably inventive story of a world where Biblical angels are real and God does work in mysterious ways.

That’s all for now. I’ll keep you posted if there’s anything exciting.

Best,
Pranav

After an unplanned hiatus from the newsletter, I’m back! And as you can tell, the newsletter has gotten a makeover. A good one at that! I had initially set out to use this space to write commentaries on work, culture, and life but I always strayed towards the more personal. There was never a common thread between the pieces other than the fact that I wrote them all.

Recently when I returned to write something here, I was able to see this more clearly. I’ve only written what I wanted to share and that had mostly been life updates and the occasional oversharing on things. And that was accepted by you. Those who are reading my newsletters aren’t reading it so much to learn something but merely to take a break from their lives with a peek into mine. It’s a simple and endearing thing. I write because I have to and you humour me by reading. Thank you. Here on, I’m simplifying things, and hence the rebranding.

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Over the last couple of months, I’ve been settling into the idea of calling Wellington home. Since I’ve gotten here, I’ve been able to write more regularly and I’m happy to share that I’ve been making steady progress on a collection of short stories. I’m doing most of my work at The Wellington Writers’ Studio which is a shared space for writers in the city. More than a workspace, it is a real community of writers.

I haven’t written much fiction before and it’s turning out to be a humbling experience. I sit at the desk and question myself a million times before I finish one paragraph. Perhaps this is part of the process, and I must learn to enjoy it.

My stories are inspired by the tales I was raised on, and they’re mostly set in rural South India. For my first collection, I’m taking the classic writing advice of ‘write what you know’. I’ll tell you more about them some other time. For now, let’s get into what I’ve been reading lately. Naturally, I’m trying to read stuff that’ll help me write my stories better.

While a big chunk of my reading at present is short stories, I’ve tried to find works that are vastly different so that I get a more comprehensive idea of what short fiction can be.

My reading can be broadly categorised based on substance and style. The substance I’ll be focusing on is pre-modern to contemporary India with an emphasis on the mythologies, religions, folklore and social structures of peninsular India. By style I mean the art of short fiction. I’m reading works by masters of the genre, mostly from recommendations from fellow writers at the Studio. Thankfully, there will be writers whose work falls into both categories.

Fiction
Stories by Jose Luis Borges, Raymond Carver, Julio Cortázar, Ismat Chughtai, Gabriel García Márquez, Saadat H. Manto, Alice Munro, R. K. Narayan, Satyajit Ray, George Saunders, Rabindranath Tagore, Yiyun Li, Stefan Zweig
Plays by Girish Karnad

Nonfiction
On Indian History - William Dalrymple, Romila Thapar, Narendra Luther, Ramachandra Guha
Indian Perspectives from A K Ramanujan, Amartya Sen, Shashi Tharoor, P Sainath, B R Ambedkar
General Essays - David Sedaris, James Baldwin, John J Sullivan

This is an evolving list and I could include more contemporary works. Please let me know if you have any suggestions. Also, what have you been reading lately?

As I began my research into the themes and settings of my stories, I started frequenting the Wellington City Library, just a few blocks from home. And that’s how I got my first great find.

If there’s any book in Hindi literature that has survived in the collective memory of modern India, and has definitely taken a spot in the Hindi literary canon, it has to be Godaan by Premchand. It’s a book that everyone who’s familiar with Hindi literature knows about. I was surprised to find a single copy of an English translation on the library website. The book was a hardcover edition published in 1968, and had to be brought in from an offsite storage location upon request. Other than the foxed pages of the book, it was rather well-preserved. This version was a translation by Gordon C Roadarmel and titled ‘The Gift of a Cow’.

It is set in the early 1900s rural Uttar Pradesh, then the United Provinces under colonial rule. The story is about a poor farmer and his never-ending struggle to make ends meet. The protagonist, Hori, is in his late forties and works on a small plot of farmland, for which he has to pay yearly tax to the local landlord, Rai Saheb. He navigates an oppressive class structure, unpredictable cropping seasons, and personal illness to keep his family afloat. The landlord, so wealthy as to not have to work, is terminally preoccupied with maintaining his appearance among his peers and he too is perpetually in debt.

Premchand, like any good novelist, lets his characters evolve and have real personalities instead of being archetypes that push a plot forward. His astuteness in expressing the inner turmoil of his characters shows a deep understanding of the human condition. Not only this, Premchand masterfully crafts the characters in relation to one another.

Dr. Malti is one such well-written character. She is a feminist and the sole earner of her family. She supports her sisters’ education and begrudgingly puts up with her father’s gambling. In the public sphere, she sets herself the purpose of advancing women’s rights. She is forthright about it. In her private life, she also yearns to be loved by a man, who turns out to be rather unromantic and given to archaic ideals.

Premchand takes great care in elevating the humanness of his characters. At no point does he seem to be building the archetype of a modern independent woman only to take a potshot at her. He has the capacity to accept and express the multitudes that people have in them. He does find ways however to put forth his iconoclastic ideas through his characters. Another character of note is a man who is raised within strict caste boundaries and enjoys the spoils of the prevailing order. He enters a relationship with a woman of a lower social standing. This does not sit well with his family or hers. And it is the woman who is blamed from both sides. A conflict ensues and results in an incident that compromises the man’s caste privilege. At once he finds himself on the receiving end. Only when he gets a little taste of caste-based oppression is he able to see the inordinate violence that people endure under this social hierarchy. His world is shattered and he’s forced to reevaluate everything he was taught. In effect he goes through the stages of grief for his now dead caste superiority and then has to face the guilt. Only when he sheds his orthodoxy is he able to return to the woman as an equal. Eager to reciprocate the affection that she had always shown him.

Premchand captivates the reader with his nuanced prose and then lays out the dehumanising elements of orthodoxy. Further, he nudges you to envision a world where we overcome it.

Talking about the prose, some subtlety is surely lost in translation. Such as when Hori refers to his wife using different Hindi words in different contexts, sometimes reflecting affection and sometimes nonchalance. Always retaining a sense of formality when he addresses her in public. In the translation, only ‘Wife’ is used at every occasion. Although having compared this version to excerpts from the original, I didn’t find it lacking by and large.

The Roadarmel translation does an excellent job and I’m sad this is not as widely known for the masterpiece that it is. I urge you to pick it up and see for yourself. Here’s a link to a free online PDF: https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.449404/page/15/mode/2up

Best,
Pranav

The days are getting shorter here in the southern hemisphere. It’s almost winter in New Zealand and the occasional rain is locking me indoors.

I’ve been on the road for nine weeks now. Being constantly on the move can get taxing, not to mention expensive. But there are ways to minimise costs while maximising your experience. One such way is to stay with locals as part of a work exchange instead of paying for accommodation. This is fairly common around here. Being an economical way to get around the country, it’s popular among longer term travellers. There are websites on which you can find such oppportunities. WWOOF is one such platform. It stands for Willing Workers On Organic Farms or World-wide Opportunities on Organic Farms in some countries to comply with labour laws. (Learn more about it here)

That’s how I found Robin. I requested to volunteer on her lifestyle block and she was happy to host me. I was going to stay at her place for a week but I ended up staying two. It is near the Abel Tasman National Park. A large property with all sorts of magnificent trees along the boundaries, a bunch of nervous sheep trimming the lawn to one side of the long driveway that takes you to the house, four reclusive cows grazing the large pasture beyond the stream that runs along the house and three well-behaved chickens who obediently peck on all the kitchen-waste that comes their way every morning.

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Robin is mindful of what she consumes. Most of the greens come from her garden and the kitchen waste that can’t be fed to chickens ends up in Bokashi, a composting method. As days passed I got to learn more about Robin and her adventurous life. As a retired doctor, she now spends her time working with multiple climate action groups, educating those around her and urging the government to implement the right policies.

The following is a brief Q&A we had on my last day at her place.

Could you give a brief introduction about yourself?

Well, I'll be 71 this year. I grew up in Wellington. My father built a yacht during my childhood, and I spent the holidays of my teenage years cruising in the Marlborough Sounds and the Tasman Bay. So that was my earliest connection with this area. My mother was a keen gardener, but I mean, the whole thing about sustainability and climate action wasn't really thought about back then. But I certainly became interested in the natural environment through that sailing experience and visiting lots of islands with native bush and birdlife.

And so I'd say when I went to university, I wanted to study to be a marine ecologist. And I was also very interested in the whole question of population control and the carrying capacity of the earth.

However, my father thought that that would be an interesting hobby, but it wasn't a real job and he wanted me to go to medical school. And back in those days, I'm sorry to say that I still obeyed my father. So I became a medical doctor and then I worked in family practice.

But I always continued with my love of the ocean, in particular I was a very keen scuba diver and dived on a lot of the offshore islands of New Zealand. When it was time to decide whether I would specialise and if so, in what, I decided that I really wanted to see something of the world, because I was 26 and I hadn't been overseas.

So I decided to get a crew position on a yacht heading to the Pacific Islands. And I met in an American sailor who was changing his crew. I sailed with him from Auckland to Fiji on his 45-foot yacht. And then the old story, fell in love, carried on sailing, got married, had our son.

And then tragically, he died in a sailing accident in Singapore. So at that point, I was a solo parent and I went back to medical practice.

What brought your attention to climate action?

It wasn't really until I held my granddaughter in my arms in 2017 and just really thought what kind of world is she going to be growing up into? And at that point, I read a book by Naomi Klein called ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate’. And my interest in ecology and climate action kind of resurfaced. I joined a local climate action group called Our Climate Declaration that included our first Green party MP, Jeanette Fitzsimons. She had been to the Kyoto meetings and all the big climate meetings and had been doing her best for about 40 years to draw attention to the impending climate crisis. And so she was a very powerful mentor.

What’s your definition of Sustainability?

Okay, I think living sustainably is reducing our carbon footprint to a point where the Earth can support 10 billion people. That means those of us in the Western world need to dramatically reduce our carbon footprint so that those in developing countries can improve their standard of living.

What is the obligation to act in order to restore the climate?

The obligation well, is to preserve a liveable future for next generations, not just of humans, but of all living creatures, because we're currently in a phase that's being called the Sixth Great Extinction.

And the Earth is also on track for global heating of at least three degrees by the end of the century. When you think of the disasters that are unfolding at the moment, you can only imagine how bad it's going to get.

The other issue is that of the tipping points, which are the irreversible changes in Earth systems that are increasingly likely to happen once global warming is higher by 1.5 and especially 2 degrees. So that's things like the dying off of the Amazon rainforest and the boreal forest, the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and changes to the AMOC (a major ocean current system) which will plunge Scandinavia and Europe into much, much colder temperatures, the melting of the permafrost which will release a lot of Carbon into the atmosphere. All of these will have a major impact on the amount of food that the planet can grow and how people can live.

This is an existential polycrisis. It is quite literally threatening civilisation as we know it on Earth and the lives of billions of people.

What do you hope your grandchild will do differently?

Well, I hope that she will learn. We will teach her about sustainable living once she's old enough. She will already be absorbing, of course, the way we live and the things that are important to us.

More particularly, I hope that the governments of the world will stand up to the fossil fuel companies. And demand that they stop producing fossil fuels and move towards a sustainable way of living that will preserve the future for my granddaughter and all others.

Talking about governments, What do you think New Zealand is doing right and what is it doing wrong?

Well, with the right-wing government, we're not doing anything right at the moment, or certainly not fast enough. In fact, we're doing the reverse.

I think of the movie that was called something like Back to the Future, and I feel like we're going backwards into the future at the moment with the policies.

They've removed initiatives that support EVs, cycleways, and all the kinds of sustainable forms of public transport. They're supporting exploration for more fossil fuels, natural gas and oil, and that's the exact opposite of what we need to be doing.

They're also supporting more tourism. I think tourism is a luxury that the planet can't afford at this point. Yeah, so I think that we're in a very dire situation at the moment

What is your hope for 2050?

Well, first of all, that we have zero carbon emissions. That the planet has moved to renewables and a low-power degrowth philosophy that meets people's needs rather than their wants. So there's a whole lot more compassion and care for each other around the world, not just in our local community, so that people can at least survive and hopefully thrive.

Any essential reading that you’d recommend?

Christiana Figueres’s The Future We Choose. There's a local one called Under the Weather, written by James Renwick, who's a New Zealand climate scientist. You should check out the ‘Take the Jump’ initiative that talks about helpful personal lifestyle shifts you can make.

Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of knowledge out there. It's just the lack of will from government to enact the necessary laws and that, of course, means a lack of educated public to demand the changes.

How are you? I’ve been away far too long and we haven’t kept in touch. I’m sorry. But now that I have more time on my hands I’m shamelessly asking for your attention again. The idea was always to keep writing, which I believe I have stuck to by keeping a journal. Editing and publishing on the other hand is double the work and I’ve been pathetic in that regard. Anyway, I have more time now because I’m once again happily unemployed. I left my job last month and decided to travel for a while. This I did after I was overcome by a thought that occasionally creeps up on all young adults (or everyone?), ‘you’re not getting any younger!’ I’ll be exploring New Zealand for a couple of months.

As the first stop on my journey, I volunteered at a Yoga retreat centre in the Waitakere Ranges to the west of Auckland. The Sacred Earth Retreat Center is really a community of people who’re exploring spirituality and who cherish the land. It is nestled in a valley overlooking the Karekare beach. The community has residents and volunteers. While residents pay to stay here, volunteers work three days a week in exchange for stay. The work is simple. A bit of gardening, a bit of housekeeping and maybe sometimes admin work.

The owners are a couple who started buying up land around the valley almost two decades ago and kept adding buildings all over it. You can see the commitment they have towards the place in their work ethic. Both in their sixties, they still make each minute count. The place requires constant and meticulous upkeep to fight back the wilderness encroaching from all directions. And the couple always seem up to the task. They strive to keep the place intact, with all the comforts to make your stay pleasurable.

Everyone here does their bit to help the community. A resident who happened to be visiting the city drove me here on the day I arrived in Auckland. He waited for almost two hours to pick me up, but that didn’t stop him from greeting me with the warmest smile and helping me get groceries on the way back. As the nearest market is a 45 minute drive away, most people living here stock up food once a week.

The drive up to the retreat is a pebbled track with large rolling meadows on either side. Often you’ll see horses grazing and greeting passers by. Almost all other properties here are what they call lifestyle blocks, small landholdings that are cultivated just enough to be self sufficient. With idyllic vistas all around and a calmness that’s rarely disturbed by human activity, this seems to me the perfect place to sit back and contemplate the mysteries of life. If you listen closely, you can hear the waves crashing on the rocky shores all day. Until the noise of cicadas takes over in the evening followed by the chirping of birds returning home. Then the sound of the sea reclaims the night only to be interjected by the occasional hoot of an owl.

The property is filled with Hindu and Buddhist iconography. The owners, who are devout followers of the guru Sathya Sai Baba, spend half the year in India and they’ve been doing that for decades now. They’ve given Hindu names to their children and are more religious than your average Indian. The people that this place attracts are interested in religion and spirituality as much as the nature. The day I got here, I got questioned by three people about my religion. I evadingly replied that I was born in a Hindu family and left it at that.

But soon enough, their enthusiasm about eastern spirituality got me thinking about my own journey with religion. I have grappled with the idea of religion for a long time but now I finally seem to have settled my thoughts on it. I’ve strayed far from my orthodox Hindu upbringing. I was 16 when ISIS made headlines all over the world. I could see how cruel people could be in the name of religion. Then came the wave of rationality. I was already late to the new atheist movement, Hitchens had already died and Dawkins wasn’t as active. But they were still their firebrand, witty selves in the televised debate videos I found on YouTube. I realised that I had only listened to what everyone else was saying, now it was time to think for myself. I turned a sceptic and quickly an atheist.

Had the people at the retreat centre met me in my late teens, they’d find me insufferable. They’d tell me how they’re managing their anxiety with breathwork, I’d ask them for evidence and think myself clever. I had to go a long way before I could see that simple things do not need to be overanalysed or even explained. Simple things such as working the field, planting a few trees, weeding out the garden, watching the sunset, practising a few breathing methods, feeling good, sleeping happy.

Going to university was the first time I was free to exercise my thought. I no longer had the constant presence of religious orthodoxy that I had at home. Without something immediate to rebel against, the firebrand rhetoric of the new atheist movement wasn’t as appealing. Around this time, a friend introduced me to the works of Sam Harris. He gave me a year-long subscription to Sam’s mental health app called Waking Up. In short, Sam Harris proposes spirituality without religion.

I also started learning a little more about philosophy. Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy was my introduction to western philosophy and a collection of Swami Vivevakananda’s essays that I found in my grandmother’s house was my gateway to Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta (Nonduality) in particular fascinated me. I found it profound that all things and peoples can be thought of as interconnected. That the world is a single consciousness and this oneness is divine. For a while I was satisfied. It aligned the theism I inherited and my quest for a more holistic spirituality.

Advaita had almost driven me back into the fold of believers when my newly-learnt rationalism was triggered. I noticed that the theory required a bit of mental gymnastics. It’s beautiful to think of all things as one, it almost fosters an idea of togetherness, we’re in this together sort. But the level of abstraction required to get there leaves it ineffective as a practical philosophy. I needed something simpler.

I don’t really know what brought my attention towards Buddhism and when. Maybe it was the summer I spent in Southeast Asia where almost every other tourist attraction is a Buddhist temple. Maybe it was the Alan Watts podcasts on Zen that I found on the Waking Up app. I’m sure the ever present Buddha imagery in houses and restaurants placed just for the ambience had something to do with it.

When I started learning about it, I was drawn to the fact that it had very few assertions. The Buddha, they say, recognised that the commonality between all living things is our never ending need to avoid suffering. Further, everything around you is constantly changing and nothing is permanent. What you call real is only a concept of your mind. These axioms form the basis of his teachings.

The teachings of the Buddha can be summarised as three assertions and a proposition.1

• Life involves suffering

• Suffering arises out of causes of our own doing

• We can avoid suffering by terminating the causes

• Proposition: The way to terminate the causes is through the eight-fold path.

The Eight-fold path2 that the Buddha is said to have expounded in his first sermon is a sort of do’s and don’ts to help you steer clear of suffering. Even in following the eight-fold path, the Buddha suggests moderation. Neither will extreme renunciation calm you nor will extreme indulgence satisfy you. He suggests you choose the middle way. Everything in the eight-fold path is in your control. You are to decide how you follow it and you are to decide what moderation means. There is no other arbiter of what’s right and what’s wrong. There are no simple binaries of right-wrong or good-bad. All things are interconnected and You must think of things in relation to one another. Something is better if it reduces your suffering and worse if it’s the other way around. This is perhaps the biggest difference that Buddhism has when compared to any religious doctrine. It compels you to think.

Another key tenet in Buddhism is the idea that everyone has the potential to be spiritually self-actualised and achieve Nirvana, the liberation from suffering. In short, the Buddha says, if I can do it so can you. In order to do so, you must be mindful. You not only need to weigh your actions but also need to weight your thoughts.

The beauty of what the Buddha taught is not merely in the method, but in the idea that you can attain spiritual fulfilment through entirely your own doing. You do not require a doctrine, a guru or a sect. Your mindfulness and enquiry alone can take you towards a more holistic life. What the Buddha taught was the eightfold path, but he doesn’t say that this is the only path. That was just his path and yours can be different. This gives you power over your life. In accepting it, you finally break free from the religious conditioning of having to believe in a power greater than yourself. And bring your attention back to the here and now rather than some great unknown.

In Vedanta, life (prāṇa) is the only Good and Divine. But Buddhism shows you that you don’t even need to be given this residual notion of good and bad. You can decide your life’s worth. Buddhism starts at a very human level, leaves all speculation of the divine and opens you up to form your conclusions about morality, free-will, truth and death among other things. Without a definite right or wrong, you can finally stop judging. You stop judging not because someone tells you to but because you realise that there is no need to. The entire Buddhist philosophy points towards a more nuanced outlook on things.

“Take the risk of thinking for yourself , much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way ..”

Christopher Hitchens

One of the great allures of travelling is meeting different people. Recently, I met two interesting women from Canada at a hostel during dinner time. They were in New Zealand for a Bible Study exchange program. Naturally our conversation turned towards religion and faith. Which they quizzed me about. I gave them the same spiel about my journey and that I’m currently leaning towards Buddhism. They told me about their belief in Jesus and the holy trinity. My curiosity was matched by theirs and we spoke through dinner. As we were getting up to leave, the more inquisitive one turned to me and asked, “So do you believe in Buddhism?”

The answer to this is perhaps what sums up my entire outlook. For the most part I don’t want to believe. I shouldn’t have to believe. I shouldn’t need faith. And Buddhism is the only path I’ve come across that doesn’t ask that from me. The Buddha’s teachings, don’t require you to believe, they urge you to introspect. The few fundamental assertions don’t test your imagination, they’re almost self evident. There is nothing beyond that which can be reasoned. And so life is made simpler. At least for me.

I’m fascinated by the Buddha and the Buddhist tradition. I’ve been to the Deer Park in Sarnath which was the site of his first sermon and I’ve been to the Dalai Lama’s monastery. This however doesn’t indicate belief. I don’t require an actual person to have renounced earthly pleasures for an ascetic life around 2500 years ago. I don’t need the Buddha to be a real person in history. I can see the wisdom in the principles without needing to believe in anything to validate their worth.

Finally, belief or not, I think it’s important that your worldview helps you live better and be better to others. The mindfulness I’ve discovered through Buddhism helps me do that. And the point of this thinking is not to be able to think more, but to think less, to be able to sit back and soak up the gentle warmth of the setting sun and rejoice in the evening birdsong unencumbered by the questions of who, what, when and why.

I’m glad to have you back here!

This is the first of a series of pieces I’m writing on topics related to public policy.

In May, I started learning about public policy after enrolling in a course at the Takshashila Institution. The course is a primer on the different aspects of policy analysis, with a focus on technology policy. Learn more about it here.

In a recent lecture, we discussed all the things that a government can do for citizens' well-being. One way that governments try to make life easier for people is by offering subsidies and making a resource available to the wider society.

Water is a resource that the government subsidizes for its people. But lowering the price is perhaps one factor that led to the water shortage we faced in Bangalore. Sometimes when an agent such as the government tinkers with the price of a product without making necessary adjustments to its supply or demand, there can be unintended consequences. That’s probably what happened to some degree in the case of the water shortages in Bangalore and New Delhi in recent times and Chennai a few years ago.

The water in Bangalore is priced at less than 15% of the cost incurred to supply it (ref). With this, the government has encouraged an irresponsible attitude towards water among citizens. Since the subsidy on water is available to everyone across all financial levels, the actual perceived value of water is abysmal to the majority. This ultimately had an adverse effect on the poorest of the society.

The actual cost of water, that is incurred by the government depends on the cost of the resources required to deliver the water from the natural reserve to your tap. The government takes on the challenge of constructing and maintaining the infrastructure required for this.

But should the government entirely leave the pricing of water to the forces of supply and demand? It probably shouldn't. Access to clean drinking water is a fundamental right of every citizen, protected by the 21st Amendment of the Constitution. Further, water is a public good like air, safety and education. The Government has to take responsibility and make sure all citizens can have it. Withdrawing from this market could allow monopolization by private enterprises and people of fewer means can lose access to it.

What did the Government do?

When the city was faced with a water shortage, private water suppliers saw an opportunity to make a profit. As demand for water tankers increased, the prices naturally increased too. People who couldn’t afford the new prices would possibly lose access to water. The government had to step in.

For a brief period, the Bangalore Municipal Corporation took control of the water tanker market. They ordered all water tanker operators to register themselves and supply water only at a specified maximum price. The government also seized several water tankers and operated them so that all parts of the city were served.

While this was a temporary solution to a problem that has been gradually building up, the government now needs to focus its attention on implementing long-term fixes.

What can the government do next?

Governments can start by setting the right price on water so that citizens realise its actual value. Then, for the disadvantaged alone, the government can offer need-based subsidies.

The revenue generated from the sale of water should be put back into solving the larger problem of water security.

This might mean improved infrastructure or administration, in which the government should invest.

Next, the society at large must be made to understand the seriousness of the issue. The Government must spread awareness through campaigns

The government can also incentivise private enterprises to innovate in the field of water management. Especially to reduce leakages, improve water recycling and accurately measure water consumption.

Doing all of this is a tall order for any government given that there are always a hundred other pressing issues that need to be resolved at any moment. But if long-term policies can be implemented and adhered to through changing governments maybe we can handle a few of the factors that could cause such a crisis. By doing so we can make the future a little less risky for the next generation.

I’ve tried many ways to begin this story but I haven’t been able to find a way that works for both you and me. So once again I ask for your patience.

Every writing class I’ve taken emphasizes the use of a hook. The first paragraph, especially the first line, is meant to grab the reader’s attention. Yet I've failed to produce one. Moreover, writing this piece was particularly challenging. It was mired in self-doubt from the very beginning. Truth be told, I don’t fancy myself a writer nor do I romanticize the process. So questions about why I must write and why I must write this have long been obstructive.

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But I can admit that writing has helped me cope. It offered me a diversion. In the days following my mother’s passing, I made copious notes. I sat up at night and wrote about what had happened. Over the months, I’ve been jotting down my thoughts whenever I’m reminded of her.

However, when I sat down to put it all together, I felt vacuous. The thought of reducing everything that happened to a blog post terrified me. Furthermore, I was afraid it would end up being attention-seeking or worse, self-pitying. Writing a journal as a private exercise seemed natural, but showing it to the world felt affected.

It has taken me quite some time to get my thinking in order and find answers to my questions.

It’s been a couple of months since my mother’s passing. Regular things have gradually regained their sense of importance. I’m once again worrying about professional growth, finding a partner, being productive, saving, investing, and creating financial value for myself. Life is beginning to feel like it’s in my control. Time has tricked me into thinking that way again.

But for a while, in the days leading up to and following the demise of my mother, I saw how little of life was actually in my control. Or rather, how control itself isn't real.

When I look back on those weeks, I’m reminded of the helplessness, the sleeplessness, and the tears.

The first time I teared up was when I realized how badly my mother’s health had deteriorated. I had been living in Bangalore and hadn’t visited Hyderabad in a while. When I was told to return urgently in October, I had no idea how bad her situation was. I visited her at the Lung Care facility. She had infected lungs and was getting intensive pulmonary care. I had seen my mother slowly become delicate over the last decade, with her arthritis and thyroid issues. But I had never seen her so frail.

My father, who had been with her over the past week, looked drained. He had a crumpled T-shirt on and looked sleep-deprived. He complained that she wasn’t taking her medication on time. She was incapable of defending herself. I saw a look of dejection on her face that I had never seen before. That made me tear up.

A few days later, the doctors discharged her, they said that her lungs were healing and she could be cared for at home. Just in time for Dasara, we brought her home. On the night of Dasara, I presented myself in a new shirt, as per her dictum of always wearing new clothes on festive days. My uncles and aunts had gathered, and we exchanged leaves of the Jammi tree. My mother was visibly exhausted, but she stayed up for a while after dinner speaking to us.

The next day, she didn’t leave her bed. She took her meals in her room. We thought she needed the rest and didn’t bother her. The day after that, things suddenly got worse. She didn’t wake up till noon, and when we gently woke her, she looked confused and kept asking for water. I held the glass close to her, and she’d take a sip from the straw, and then ask for water again a few moments later. Seeing her slip away into a sort of delirium was crushing.

We rushed her back to the lung care centre that day and they said that she might require a well-equipped ICU. So we brought her to a more advanced hospital. She was admitted to the ICU later that night. She was heavily medicated and put under an oxygen mask. My father, my uncles, and I stuck to the waiting room. ICU visits were limited and involved a lengthy process.

When I visited her the morning after she was admitted, I was happy that she had regained consciousness. A staff doctor asked her, “Who is this boy?” She slowly turned her face and pointed at me. From beneath the mask that was fixed on her face, I could hear her gentle voice, “Pranav”.

The next evening, the doctors informed us that her vitals were worsening and she might need a ventilator soon. We understood that my mother was very fragile now. My father had been sobbing without pause since the doctors gave us this news. I too teared up later that night after struggling to hold on to hope that entire evening.

The doctors put her on a ventilator the following morning. To make the pain bearable she was heavily sedated and was no longer conscious.

The only consolation in that moment was my brother's arrival. He was able to get the next flight back and came straight to the hospital.

The doctors told us that it was going to be a crucial night. My mother had been fighting to hold on for over a week. Now that the life support would reduce the stress on her, she needed to show signs of improvement. Seeing her crumble over the past week had beaten us down. But my brother, who had just arrived, was able to find optimism in their words.

We waited in the lobby for a few more hours, there was nothing to do but to wait and pray. At around 11 PM, we decided to go home and wait out the night.

About an hour later, I got a call from the ICU. The doctor on duty told me to get my family and reach the hospital as soon as possible. We hurried back to the hospital. My mother had suffered a cardiac arrest. Her organs were failing and her heart wasn’t getting enough oxygen.

As we were leaving the ICU, the doctor pulled me aside and told me that her situation was irreparable. He told me to keep my phone nearby and that I should expect a final call any time now. I nodded.

We spent the next hour or so in the waiting area. We were beginning to realize that we were nearing the end. My uncle suggested that we leave the hospital and go back home. There was no point in waiting. From the way the doctor put it, the final call was imminent. Now that hope was taken away from us, the wait became ominous. Staying there didn’t feel right.

We were halfway home when I got the call. The doctor told me to return. We didn’t rush this time. My father, brother and I entered the ICU ward together. We waited at the desk while the nurses rushed to clear the equipment at my mother’s bed. A few minutes later, the curtains were flung open and the doctor led us to the bed. I looked away instantly. The devices on the side had flatlined. But I knew that it was important that I see her. So I brought myself to look at her.

In the center of the large bed was the tiny lifeless form of my mother. The ventilator, which was still fixed to her was aggressively pumping oxygen into her failed lungs. My father began sobbing, he was given a chair. I looked at my brother to see how to react. I couldn’t gather much.

Slowly, I started tearing up. But I wasn’t crying, the shock of it had numbed me from any pain. It was an instinctual response. The tears then turned into whimpering. My father, my brother and I huddled up and held each other. As we composed ourselves, The doctor brought a document for my signature. Written on the top, ‘Time of death: 1:28 AM. Diagnosis: Septic shock and multi-organ failure.’

My brother and I walked my father out of the ward, through the long, desolate corridor to the waiting area. My cousin and uncles took turns entering the ICU next.

We reached home around 4 AM. We hadn’t told anyone at home. We didn’t have anything to say. My grandparents were very young when they had my mother and in effect, they grew up with her. My uncles and aunt are younger than her and had an elder sister all their lives. Everyone broke down.

Things moved quickly now, elders close to the family stepped in and told me and my brother what to do next. I made calls to get the paperwork in order and process the insurance. I was back at the hospital at 7 AM. The exit procedure took two hours and had me running between the ICU ward, administrative desk, and insurance claims desk. In hindsight, I’m glad I held myself together and did what was required of me.

At about 9:30 AM, after completing all the paperwork, we reached the hospital’s basement, which had the mortuary. The ambulance that was hired to take her remains home was still behind schedule. The person at the mortuary took my signature on yet another form and told us to wait. A few minutes later I spotted a large vehicle turning the corner towards us. That’s when I heard a clank from behind me. Then I heard the rattle of a stretcher. As I turned around, I saw two men moving a tiny white bundle from one stretcher to another. I had been quietly preparing myself for that moment. I knew that they’d bring her out any moment and I was dreading it, a certain anxiety was growing within me. I accepted that it was my mother that they were handling. My heart sank. As they brought the stretcher closer, it passed over a bump which jolted her into the air. That was the trigger. The absolute lifelessness of my mother was clear. I broke down.

All the grief that had been building up inside me burst out. All that which had been walled off by the urgency of attending to the tasks at hand. I wept, uncontrollably. My knees buckled, and my uncles rushed to hold me together. I sobbed into their shoulders. The lifeless body of my mother was being moved into the refrigerated unit of the van. I felt the reverberations of my wails inside the hollow void of my chest. I wept.

Things were a mess for the first few days. There was no semblance of reason or sense. My mother had just vanished. I knew my mother was getting weaker, but I didn't know what the tipping point was. Did we bring her back from the hospital prematurely or did we not take her to the ICU soon enough? Did we not test her home oxygen kit enough or was her medication not on time? Should I have come back home sooner? What exactly led to this? After a point, looking for reason felt futile.

The two weeks following the funeral were for elaborate rituals and confining ourselves at home as per custom. I started painting and writing every day. Many relatives visited us during this time, people I hadn’t seen in a long time. My brother and I would make an appearance and exchange a few words. No one had much to say but I’m thankful to everyone who came.

Among them were the uncle and aunt of my sister-in-law. They had been in touch with us ever since my mother was hospitalized, and they were concerned. As Reiki practitioners, they had been focusing their practice on my mother’s recovery. They told us that others in their healing group prayed for her recovery too.

These were people who never knew my mother. I know Reiki healing isn’t scientific, but I was glad they thought of my mother. It was proof of the love my mother gave us.

The love that my brother then shared with his wife, who in turn connected it with the love she shared with her uncle and aunt. This shared love manifested in the form of concern for each other.

I could see how precious this is and my rationality posed no conflict. Their prayers proved that her love was alive. I’m not sure if their healing practice restored any life force to my mother, but their concern was life-affirming.

The days passed in silence, I slept a lot and dreamt of her. I saw her struggling on the hospital bed. The dreams gradually became less frequent, and the melancholy in the house settled.

One day, my grandmother burst into tears, saying she wasn't able to recall for a moment how my mother looked. Forgetting is natural, but in the weeks following the incident, I struggled to find ways to keep the memory of my mother alive. I wanted to retain a part of her within me. What would she have liked me to do? Should I ask the only girl I told her about to marry me? My mother’s final days had been so deeply etched in my mind that I thought they’d blur the memory of who she was before she was eclipsed by her illness. I was desperately thinking of ways to keep her with me.

A month later, I returned to Bangalore and got back to work. Occasionally, I gave in to moody spells, but I held myself together for the most part. I dreamt of her a couple of times, but now the dreams were different. She was no longer hurting. In one dream, we had a fleeting conversation. She called my name, and I went closer. I asked if she was sleeping, and she said that she was going to. The dream ended abruptly. I woke up in a pool of sweat and started weeping. I felt completely alone. My every imagination of a future had her in it. With her loss, everything had crumbled.

There is a certain confidence that comes with being loved. I can tell that I've lost a bit of that confidence. I know that no one will call me Pranu anymore. No one will look at my face with the crooked jaw and frown-like smile and say that I have the most beautiful smile.

With her loss, I’ve lost someone who would make an effort to understand me. I always knew that I could open up to her. I always felt that she saw beyond her traditions and knew that there were things of true value that just couldn’t be squandered under the pretext of customs.

Over the months, I’ve come to terms with the way things will be. But more than anything I’ve realised that I needn’t make an effort to keep my mother's memory. Everything I am and everything I do will have her influence. For many around me, I am a living memory of her. I just need to be present.

I have a question for you, when did you know that you had become an adult? Not in the sense that you start earning your own money, move out and find a place. When do you stop being a boy or girl and start being a man or woman? Not to the world around you but to yourself.

I’ve just turned 27 and I’ve been thinking about this for the last couple of days. Especially about being an adult. Ever since I turned 20, I’ve been thinking that I’d be an adult soon and now, seven years later, I feel ready to call myself an adult.

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Much has changed since I was in my early twenties. Some changes were sudden and some were gradual. One reason, I think, I didn’t feel like an adult for so long was because of the setting I found myself in. Right after college, I moved to Bangalore to start working. I stayed with my brother for a while and then I moved back home during the pandemic. After the pandemic, I returned to Bangalore and stayed with friends. When I stayed with family, I had people to look after me and when I stayed with friends, we were simply extending our carefree college life.

One surprising change that I noticed this year was how I felt about my birthday itself. Usually around the first week of March, I begin preparing myself for the coming birthday blues. I have to remind myself that I’m more than okay and find ways to keep myself occupied or in the company of friends. But this time was different. Growing a year older didn’t seem all that dreadful. Maybe my attempt to articulate my thoughts had something to do with it or maybe as an adult, I’ve come to terms with growing old.

In a recent session at the Bangalore Writers Workshop, we were talking about how we stop growing at some point and just continue to get older. Some said they were mentally still in their late teens or early twenties. That even if their preferences and priorities have changed, their underlying thought process has been pretty much the same.

I feel that I’ve only recently begun thinking the way that I do now, and I’m always surprising myself by how I behave.

But the question remains, When does one become an adult? There is no modern rite of passage that signals adulthood. The Hindu philosophical view of adulthood, as a stage one enters upon getting married, is no longer relevant. Perhaps it is something that you only recognise after it has happened.

I think the feeling of being an adult comes with a few realisations,

1. You no longer need approval. Especially for the way you want to live your life. The elders who had once validated what you did no longer have any more authority on living than you do.

2. Everyone has their biases and interests. And maybe you can even empathise with their intentions. Further, you can choose to see yourself for who you are.

3. You must advocate for yourself. Because no one else will. And that’s fine, you wouldn’t want anyone else to speak for you anyway.

4. You make the society.

5. Living can be a very lonely experience. At this point, it would be in your interest to make peace with it. Loneliness is natural and worse things like dissociation, distress and angst might also creep in from time to time. But they will leave you if you decide to stick around.

6. You can choose to follow the things that give you a semblance of order in a wildly unpredictable life. These will become your rituals. The daily and personal to the occasional and communal.

All in all, I think being an adult is an opportunity. Given that you are lucky to not have to think about your immediate human needs, it is an opportunity to choose.

But is this still an oversimplification? The beginning of adulthood must also mean the end of something else. For some, it could be the end of adolescence. Especially for those who’re thrown into the deep end of what life has to offer at a young age.

But every definition of adolescence points to a time in my life before I turned 20. What about the time between then and now? The American psychologist, Jeffrey Arnett calls this intermediate period Emerging Adulthood. He proposed that it can be identified as a distinct stage of life when people gradually come into themselves and stop feeling in between.

This is another marker for adulthood. A sense of identity. The question about who you are, that preoccupies the adolescent and early-twenties mind, seems to have settled a little in adulthood.

Neuroplasticity plays a big part in this. The brain’s ability to establish new neural pathways as a response to internal or external stimuli. Research has shown that neuroplasticity starts decreasing after adolescence. In practical terms, this change can be seen as a reduced capacity to learn and unlearn ideas. Ideas that can range from the most widely accepted science to the deeply personal way you see the world.

And by the time you see yourself as an adult, you will have found things that work for you and begin to actively choose them over anything else.

While I have some answers in the matters of identity and personal choice. I’m unsure if I understand myself well enough to know everything that would enrich my life. For that reason alone, I believe I must retain some childlike curiosity towards living.

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Further Reading: When are you really an adult? - brilliant essay on the perception of becoming an adult.
A brief note on Emerging Adulthood

PS: If you’re reading this in your inbox, thank you for letting me into your personal space. As special as you are to me, you must also be aware that as a subscriber of a small and growing newsletter, you are essentially the beta tester. I would truly appreciate your help in improving this project. Feel free to share your thoughts, send your ideas or just point out mistakes. 🙏🏼

It’s been just over three months since I started a new job. I’m sure you know all about it, didn’t I spam you enough about my job hunt already. And now I’m finally beginning to strike a rhythm at work. In the year-end meeting our CEO said that our focus in the new year will be on individual ownership. Come to think of it, ownership is exactly the thing I need in my personal life as well. It’s time that I become proactive with all the things I want to do outside of the workplace.

The new year comes with the promise of a new beginning. It presents itself as an opportunity to start doing things that you want to do and being the person that you want to be.

Recently during a lunchtime conversation I asked two of my colleagues what they would want to change in the new year. One said that the changes she sees as necessary shouldn’t wait for a date on the calendar. The other one said that she would like to face the tough things that she has avoided or neglected so far. Though I had posed the question, I really didn’t have much to say when it was my turn to answer.

But I’ve been pondering over this the last few days and I think I have one possible answer. In 2024 I would like to settle down a bit.

Every year has been a year of aspiration and change. I always needed something to look forward to or something to chase.

When I was at a job I didn’t like I was desperately trying to shift careers. When I had a job that I was beginning to like, I wanted to travel and see the world a little. When I returned to my desk I decided that a Masters would be the next thing I’d chase. Always restless to get to a place that I considered better.

Starting this year maybe I’ll take a break from my constant search for the next big thing. I’ll go to work, come back, workout, find time to read a book, learn to paint better, go to the park on weekends, and just breathe.

To that end, I’ve been trying to create routines for myself. That doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? But my current hypothesis is this, the year will be more rewarding if I stick to doing the things I like and try to get better at doing them.

Consistency will be my primary focus. I’ll try to make small consistent efforts towards things that can have compounding effects. Mainly across two categories: wellbeing and creative pursuit.

However there’s one deadly thing that can absolutely ruin the process. Expectations. I can’t get lost in vain expectations of some imagined reward. So I’ve decided to give up thinking about the results and focus only on the efforts. And I’ll have achieved what I set out for myself, If I’m able to consistently put in the work.

Defining consistency is important here. With ever changing priorities towards office work, my own learning and leisure, I’ve realised that I can’t really hold myself to a daily routine. To have some flexibility in this matter, I’ve decided to stick to weekly schedules instead. I’ll be spending about three hours in the gym every week. That can be 3 sessions of 70 minutes on alternate days or 6 session of 30 mins each on consecutive days. I have the same approach towards painting and writing. I’ve enrolled in online classes that demand a few hours of my time every week. And I’m very much looking forward to investing that time.

Aaand we’ve crossed 50 subscribers! 🎊🎉🥳
Thank you for joining me on this journey and finding the time to read my work!

In this edition I want to talk about something that I’ve been thinking about lately.

Recently my Manager remarked that I ask a lot of questions. It was more of a benign observation than a loaded comment. To be honest, I am aware of this habit and I do see how it can get a bit tiresome for others.

While I was pondering over this last week, I was also reminded of two people who’ve had an immense impact on how I think and how I ask questions. Last week marked the birth anniversary of Osho (11th Dec) and the death anniversary of Christopher Hitchens (15th Dec). And through the week I’ve been contemplating how they both affected the choices I’ve made in life. It’s fair to say that their discourses and their prose have influenced how I make sense of the world. Which is primarily through questioning.

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I was a very curious child and I always asked a lot of questions. I can recall more than one occasion when I’ve annoyed my grandparents, my brother or my uncle with unending questions. I perhaps truly believed that someone had to know the answer to every question. I was a child.

At around 16 I began to realise that I could have an opinion for myself. Having an opinion was suddenly important. All the adults had them. I wanted to have one too. So I started by adopting the ones handed to me by the elders in the family. And then spouted them in front of my peers. The kids around me had their own opinions. While some of our opinions were common, some were absolutely contrary. That’s when I learnt that having one wasn't enough, opinions had to be protected. I needed to back my opinions with strong reasoning.

Naturally I went back to the adults with more questions. But their answers weren’t holding up. I was in a fix, what I borrowed from them turned out to be faulty.

With some disappointment I discovered that they didn't have the right answers after all. They didn’t know much more about the world than I did.

But my questions continued, they were now aimed not at learning the ‘what’ about things but learning the why. And everything I had learnt so far, had come back into scrutiny. Asking why opened a whole new dimension of perceiving the world.

It was around this time that I came across the work of Christopher Hitchens. The firebrand icon of the new atheist movement. He wanted to make people rethink their beliefs. Especially regarding faith and religion. I liked the idea.

He spoke about the principle of Occam’s Razor. A concept that invokes first principles thinking of breaking down a thought into the most basic assumptions.

It has several interpretations that specify its application in formal logic, philosophy, ethics among others. But the simplest everyday meaning of the principle is this: an idea or statement that relies on fewer assumptions or axioms is likelier to be valid than the one that requires more assumptions.

This was a new way of dissecting opinions. I tried to apply it to the things I had been accepting so far. When viewed through this framework everything I thought I knew suddenly seemed convoluted or entirely baseless. Most of the opinions I had about religion, faith and love fell apart. That called for me to rebuild my thinking from the ground up. To make my opinions sturdy, I started questioning the axioms on which I was basing them on.

In his speeches and essays Hitchens pushed this idea further and formulated what later came to be know as the Hitchen’s razor. He said, “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” This was targeted at the religious. I could see the soundness of his argument.

“Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way ..”

Christopher Hitchens

I went from questioning other’s opinions to questioning my own. After the reeducation I got during this time of my life I started questioning not just the opinions but the intentions behind them. I wanted to know why people made the conclusions that they did. And the purpose their opinions served.

This has how I continue to think and make sense of the world.

A few years ago I turned my attention inward. I started evaluating the biases, intentions and motivations that influence my own thinking. This seems all the more important as I grow older. Now I’m more curious about what it is that I really want to know.

While this approach has basically structured how I think about the world around me. An even deeper degree of questioning helps me make sense of the human condition.

Questioning, not to know but to reflect. This I learned from Osho.

Osho, through his discourses and lectures, posed a few fundamental questions which had so far been completely out of view. He compelled me to reevaluate how I defined things. Things which are so innate to the human experience that they are often overlooked entirely. Things such as emotions, impulses, behaviours, aspirations etc. I believe this is the furthest I’ve gone with my questioning in terms of abstraction.

Let me explain this better. Say I am angry. So far I had been trying to dissect what it was that really made me angry. Then I would ask myself why it made me angry. Now came the time when I was beginning to question what anger was.

Most of our thoughts are handed down to us. And as we go on living, we imbibe the definitions taught to us by our surrounding culture as an inherent piece of our worldview. For me, it was Osho who reaffirmed the importance of questioning.

Questioning is a human tendency, Answers are made up. Questioning is primary Answers are placeholders.

Some questions can get technical and demand complex reasoning that draws on nuanced ideas. These questions, I believe, are at the heart of our collective human pursuit. All of science and philosophy is an attempt to answer these questions.

But there are also important questions that are personal and can be answered by merely being truthful to yourself.

“Truth is not something outside to be discovered, it is something inside to be realized.”

Osho

The emphasis is no longer on finding an answer to the deeper questions. The point is to reflect and from that internal inquiry produce answers that align with who you are and how you want to live. These answers shape your attitude towards life.

Here are some fundamental questions to start you off,
What is life? What is love? What is ego? What is sadness? What is Anger? What is death? Who am I? Who are you?

And finally there is the question of knowing itself. ‘Why should you know?’ Especially for these abstract questions.

While I can give you an answer to why I question things, the question about why I should know has no answer. I’ll reflect on that.

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

―David Foster Wallace,Infinite Jest

And beyond the reflection, maybe I will see more clearly and my mind will rest. There could even be a calm from the internal chatter. A peaceful silence, where the questioning ends.
But is that death?

Thanks for joining me here. This project has become a haven for me over the last couple of weeks and I’m so glad to have your company. The year is coming to an end and it’s definitely an emotional time for all of us. Ignore those who say having a New Year’s resolution is immature. I hope you begin doing the things that you want to do and become the person that you want to be.

Have a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year. 🎄🎉

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The previous couple of weeks were very tense. On the 30th of October, I lost my Mother. For now I do not know how to talk about it or even what to say. Eventually if I bring myself to write about it, maybe I’ll tell you a bit about what happened and how I’m dealing with it. Nonetheless, I had to bring this up because I just couldn’t brush this off and start talking about all the relatively trivial stuff that I usually share my thoughts on.
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It’s been over three months since I started Business Casual. My intention was to create a space for myself where I could pen down my reflections. Initially I thought that I’d write about global culture, art, literature and philosophy. As it turns out, I don’t really reflect on these things. But I do philosophize everyday things. And I’d rather write honestly about the things I care about.

To that effect I’ve recently changed the newsletter’s description on the Intro page. It now says, “Field notes from the workplace and scribbles from the drawing board, presented as a weekly newsletter.”

I believe this is a proper introduction to this space. For now.

In an effort to make this whole enterprise more structured I’ve tried to make a format for this weekly newsletter. Over the past few months I’ve realised that writing personal essays one after another can get tedious. I’ve got to find ways to keep the process exciting.

So I’ve decided to limit myself to one personal essay every month and use the rest of the weeks to post about other interesting things.

For now I’ve listed the following 5 things as possible categories for my posts.

1. Personal Essay: Question to self. A ~1000-word essay through which I try to answer a question about myself and my understanding of the world.

2. Interviews (Friends, Colleagues and other interesting people). The intention with this is to give a snapshot of someone else’s life. And delve into their journey, their priorities and their worldview.

3. Thoughts on Art (with an emphasis on my own art practice) - This is to record my progress and reinforce my commitment towards learning and making art.

4. Notes from Work - I work at a deep tech startup that’s solving interesting problems in a new and emerging space. And I’d love to share with you all the interesting things I come across at work. This will include thoughts and learnings around Product management, software development, work culture, team building etc.

5. A Monthly Digest: a round-up of the things that happened in the previous month. This will usually be the last newsletter of the month. It’ll include travel notes, recommendations, life updates and more.

Whenever I talk about this newsletter I use the word ‘weekly’ to describe it. This is perhaps only to remind myself to post regularly. And I can admit that I have never been regular. I hope following a framework will help me with this.

This post is the first edition of the monthly digest category.

I moved to a new place (I’m back in Indiranagar)
In the last week of October I moved to a new place that’s closer to my office. I realised that If I were to go to office more often and not hate myself for it, I had to cut short my commute time. Before moving here I was staying in Jaya Prakash Nagar which was 10 km away from my workplace. During peak traffic hours, it would take me at least 45 mins to cover that distance. The new place is much closer, and now I take just about 15 or fewer minutes to get to office.

Another big plus with the new place is that it’s in a calm neighbourhood. It has a welcoming vibe that I’m beginning to enjoy. But the only thing I’m worried about is that a few units in this apartment building are being renovated. And that means we might soon be subjected to head pounding noise from construction work. I just hope it doesn’t get as bad as I imagine.

I got bit on the face 😟
The playful pup DeeDee whom I adored gave me a major shock a couple of weeks ago. It was late at night and she was half asleep. I got close to her and tried to talk to her, which was nothing out of the ordinary. She perhaps didn’t recognise me and jumped at me. I’m not sure what I did that brought out the defensive instinct in her. But all in all, she left me with a slightly deep puncture just above my left cheek. Thank god she missed my eye.

Though DeeDee is vaccinated I thought it prudent to get a TT shot and the anti rabies course. I now have a small scar below my left eye and a renewed awareness of a dog’s personal space.

Watch This! ⬇️
YouTube recommended this interview last week. The interviewee is a wealthy octogenarian who made his money in the shipping industry. He talks about his journey to financial success through the different tragedies of life.

This was such a candid and real conversation with absolutely no pretence. His sincere and articulate responses to even the basic interview questions make the discussion all the more engrossing.

Thanks for joining me on this project. I keep hearing that people’s attention spans are shrinking and that people don’t read at all anymore. I hope this is not true. And even if it is, I think the challenge is not finding the right people but writing interesting prose that engages and entertains. I want to take up that challenge and I’d be grateful if you can share your thoughts on how I can get better. Hope to hear from you soon. 👋🏼

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Good to see you again! Thanks for joining me for the third and final part of the series in which I recount my job hunt experience. If you’ve stuck with me this far, you’ll know that in the first post I spoke about how I dealt with the news that I lost my job. In the second one, I wrote about the initial phase of my job hunt which ended with a job offer.

So, in the last week of April I was offered a role in a software marketing agency. After considering everything, I felt that the role wasn't ideal for me. At this point I had been unemployed for over three months. But I was still hesitant about getting back into the workforce. I wanted to be sure about the work I was going to do and the culture I’d enter. To be sure of that, I needed to be sure of my own expectations from a job.

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I had always wanted my job to be a source of contentment. My attempt is to seek some level of fulfilment from it without losing perspective on the many other things in life that are important. A job is still a means to an end. But the end should be holistic wellbeing rather than monetary compensation.

To figure out what sort of a job checks the boxes for me. I had to ask myself a fundamental question.

What do you find inherently rewarding?

These are things that I enjoy doing without having to be validated by any sort of outcomes. I find that two things fall in this bucket for me.

Writing: I’m always experimenting with word order, tone, logic and the choice of words. Crafting a decent sentence brings a smile to me and I can sit for hours at end just writing or editing. So if I’m required to do this as part of a job, it wouldn’t seem like work.

Working with people: This one is important when it comes to the workplace. Seeing upticks and metrics on paper doesn’t motivate me as much as actually seeing customers and colleagues benefit from my work.

Pondering over these things gave me another realisation. I don’t care too much about the job description. I don’t believe in career paths all that much either. My idea of career growth is to keep increasing the value that I can offer and keep increasing the scope of my contribution. And if I do this in ways that I find inherently rewarding, I’ll keep growing while also having fun along the way.

I believe this works out especially in the technology space. A basic understanding of digital technologies and a curiosity to learn are enough to carve out a space for yourself. There’s product development and management if you enjoy making digital tools, if you enjoy making them functionally elegant there’s product design, if you enjoy helping people there’s a plethora of customer-facing roles. It takes a little bit of work for you to find a role that fits snuggly with your preferences.

With all this mind I began looking for an opportunity that wouldn’t give me second thoughts again. To widen my search I started looking for interesting companies and not jobs.

That approach led to a couple of insightful conversations with startup founders and hiring managers. I no longer felt the need to sell myself. Instead I wanted to learn about the work they were doing and the problems they were solving.

This shift didn’t come easily though. There have been times when I felt that the job hunt was crushing me. That my value was depreciating as time went. But I also knew that I had to keep my confidence. Because regardless of how I felt momentarily, the big picture truth was that it was only a matter of time before I started working again.

In the last week of June I got a response for an application that I had made. The HR coordinator set up a call with the hiring manager. The interview was for a product marketing role. A week later I presented an assignment and the hiring manager gave me positive feedback.

Then there was absolute silence. For 1 month. And in August, I received a mail from the hiring manager. The role for which I had interviewed was filled internally. She told me that there was another role within the team. It was for an Associate Product Manager.

This role was interesting too. I’d be working across functions to build and test new products. I could see myself doing inherently rewarding tasks as part of this role. I told her that I was eager to apply for it.

I had a couple of more interviews with the team. These interactions gave me confidence about the company’s culture. I accepted their offer and joined in the first week of September.

This concluded my 6 month long search for employment. Phew.

A word on the offers that I rejected. Among the four applications that reached the final round of assessment I dropped two because of work culture.

Having a suitable work culture is essential if you don’t want to dread work or become indifferent towards it. When it comes to assessing culture I try to understand the hiring manager’s perspective on work. I’m always vary of managers who say that they work a lot.

However, the last couple of months have changed my own outlook on work. In the past, I have looked at work as something to be done away with. As a weight on my shoulder that needs to be chipped off or better still escaped entirely.

Now I consider it necessary. I recently came across a maxim on an Instagram post,

The magic you’re looking for is in the work you are avoiding.

Here the emphasis is on the right work. You must discover what your magic is and take on the work that holds it.

But I still don’t understand people who glorify work. During one final meeting in an application process, a CEO told me that she works till 1 AM almost everyday. That seemed like irrelevant information to me. She went on to say that she expected the same commitment from everyone in her team. I responded that I would consider myself inefficient if I’m not able to achieve my weekly goals without having to stretch myself every day. Perhaps, for a CEO, the requirements are different. But I still maintain that working sustainably needs to be a priority for everyone in the team.

She had a different perspective, she used words like mission-focused, mission-critical, last-mile push to support her opinion. She even referred to her team as her family. To my surprise she kept stressing on the amount of work they did but never mentioned the value they were creating for their customers. Towards the end of the call we were both in agreement that there was no culture fit.

Another thing I dislike is the overemphasis on professionalism and protocol. The kind of places where people look at you differently if you rush into the office with wet hair. I find that such a culture cultivates unnecessary biases among people and allows them to lose sight of what really matters.

These are personal opinions though. And I’m sure there are sensible arguments to counter them. I’d love to know what you think is the ideal work culture. Please leave a comment or send me a message!

In parting, here’s a list of suggestions that have helped me in the last few months.

Be proactive. Sometimes there is no work out there, you must create it for yourself. Track every application and follow up. Attend events where you can meet people in your domain.

Grass is greener where you water it. A job will not make you happier. If you strip your goals and aspirations to the very fundamentals it might be that you can achieve all the things that matter to you, right now, as you are.

Show and tell. The idea is to make every conversation engaging. If the first contact is through a resume, try to make it a conversation starter. Better still, make an interactive portfolio that also has work samples.

Tell people that you’re available for work. There is no reason to be quiet about the fact that you’re unemployed. I got very interesting leads from my relatives and childhood friends.

Don’t shortlist before considering everything. Initially I’d quickly lose interest and drop a job opportunity even if a single thing didn’t fit my ideal. The truth is that almost everything is negotiable if both the employer and the candidate want to make it work.

Thank people for their time.

Thank you for joining me in this series. I hope I’ve been able to engage, entertain and maybe even inform you. In hindsight, everything looks clearer and I can admit that the last couple of months have not been as hard as I had imagined. I’ve been lucky to have endless support and encouragement from everyone around me. Thank you. 🙏🏼

Thank you for joining me for the second installment of this series. In these posts, I recount my job loss experience and the subsequent six-month search for a new position.

In the first part I spoke about how I suddenly lost a job and how I responded to that situation. In this post I’ll talk about what came next. I had been given 2 months’ notice. And by the first week of March, I did not have a job.

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I got started with my job hunt just a week after the news came that I was being dropped from the team. I updated my resume and added details about my latest experience. But that just cluttered the resume. I had to redesign the whole thing. A resume is the first thing a hiring manager evaluates. I wanted to make an impression with mine. After a little bit of work, the resume went from a bland combination of tables and text to a visually crisp document that reflected some character and a sense of design.

Initially I had planned to apply for my master’s degree this year. I did not want a long gap from work to weaken my college applications. I wanted to get a job as soon as possible. I thought that the quickest way to find my next job would be to apply to roles that were very similar to my previous job. I had worked in a product marketing team at a company that made software for large Banks and Insurance companies. I had learnt a thing or two about the enterprise software space.

For my next role, I decided to pitch to startups or small companies that made software. And specifically, to product marketing roles within these companies. For the pitch to be successful, I needed a convincing story. It had to communicate everything that I could bring to the table.

My method was simple:

1. List down all tasks and projects from my previous job.

2. Highlight what I had learned, including tools and soft skills.

3. Craft a narrative integrating my experiences to present a compelling value proposition.

Armed with my new shiny resume and with some idea of how I was going to pitch myself I started applying for jobs. I updated my profiles on LinkedIn, Wellfound (formerly Angellist) and YCombinator’s workatastartup.com. Most of my time was spent on connecting with interesting startups and reaching out to hiring managers.

I was getting responses to these applications. HR teams would get in touch and tell me that they’d schedule interviews if my application got shortlisted. This was at a time when large tech companies were laying off thousands of people. Interacting with HR teams, gave me hope that startups were still hiring.

Over the following weeks, as I gave more interviews, I modified my pitch. I expanded on the bits that interviewers cared about and dropped others. I continued applying to jobs for the next two months. By the end of March, I had taken part in the application process of over a dozen companies. But I got nowhere.

The one thing that I kept hearing from hiring managers was that they were looking for someone with more experience.

It was not that I was unable to answer interviewers when it came to deeper questions on product marketing, it seemed as though they wanted instructions rather than answers. Most startups don’t have a product marketing role. Product marketing is handled internally as a combined effort by PMs, marketing and sales teams. If they’re looking to hire a dedicated resource for it, they want that person to bring structure and tell the management what to do and what not to.

I had estimated that I would take about 3 months to find a job. But three months passed quickly, and I felt like I was not making much progress. I was getting impatient. I had to reassess my approach. I realized that product marketing was a niche space and sticking to it was not going to help me find a job quickly.

Though I was actively looking for a job, I knew that this time could be a valuable break for me. I had to make the most of this period. So, I got back to painting. I painted for a couple of hours every day. This was a great stress reliever. I would set up my art supplies on the dining table and place the easel to one side. And then I would get absorbed into the process of painting. I had also started watching a lot of films. I discovered so many amazing international films.

There have been times when I felt crushed by this job hunt. But I also knew that I had to remain confident. The truth was that it was only a matter of time before I’d start working again. Thankfully I did not let this worry take over me entirely. I made sure that I had an enjoyable summer.

But the way I was approaching the job hunt seemed limiting. There were so many roles that I found interesting, and which were not too far from my reach. I could step into either a more creative or a more technical role. I had come across job opportunities that I could see myself fitting into. But I had passed on these thinking that I’d rather not lose focus.

Also, I was judging too quickly. Over the previous weeks I had rejected companies that didn’t meet even one of my criteria. I was stopping myself from investing my time and energy on applications for roles that didn’t seem ideal to me.

I decided not to continue this way. I had to widen my search. And being picky in the initial stages was not helping.

It was the last week of April, one month after I made the decision to widen my search, that I got my first job offer. The offer was at a Software Marketing Agency. The agency helped large tech giants find customers and sell to them. I liked the interview process and the culture of the place seemed alright. But when I had to decide, I felt that I would rather work on a product and learn how to build it rather than just trying to sell something that others made.

I liked their team and the compensation they were offering but I still felt that the opportunity wasn’t the right one for me. That’s when I realized that I had to fundamentally reevaluate my expectations from a job.

In the next part I’ll talk about how I stopped focusing on the right job and started looking for the right company. For this I had to give up some preconceived notions I brought to my job search. I had to change not only what I was looking for but also what I was presenting to potential employers.

I will also talk about how this change reflected in my priorities and choices. I hope you stick around! 👋

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Thanks for joining me again. I apologize for not being regular with my posts last month. I’ve missed sending the newsletter for two weeks. I feel terrible about it. But I’ve consoled myself with the fact that I’ve spent my time and effort on presenting a more detailed series of posts. Starting with this one.
This is part 1 of a series of 3 in which I’ll talk about my journey from losing my job to searching for another one and finally getting back into the workforce. I’ll be focusing on how I navigated the entire ordeal and highlight what went through my mind. Also, I’ll try to be honest.

Before I talk about losing my job, I must preface it by telling you how I got it. For that I must talk about the job before it. I graduated in 2019 and took up my first job in June of that year as a business analyst at a fintech company. The work quickly got monotonous and in about a year I realized that I was missing a creative outlet as part of my work. So I started working with the marketing team on a series of blogs. It was during this collaboration that I learnt about product marketing.

I found a wonderful Sr. Product Marketing Manager who took me under her wing. I shadowed her and did a small project. I was liking the work and could also see myself in her department. But my manager in the business analytics team could only stretch so far in giving me the freedom to contribute to a different team. The Sr. PMM told me that I should consider finding a product marketing role elsewhere.

It took me a few weeks to find my first product marketing job. I started on the 4th of October 2021 as an Associate in the Go-to-Market function of an enterprise software company. The company makes software for salespeople in the banking and financial services sector. I was brought in to bridge the Product team with the rest of the GTM and customer-facing teams. I was excited to be joining a new team and brought my ideas to the job.

Over the next couple of months, we increased the team size. And the team now established its presence across the sales, marketing and customer success teams. I was promoted to Senior Associate. Everything was going well.

So far, I had made inroads into the product team and was attending their internal calls. I even adopted their vision and direction for the product.

In the last week of November ‘22 my manager set up a call with me. In the call he told me that the entire company was on a tighter leash in terms of financials and that extracting the most value from each person was becoming a priority. I understood what he meant. That quarter had been a relatively slow one for me. I knew he was expecting results in a few particular areas.

He told me to shift focus from the product and show results that directly impacted revenue generation over the next two months. This came at a time when the Head of Product was planning an exit and the product team itself was undergoing a restructuring. We made a work plan and I got started.

Six weeks in, he informed me that he decided to drop me from the team. He said that he had wanted to see 2 to 3 times the output. He acknowledged that his ask might’ve sounded unreasonable, but the new situation of the company left him no choice.

I felt helpless.

I was blindsided. Especially since he mentioned earlier that this work plan was only meant to shift focus and bring rigor into my work and that it had no bearing on my employment.

I asked him how he was going to restructure the team, since he was effectively dropping an entire wing of the GTM function. He said that he hadn’t thought about it yet but would figure it out when it became a priority.

This was terrible news. But as we continued speaking about it, he seemed apologetic and I seemed desperate. I took a breath. I had to remind myself that I was okay.

It was a big moment and the way I responded to it would reflect the person that I was. This was a question that had been posed to me. Not by my manager or the company or even the economy. It was a question posed to me by the universe or life itself. How would I respond to this?

There have been other overwhelming moments in my life. Moments in my adult life which I have not been able to endure without tearing up. But this was clearly not that moving. My heart sank a little when I learnt that my manager, whom I had grown to respect, was giving up on me. But I quickly saw beyond this.

I could see that this conversation was equally unpleasant for him. In that moment I decided to compromise. I didn’t want to fight back. I decided not to question the grounds on which he made his decision. I would serve my notice period and leave quietly.

Now there was a timeline attached to my presence in the company. I did what I thought was best. I carried on as usual. Went to the office the next day, spoke to colleagues as usual and continued working on my projects. I did not know whether I should look at things differently in light of my new situation. I spent the rest of the week in a sort of limbo.

The following week I scheduled a call with the only other senior in the organization that I really looked up to, the Head of Product. He told me to start looking outward. “You’ve learnt all that you could have learnt from this company, now start looking outside” he told me, “Figure out what you want to do next. Don’t even think about contributing to your team anymore. Expectations from you are no longer valid.”

After that conversation, I pretty much stopped working. And his point that the company wouldn’t expect anything from me became evident to me as days passed. What followed was two months of idling on the payroll. I started looking for jobs too at this point, but I didn’t really feel pressed for it.

How did it come to this?

I believe the reason for my manager’s decision had more to do with his belief that I just wouldn’t do twice the work.

To be fair, he was probably right. I had joined this company after working at a very fast paced fintech startup. I came from a 12-hour workday to a 6-hour workday environment. Doing things quickly was not vital to the survival of this company. And I couldn’t see the impact of my work immediately. Soon after I joined, my boss had told me that I could get my things done with just 4 hours of focused work.

The sales cycles in the enterprise software space are long and this gave us the freedom to theorize and try new things. In my case, it stopped at theorizing. This lax environment was more of a limitation to me. Of course, it depends on what you make of it. Some would love this freedom and truly apply themselves.

But this is not to say that the job didn’t do me any good at all. I leveraged the position this job put me in to travel, spend time among friends and have a wonderful post-covid uptick. In 2022 I spent 3 months traveling. I visited Angkor Wat, a place that I had always dreamt of seeing. I rode 600kms in the northern part of Thailand. I went Scuba diving in Vietnam. I saw the Taj Mahal for the first time. And most of this I did by working at odd times and communicating asynchronously. All in all, I had experiences that changed my worldview. And this job had everything to do with it.

I got just as much from the job as I gave to it. Or maybe I got more if I consider all the wonderful people I met and the continued relationships I have with them.

Soon enough, my last working day came around. the team gathered on videocall to bid me farewell. I had no ill will, only gratitude. And I quietly left the organization.

What came next was a period of reflection, changing priorities and course-correcting. Had I continued working for that company, I would have started applying for my master’s degree by this time. Not working for 6 months was a major setback to my initial plan.

In the next post I’ll talk about how I looked for my next job. I’ll share the ups and downs of my job hunt journey – the hopeful applications, the nerve-wracking interviews, and all the lessons I learned along the way. It’ll also include some practical advice that I’ve found to be very useful. I hope you stick around! 👋

Hello reader! good to see you back here. Last month was a bit packed, there were a few crucial interview calls, newsletter took off and we welcomed a new flat mate and helped him pack and move.

It’s more accurate to say that we welcomed three new flatmates. Gunjan and his two dogs Dexter and DeeDee. I never had a pet in my life and this was the first time that I got a glimpse of what having a pet might be like.

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If it’s not obvious, their names come from the amazing cartoon that we all enjoyed as kids, Dexter’s Laboratory.

Unlike the show, here Dexter is the elder one. He’s a golden retriever and is 8 years old. In dog years that makes him an elderly gentleman and he behaves as such. Gunjan got him back in Kolkata, so he’s Bengali. When Gunjan moved to Bangalore almost 6 years ago, he brought his trusted companion along with him.

The younger and more energetic one, DeeDee, is about 3 years old. She entered Gunjan’s life when she was only a couple of weeks old. It was during the pandemic when everyone was stuck at home. Gunjan and Dexter had each other’s company, but they had space for more. His neighbours back then were fostering two puppies, they kept one and were searching for a place for the other. Gunjan welcomed the little one into his home.

He was unsure whether Dexter, already an adult would allow a little girl to share space with him. But Dexter, the gentle soul that he is, lovingly accepted her and they’ve been best friends ever since.

If there is one thing that marks my group of friends from college, it is the enthusiasm with which we give nicknames. Each of us has a dozen names, of which some are plays on our real names and some are inside jokes.

When Gunjan arrived with his dogs, we naturally started throwing around new monikers for the dogs. Whichever ones caught on, would emerge as the newly accepted nicknames.

Dexter is now sometimes called, Dexterwa, Dexesh, Dexmaniac. Some names that have amusing backstories are are knee-licker, butt-sniffer, the virgin, gentle giant.

But there is something about Dexter’s demeanour that tells me not to infantilise him. He is clearly the eldest in the house. Apart from the occasional pissing-on-the-floor, there is nothing to indicate otherwise. I believe he even has a sense of responsibility towards us, his flatmates. My hunch was proven true one night.

After a busy day we boys sat together in front of the TV for a quiet meal. We were going to retire into our rooms soon. The dogs generally made their way into Gunjan’s room around bedtime. But that night was different. DeeDee as usual stepped in the room, but Dexter refused. Absolutely nothing could get him to go in. We even pushed him a little. But he just wouldn’t go. He wanted to stay in the living room. We left him there and went to our respective rooms. At around 12PM or so, Gattu(my other flatmate) and I came out to find Dexter hanging out with Ayush, who had been crashing with us for a while. I noticed that something was different with Dexter. He looked extremely alert. He got up at the slightest disturbance to see what happened. He would then walk towards us to check on us.

We put on Netflix and stayed up till 4AM. Dexter was by our side all the while. Going by the way he slept the entire next day, he probably stayed awake that whole night. Maybe he was being a watchdog. Maybe there was some omen, imperceptible to us, that called upon his primitive instinct to take charge. And maybe even the floor pissing is a power move to put us in our place.

Unlike Dexter, DeeDee is a bit of a bully. She has to thoroughly vet anyone who’s new to her. I remember the first time I met her at Gunjan’s previous house. She greeted me with a growl. And stared at me with such contempt. But once she’s done asserting herself, she offered up her butt. Now as long as I kept patting her and giving her belly rubs she was friendly.

Over the last week, she has claimed the living room couch. You can find her curled up on it for hours on end. If someone takes her spot she snuggles her way in and settles in odd positions leaving the person with no choice but to vacate.

I stayed home with the dogs for the major part in the last two weeks and that gave me the opportunity to see how they spend their day. They have active mornings, they greet people as they wake up and then Gunjan feeds them before taking them out for a walk. From noon till evening, they relax. It’s almost like they take the Pomodoro approach to their downtime. They lie down for 25 mins at a stretch and take the next 5 mins to rediscover their surroundings. They repeat this pattern till evening. Sometimes when they don’t find people around, they search the rooms just to check on us. They also keep a watch on the road from the vantage point of the balcony, barking at unfamiliar vehicles and strangers.

And when they’re not moving around, I intrude into their space and try to study them. I see how they react to verbal and physical stimuli. I call them names, try to have conversations, poke and prod. Through them I’ve learnt a bit about the anatomy of dogs. I was surprised to find that they have webbed paws and almost plastic-like flaps for ears. Both Dexter and DeeDee show great restraint towards my probings.

Scientific experiments have shown that dogs have very short memories. But I wonder how they display different personalities, choices, and a range of emotional behaviours when they tend to forget what happened 15 minutes ago. I’m sure there are extensive theories that explain the nature of Dogs, but I think I’d rather learn from these two specimen around me than get buried under academic texts.

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In this edition we’re talking about Fiction. Yes, the genre of prose literature. I don’t aim to explain the entire genre. These are my thoughts on what characterises good fiction and what elevates it to art.

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The most popular form of Fiction is a story in third-person narrative. Stories in which the narrator recounts events that occurred in the past in a fairly simple chronology. In such stories the plot is emphasised.

The famous novelist Kurt Vonnegut gave a succinct theory to explain how a story takes shape. The story emerges when a character faces a conflict. A conflict is typically a situation that threatens to alter the character’s fortune towards the negative.

In a lecture, he plotted the shapes of stories as a function of time and fortune. He went on to make eight categories using this framework. The categories are based on how the main character’s fortune fares from the beginning to the end.

Such a framework could work to understand stories. But there’s more to the genre of fiction than linear stories.

The conventional definition of fiction is that it's literature that is imagined—manifestations of human creativity that veer away from our collective understanding of reality. This definition relies on what the writer says. But there have been cases where authors mislabelled their works in an attempt to create mystery.

David Foster Wallace(DFW) summarised his process of writing fiction,

“When you write fiction you are telling a lie. It’s a game, but you must get the facts straight. The reader doesn’t want to be reminded that it’s a lie. It must be convincing, or the story will never take off in the reader’s mind.”

Jorge Luis Borges, another great storyteller, took a step further with regards to the truthfulness of prose, he was strictly against literary realism. He considered it an impoverishment of fiction's possibilities and falsification of its artistic character.

Borges took his fiction to extremes. His fiction is so intertwined with reality that it blurs any sort of distinction. With the collaboration of his contemporaries, he was able to weave stories and anecdotes that have all the signs of factuality. What’s more, a few of his contemporaries joined the mischief by corroborating some of his weirdest anecdotes.

Even if the prose is a complete departure from reality the one thing that can surely capture the readers attention is its ability to encapsulate the human condition. Even the most fantastical beasts can endure emotional turmoils that strike a chord with readers.

Prose is written primarily to be read. Poetry can be written for oneself and nonfiction can be written as reference material or as a record. The purpose of fiction is to enrich. It therefore must successfully engage the reader and earn their attention.

In engaging the readers, the prose can rely on multiple aspects like style, substance and form.

Writers employ many techniques such as allegory, symbolism, imagery and irony to appeal to the reader. These writing techniques help them set the style of the text. The substance of the work comes from the plot i.e. how the characters react to the conflict. The form is the nuance with which the characters are brought to life.

The fiction reader too is very forbearing. She is not looking for anything particular in the text, she is not here for information. She is here for an experience and to that end she is willing to invest time and effort. It is up to the writer to be worthy of it. The writer must use all their prowess to usher the reader into an alternate reality.

In an interview DFW explained what he wanted his fiction to do,

“...there’s a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can’t be in the real world… I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely.”

Often the reader is just as eager for that intimacy.

While David Foster Wallace is infamous for the verbosity of his prose, many others feel that art emerges under limitations. Curtailing the prose restricts the author. They can no longer write passages to accommodate every reader with a combination of tones and styles.

Edgar Allen Poe in his essay ‘Philosophy of Composition’ declared that literary art requires a limit on its length. The limit of a single sitting. According to him, a text that can be read in a single sitting retains the advantage of having Unity of Impression.

“...for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed.”

The world that the author weaves can get muddled by the everyday happenings that compete for attention in the reader’s mind.

While this might be true, one can not overlook the undeniable quality of a good novel, which is companionship. And isn’t companionship an artful purpose for a work of fiction?

Borges argues for brevity as well. But his reason is different. He looks at it from the point of creation and not of consumption.

He compares the act of writing vast books to a sort of madness. He says that no idea that can be communicated orally in a few minutes should be stretched to a few hundred pages in writing.

His approach to writing shorter fiction is drastic. He suggests that if one were to write fiction in a few hundred pages, they must imagine that such a book is already written and write a brief summary for the imagined work instead.

As authors debate the merits of length and realism, it's evident that the true essence of fiction lies in its ability to transport, connect, and speak to the human spirit. Ultimately, the choice of how to approach fiction, both in reading and writing, rests with the individual. What remains constant, however, is fiction's unwavering power to captivate and enrich.

Recommendation for this week 🎬

"Borneo Death Blow" is a documentary directed by Raphael Treza, which delves into the lives, traditions, and challenges faced by the Dayak people of Borneo. Treza's evocative cinematography and storytelling provide an intimate portrayal of the Dayak's ancient customs, their deep-rooted connection to the land, and the threats they face due to rampant deforestation and external economic interests.

What is Marriage?

Marriage is a cultural universal. It has developed independently and existed as a societal norm in cultures all over the world.

I think the idea is simple. Life can become lonely. Everyone who becomes a big part of your life eventually leaves. Parents, friends and lovers. Marriage is an escape from this pattern. An agreement to form a pair and prioritise mutual benefit. In perpetuity.

I admit that this idea is quite modern and even romantic. There are better explanations for the origin of marriage. That touch on ideas like parentage, right to sexual access, ownership of property etc. But I am modern, and dare I say it, even romantic.

Also, in practice, marriage is not a mere construct between individuals, it is an age-old system that is a major part of religion and is codified by law. In the Hindu tradition that I am familiar with getting married is essential to a complete life. It is one of the duties that everyone is required to fulfil. Moreover there is no concept of divorce in the traditional interpretation.

The Indian law recognises marriages in a religious context through the stipulations within the Hindu Marriage Act and the Special Marriages Act.

The traditional approach.

Everyone enters a marriage with great expectations, hoping it will enrich their life. It’s true that the trajectory of our lives are greatly impacted by the people with whom we share it. But I wonder how many people really take a hard look at themselves and their partners and try to evaluate how their preferences, behaviours, aspirations etc, will play out over the following decades.

Since marriage is a binding commitment, it’s in your best interest to think about it with little emotion and a whole lot of practical reasoning. If the intention is to implement a marriage as prescribed by religious doctrine or societal norm, it must be a once and for all sort of a deal.

This is how it is in the Indian context. India the has lowest divorce rate in the world at ~1%. That is not to say that Indians are happier in their marriages. It is more a reflection of the Indian attitude towards marriage, which elevates the union to an unbreakable pact.

In India marriages are arranged by parents after considering religion, caste, social status, class, financial status and religiosity. Finding a partner for their children is considered the final duty of a parent. The alliance is between families and the union of the couple happens only when the families bond over shared values.

This process works very well if the intention of marriage is to maintain the idea of social status and class sentiment. This is optimised for the preservation of the family structure, within the cultural framework it is part of. It works for the couple too, if they are both motivated by a sense of duty towards the family.

For adults who’re not as bound by the norms of their elders, this can get tricky. If the foundational principles that an arranged marriage relies on are of little value to the couple, it’s clear that the marriage requires something else to support it.

The traditional role of parents as match makers is no longer applicable. For the only reason that their approach begins with assessing an alliance for the family, while the youth are evaluating individuals as partners.

A better approach?

Given that love, romance and sex no longer belong only to the sphere of marriage, it is essential to find a more nuanced reasoning to marry and stay married. It requires a line of thinking that isn’t entirely motivated by the notions of love and something that doesn’t entirely abandon cultural norms. For a marriage still exists in the public sphere and has legal and financial implications.

Marriage is a long term game. It makes for a support system as we pursue the different goals we set for ourselves. Finding someone that matches/complements the present you is not enough. You need to assess whether your partner will grow with you towards the future you envision for yourself. The idea is to find someone who inspires you to live a more fulfilling life.

I can’t say I have some insight in this matter. I am just as clueless. But I can share how I would structure my approach.

Marriage is not settling down: Getting married doesn’t mean you can’t do things that you did when you were single. You’ll probably have a great accomplice to take on even bigger things.

Marriage is a project: Much like a company that creates value for stakeholders, a marriage must be optimised to create value for the participants. Value in the form of emotional enrichment, financial stability and life experiences. And just like any enterprise, marriage requires planning, effort, and regular maintenance.

Happiness must be a priority: Prioritizing happiness means actively choosing actions, words, and behaviors that uplift each other. It's essential to remember that happiness is what you’re looking for out of a marriage.

As I get older my thoughts on marriage will surely get refined and maybe in a couple of years I too might be married. I just hope that when I revisit this piece after a decade or so I’m smiling, either at my intuition or my naïveté, and not smacking my head wondering where I went wrong.

Suggested further reading: Tim Urban on finding the one, A divorce attorney’s thoughts on love and marriage - James Sexton

This Week’s Recommendation 🍿

I’d like to recommend two of my favourite movies of all time. Both deal with couples deciding to split ways and both show great insight into human emotion.

"A Separation" is an Iranian drama film directed by Asghar Farhadi. The film delves deep into the themes of family, justice, religion, class, and the moral quandaries one faces in daily life. The narrative is richly layered, and Farhadi masterfully showcases the gray areas of human judgment and actions. The film avoids taking sides, allowing you to empathize with each character's perspective.

"Marriage Story" is an American drama film written, directed, and produced by Noah Baumbach. The narrative dives into themes of love, loss, parenthood, personal ambitions, and the legal intricacies of divorce. It illustrates how two people who once deeply loved each other can find themselves in a situation where communication breaks down, and misunderstanding abounds, exacerbated by legal proceedings.

I’ve applied to so many jobs over the last couple of months. With an almost irreverent confidence that I can pick up pretty much any skill, I’ve applied to product management roles, marketing roles, community management roles among others. Perhaps I should rethink this approach. But I’m enjoying the conversations I get to have about different roles in the startup world and I’m sure I’ll find my way through this.
I’m bringing up my job hunt here because I noticed something common across many of these job listings. In the requirements section, I often see the following, “Enjoys reading”, “Must be a reader”, “Someone who reads for pleasure” or some variation of this. Especially for marketing related jobs.

Why do hiring managers care?

For many, a reading habit signals aptitude. Especially in the case of a marketing job. People believe it indicates intelligence, patience and structured thought.

Creative expression through the written word is a major part of any Marketing job. It’s no wonder that you’d find more people in these roles who care about books. And they probably want more of their own.

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Shared traits and characteristics establish a sense of familiarity and that creates a more conducive undertone.

Another thing to notice is that only people who read would go as far as mentioning it on a job description. Non-readers, however convinced of the merits of reading, would just not do that.

Are readers more intelligent than non-readers?

The short answer is probably not. There is ample scientific evidence to show that reading helps you improve cognitive ability. But there is not much evidence to prove that readers on the whole are more intelligent than non-readers.

Reading is a sort of mental exercise. It helps you improve your thinking in various ways. The most obvious way is that it expands your knowledge. It helps you improve fluid intelligence i.e. the aptitude for pattern recognition and problem solving. It also improves emotional intelligence. This is true especially for literary fiction since it forces you to look at things from different perspectives.

But no one really reads to improve cognition. They do it because they find joy in it. You see them in every corner of the world. Buried in the inanimate pages in front of them, perfectly still on the outside, but with a tumultuous swell of emotion raging inside. Bonding with strangers, real and imaginary, spread across time and space.

The act of reading can be very enriching only if you choose the right texts to read.

How to choose your books?

I take extra care while choosing books to read. There are millions of books out there and they all want to be read.

My approach is simple. Whenever I consider a book I ask myself this, is the context new and does it push the boundary for me?
Reading for me has become something more than entertainment. Growing up I read the regular pulp fiction books such as the ones written by Sidney Sheldon. But I don’t think I’ll pick them up again.

I prefer books that offer something new. Sometimes I pick those that even pose a challenge. Recently I got Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk. I was browsing through a bookstore and the cover of this book caught my eye. The story is about a seasoned pornstar who wants to end her career with a bang. Her idea involves setting a world record for the most number of men in a video. The premise was outlandish. As I flipped through the pages, I realised that the writing was blatantly crude and colourful. I felt that the book was an affront to my sensibility in the form of well crafted prose. I had to get it.

When it comes to fiction, read books that offer new perspectives and have the potential to challenge your belief system. With Non-fiction, pick topics that fascinate you. Non-fiction on science, history or any other field of study can be repetitive and dry. Read reviews before you start a book.

Also remember that you don’t have to follow through with every book you buy. If the book no longer interests you, put it back on the shelf. You can always pick it up again if you want to. And there are so many books waiting for you. The Japanese even have a word for this,

Tsundoku (積ん読) refers to the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them.

In closing, here’s my take, reading books doesn’t make you more intelligent than others, but it can make you smarter than you were yesterday. And that’s the only reason why you should care about reading.

Recommendation for this week 📺

If you're on the hunt for a fresh, entertaining, and boundary-pushing series, look no further than "Dave." This semi-autobiographical show is based on the life of rapper and comedian Dave Burd (a.k.a. Lil Dicky). It dives deep into the world of hip-hop, ambition, relationships, and the challenges of finding one's identity in the maze of modern society. The show is available on Disney Hotstar

Usually the second kind are the ones who don’t have a tattoo themselves. And when I try to answer by explaining my tattoo, I quickly get interrupted. They say they can see what it is, what they’re curious about is what it means. Often they’re looking for a cool story about the values or beliefs that the tattoo symbolises. I don’t have such a story.

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I believe this expectation that a tattoo must have a profound origin has got something to do with how people fundamentally perceive a tattoo. Let’s unravel this.

There are two generally accepted ideas about tattoos.

1. Getting a tattoo is painful.
   I’ve noticed that people who haven’t gotten a tattoo always overestimate the pain involved. I myself was pleasantly surprised when my tattoo artist began and I barely felt anything.

2. A tattoo is permanent.
   You will carry it on your skin forever. Of course no one who gets a tattoo even considers for a moment that they could want to get it removed one day.

Given these two criteria a tattoo qualifies as a commitment one has made. Now the question is, can one commit to something without having a preceding significant personal meaning attached to it. Wait, what does meaning even mean here?

I’ll try to define the word in this context. Meaning can be understood as the combination of beliefs, values and narrative that influenced the person to imprint the visual on their body. It is not the mere explanation nor an interpretation of the visual. So the question ‘what does your tattoo mean?’ Is better phrased as ‘what is the meaning behind your tattoo?’ or, ‘what was the thinking that is symbolised in this visual representation.’

With this explanation in mind if we take a deeper look at the question, we see that it comes with a presupposition that tattoos have meaning. I.e. ‘Tattoos have meaning, what is the meaning of yours?’

The semantics of such phrasing is reflective of the fundamentally held belief that tattoos indeed have meaning.

Do tattoos have meaning?

I do not doubt the significance that tattoos hold for people. Getting a tattoo is often a turning point for many. It can be the first time someone gets to exercise individual authority over their body. It can be empowering.

To begin to answer the question around meaning and tattoos, let’s take a quick look at the historical context of tattoos.

The practice of tattooing developed independently in cultures all over the world. There is evidence that suggests that it is at least 5000 years old. Various cultures had different uses for tattooing. The ancient Greeks and Romans tattooed slaves and criminals. In Polynesian cultures, each tattoo told a story of ancestry, societal status, and accomplishments. The ancient indigenous people of North America, South east Asia and North Africa all had their own uses for tattoos.

The commonality that can be observed among all these is that the tattoo was used as a group identifier. To brand others as outcasts or to mark themselves as belonging to a certain sect.

But today tattoos are in the mainstream of a cultural globalization. And along with their connotation of identity, spirituality and heritage, they are now expressions of individuality.

I propose the following scale to understand tattoos and their meaning.

Tattoos with a clear, unambiguous definition fall towards the left end. As we move towards the right an objective definition changes into a personal meaning. Further towards the right end as it loses meaning, it moves into the individual sphere. Here the tattoo becomes an expression of the person’s individuality.

Some tattoos that are purely artistic expressions don’t have a meaning. And such tattoos are on the rise. Tattoos of memes, meta memes, gibberish Lorem ipsum text and things that you probably never even imagined.

The story behind my tattoo

Growing up in a town in India, tattoos were very uncommon. No one in my family had one. The only tattoos that I occasionally saw were the symmetric line art patterns that women of the Banjara people wore. I learnt about tattoos from TV. I loved Kat Von D’s Miami Ink.

In that show everyone who came to the tattoo shop had a story. They wanted to memorialise something in their life in the form of a tattoo. That show shaped my perception towards getting inked.

The thought of getting a tattoo stayed with me as I grew up and when I moved out and started working, I felt the freedom to make it happen.

I had the money and intent. But I didn’t have a story. So, it took a backseat. Over the years, I began to appreciate tattoos as a form of art. Gradually I dropped the notion that tattoos need a meaning.

Looking back, I didn’t get a tattoo as long as I believed that they needed to have a meaning. This was a barrier. Once I let go of that idea, getting inked seemed so easy. Last year, when I was on a solo trip to Southeast Asia, I spoke to fellow travellers about their tattoos and used their inputs to work on an idea.

It started with something that I made on a lazy evening in Koh Tao. I kept adding details and over the next couple of weeks I made a version that I was happy with. When I was about to finish my trip, I walked into the highest rated tattoo shop in Hanoi. The tattoo artist worked with the idea I gave him and made improvements. Two days later I got inked.

The tattoo artist did an excellent job and I felt nothing more than a pin prick. I’m still very happy with how it turned out. And most of all I thoroughly enjoyed the process.

So here’s the final word.

In a world where personal expression and individuality are increasingly celebrated, tattoos have transitioned from symbols of communal identity to canvases of personal narratives or, at times, simply art.

For some, a tattoo encapsulates a poignant life event or belief, while for others, like myself, the journey of getting a tattoo itself becomes the story. This evolution of tattoo culture underscores the idea that just as art can be open to interpretation or exist simply for its beauty, so too can the ink we choose to adorn our bodies with.

I’d love to know if your tattoo has a meaning, leave a comment!

This Week’s Recommendation 🎸

Masayoshi Takanaka is a Japanese guitarist, composer and producer. ‘All of Me’, released in 1979, is a compilation album of his early work. The album is a fusion of jazz, funk, and rock elements, showcasing Takanaka's ability to seamlessly blend genres and create a sound that's both unique and engaging. The music is perfect background music to liven up the mood while working or cooking. It’s all in Japanese so don’t worry about getting distracted.

I wonder whether they even discuss market share, margins and growth in their business reviews.

Patagonia is a popular outdoor apparel brand. Over the years the company has emerged as the trailblazer of purpose-driven entrepreneurship that challenges the status quo of capitalism. In 2022, the company crossed $1.5billion in sales. And posted a profit margin of ~10% which is well above their competition. Also, the entire ownership of the company was transferred to entities that are fighting the environmental crisis. “Earth is now our only Shareholder” the founder proclaimed.

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Five decades in the making

Founded in 1973 by Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia's origins trace back to its modest roots as a supplier of high-quality climbing equipment.

Yvon’s story is of entrepreneurship of the purest form. He wanted to climb mountains, but the gear he had was subpar. He stepped into a forge and came out with a better product. The quality of his product brought him customers. He gradually grew his market share to a whopping 80% in piton sales. But his margins were terribly slim. The business was not making money, nor was it scaling.

He didn’t really plan to grow the business either. The business had a purpose that it was serving vey well. It increased safety for climbers and allowed Yvon to keep taking his adventure trips.

The real change came when his climbing buddies took notice of the colourful and durable t-shirts he was wearing on his treks. Yvon saw the opportunity and started importing clothes for the climbing community. T-shirt sales had better margins and his business picked up.

Reflecting on his journey, Yvon says,

“If I get an idea I immediately take a step forward and see how that feels, if it feels good I take another step. If it feels bad I step back… I just learn by doing.”

Growing Strong vs Growing Fat

The US recession of 1990 marked a major turning point in Yvon’s approach to business. With lower sales and mounting overheads, Patagonia found itself struggling to carry on. The company had to lay off a significant portion of its workforce.

That’s when Yvon decided that his company should never be in such position. Now Patagonia grows steadily to meet its demand but never expends its resources to create demand. Yvon says that greed will make a company fat, not strong. Product innovation and not sales is what drives the growth of his company. He wants to make products that last a lifetime and a company that transcends generations.

Retaining culture

For a company that says that it is in business to save the planet, making sure everyone in the team is free from the stresses and allures of business becomes paramount. Retaining the planet-first culture is essential to Patagonia’s mission.

The right hiring: The Patagonia approach is not to declare company values and try to cultivate them into their employees. That doesn’t really work according to them. Instead they go above and beyond to find people who already exhibit those values and they do all they can to assimilate them into their company.

They once found a lawyer waging a lonely battle to save a river from industrial pollution. They gave him a desk and supported his work. When new mother’s were reluctant to return to work, the company instituted a child daycare centre. Not with babysitters but with child education specialists. Because as a company they decided that the motivation to do so was not the productivity of mothers but the education and nurturing of the next generation.

Spreading the Message

Patagonia now enjoys almost a cult like following among outdoors adventure enthusiasts. This can be attributed partly to their marketing. Their marketing has always put planet earth at the centre of attention.

So much so that it seems that they were never selling outdoors apparel. They were selling the outdoors. They were selling the vision of pristine lakes, breathtaking vistas and roaring sea waves.

Even with a minuscule advertising budget (about 0.5% in 2017) Patagonia has been able to establish itself in the minds of its audience as the company that cares. As a result customers are happy to pay a premium for their products.

Over the years the patagonia has taken up many initiatives to directly impact its ecological footprint. From revolutionising the farming practices of their suppliers to creating eco-friendly synthetics in the lab the company has pushed the limits with innovation at every step.

In 2004 the company decided to do more. The 1% for the Planet initiative took shape. Patagonia routed 1% of its entire sales revenue to help grassroots change makers and environmental conservation projects.

What’s Next?

Yvon had been the sole owner of the business for about 50 years. But as of September 14th, 2022 a new setup has taken effect

98% of the business has been transferred to The Holdfast Collective, a new entity that is registered as a Social Welfare Organization in the USA. This means that the entity will be eligible for tax rebate on all its non-political operations.

The remaining 2%, which contains the entire voting stock of the company, is given to the Patagonia Purpose Trust. This trust is run by a board that includes the Chouinard family and other associates who will direct how the company will be run and how the profits will be utilised.

In other words the new setup is an alternative to going public or passing it on to the family’s next generation. The value that the company creates is no longer added to any individual’s net worth. Every year the profits that are not reinvested in the business, will be used to fight the climate crisis.

Patagonia’s journey from a climbing gear supplier to a global symbol of sustainable entrepreneurship serves as an inspiring testament to the transformative power of purpose-driven business. As we navigate an increasingly complex world, Patagonia's ethos challenges us to question the norm, embrace responsibility, and forge a path towards a more sustainable future.

This week’s pick 🍿

A Sun: A 2019 Taiwanese drama film directed and co-written by Chung Mong-hong. The film takes you on an emotional journey through the complexities of human existence. It is a gripping tale that delves deep into the lives of a Taiwanese family navigating the tumultuous seas of tragedy, redemption, and the unbreakable bonds that tie them together. With its evocative storytelling and striking visuals, A Sun will linger in your thoughts long after the credits roll, inviting you to reflect on the intricacies of life and the undying power of hope. A Sun is available on Netflix.

A few weeks ago, I went to Bangalore to visit my new office. I've recently joined this company and wanted to meet my colleagues in person. On the second day that I was there, I had a conversation with Varun, my manager. We spoke about our philosophies towards work and a bit about the literature we enjoy. I was reading Stoner at that time and we shared how much we liked that book. He then suggested that I read JM Coetzee. He said that JM Coetzee's style of writing speaks to him the most. His usage of words is just right, he said. No more, no less. Talking about his literary style, Varun wrote in an essay,

"He (Coetzee) places you in situations that are morally ambiguous, and does not provide any guide rails to find your way out. He does not overtly take sides — in my opinion a mark of a good writer; he describes the circumstance, the dilemma, with microscopic detail. The rest is up to us as readers."

On his recommendation, I picked up Disgrace.

The protagonist is David Lurie. A fifty two year old professor at the Technical University of Cape Town. The book follows a few troublesome months in his life. He was once a teacher of Modern Languages and Romantic Poetry. But in a world where education is deeply entwined with commerce he is relegated to teaching communications. He does the job of preparing students for a professional career. He feels out of place teaching, but he approaches it with the professionalism and sincerity that he's cultivated over two decades.

Even at his age, David is confident of his looks. All his life, he could rely on his appearance to get what he desired. On one impulsive night he turns his attention to an attractive student. Quickly an affair begins.

A few weeks later when the affair is exposed, his life takes a sudden turn. It comes in the form of a disciplinary committee that demands an apology. David has never faced backlash for his nature and this sudden disapproval seems misplaced to him. To him, he merely acted to fulfill a desire. And with complete respect and dignity. He is ready to accept the charges against him but he finds nothing to be ashamed of.

The committee sees it differently. They expect shame. They offer him a quiet resolution if he repents publicly and goes through with behavioral counseling. This seems to him an absurd proposition. He doesn't budge. And so he is stripped of his position at the University.

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After giving up his academic life, he decides to spend some time at his daughter Lucy's farm. She lives in a remote area in the Kaffraria region. He takes some time to get into the rhythm of rural life and its pace. He does menial jobs at the farm to keep himself occupied. But the lull doesn't last very long. He and his daughter become victims of a disturbing attack.

In the aftermath of the attack, David comes to question the delicate situation of interracial relations in post-apartheid South Africa. He is perplexed by his daughters' reaction to the crime. What appears to David as a crime that warrants punishment, is magnified as an offshoot of intergenerational discrimination to Lucy's mind.

As David struggles to find a new routine, he must also learn to let go of his child, to leave her to her own thoughts and actions.

JM Coetzee's writing is descriptive but he doesn't stray towards weaving a story for the sake of attractive prose. Even with his straightforward and consistent prose he is able to masterfully control the pace of the story. A few passages made me put the book down to withdraw into thought and a few passages got my heart racing to near anxiety.

Like all books that stand the test of time, Disgrace too deals with timeless themes. The book remains completely relevant even two decades later. The lasting tension between a historical aggressor and the victim was re-examined during the BLM movement. The possibility of true and reciprocal intimacy between a teacher and student was analyzed in light of the #metoo movement.

Even if David Lurie's affair with his student wasn't that of an oppressor in a place of power, regardless of how it may seem to the girl's parents, the university or the rest of the world. There is no denying that he transgressed. For the fifty-two-year-old professor the affair, however passionate, could not have had the kind of meaning that it had for the twenty-year old. And in treating her and approaching her as an object of lust, he perhaps tarnished her perception of romance. She wasn't the victim of a crime, but was wronged in a very personal way. Her loss of innocence was at his hands.

In Disgrace, Coetzee delivers prose that is nuanced. And that's another reason for people to keep revisiting this book.