Thoughts
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Citizenship in a Democracy
Voting day in Mumbai is always a heated affair — in every sense of the word.
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RJ Malishka, the BMC and the Underlying Breach of Our Freedom
Red FM’s Mumbai-based RJ Malishka created a video jingle satirising the city’s monsoon-related infrastructure problems. The clip garnered over 3 million views and touched a nerve — precisely because the problems it...
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Moana the Movie and Climate Change
This Christmas I took my children to see Moana. One was thoroughly engaged; the other lost interest midway. It is family entertainment that works on multiple levels.
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2016 — A Year in Review
2016 was a year of difficult choices and useful lessons. Here is an honest account of both.
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I Am Sapped
There are weeks that drain you completely. Not from any single dramatic event, but from the accumulated weight of small decisions, small disappointments, and the relentless forward motion that life demands even when you would rather stop.
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Faith
Faith is a word that gets used in two very different ways, and confusing them causes a lot of unnecessary argument. There is faith as a religious or spiritual concept, and there is faith as a practical operating principle — the...
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5 Years Hence
Five years is an interesting unit of time to think about. Short enough to feel concrete, long enough to allow for genuine transformation. Where will you be in five years? What will you have built, broken, learned, abandoned?
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Nostalgia
Nostalgia is a peculiar emotion. It is not quite happiness and not quite sadness — it sits somewhere between them, a kind of sweet ache for things that no longer exist in the form you remember them.
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Customer Orientation
Every company claims to be customer-oriented. Almost none of them actually are, and the gap between the claim and the reality is one of the most reliable predictors of long-term failure I know.
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Savalee — The Acorn and the Oak
The Marathi word savalee means shadow — specifically the pleasant shade cast by a large tree. It carries connotations of shelter, rest, and the kind of cool refuge you seek on a hot afternoon. It is a word with comfort built into it.
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Bandwidth
Bandwidth has become a metaphor as much as a technical term. We talk about personal bandwidth, cognitive bandwidth, emotional bandwidth — and by this we mean the same thing the engineers mean: the capacity to carry information, to...
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IIM Jobs
IIM placement season generates a particular kind of media coverage in India — the annual ritual of astronomical salary figures, investment banking offers, and consulting packages that prompt both celebration and anxiety in equal...
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Valu — The Wild Bull
Valu is a Marathi word for a wild, uncontrollable bull — one that has broken free of all constraints and moves through the world on pure instinct and energy, without direction or discipline. The word is used to describe people too.
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Meetings
Meetings are one of the primary ways organisations convert time into noise. This is not a new observation, and the fact that it continues to be true despite decades of complaints suggests that the problem is structural rather than merely...
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Democracy
Churchill’s observation that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others is often quoted and rarely examined. It is worth examining.
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God as a Brand
If you apply brand strategy thinking to religion — purely as an analytical exercise, setting aside the metaphysical questions entirely — you find that the major world religions are extraordinarily sophisticated brand operations...
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Life as We Know It
There are moments where you step back from the routine and notice it from the outside — the particular shape of your days, the habits and relationships and small choices that have accumulated into what is, for better or worse, your...
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Lights Out
This is the first post on this blog. It seems appropriate to begin with something honest about what a blog is and what this one is supposed to be.