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Showing posts from 2020

Ikigai - Load full of sh#t

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Okay, so this Spanish bugger, Francesc Miralles, son of a dressmaker and an office clerk, with bad high-school records who worked as a waiter found his Ikigai of selling self-help crap to the gullible. The first line of the book says it all - “The book came into being on a rainy night in Tokyo, when its authors sat down together for the first time in one of the city’s tiny bars’. So basically Miralles and Hector Garcia, a Japanese software engineer were sloshed when they came up with this ‘brilliant’ idea of telling a story to the world about how this handful of people on the island of Okinawa live longer than the rest of the world. And boy, how the world has lapped up the utter nonsense by buying millions of copies of, yet another scam called ‘Ikigai’. In a nutshell, Ikigai is the intersection of: 1.         1. What you love 2.        2. What the world needs 3.        3. What you are good at 4.        4. What you can be paid for Obviously, the long-lost humans who continue

Fear... the worst enemy

Fear… A word whose mere mention brings in more of it. You would have heard and read so many times that ‘Fear is our greatest enemy’ yet day after day, month after month, year after year, we keep nurturing it such that it starts festering our entire existence. Just so as to comfort you, fear has been mentioned in ALL, yes ALL, religious & spiritual tomes across the world since writing came in existence. So, you are not the first or the only human facing it. In fact, each and every human and every other living creature, fears something or the other. So, you can take a deep breath and relax since you are not all alone is this or you are facing some unique challenge that no one else has faced earlier or now. You must have also heard or read that the universe is ‘time’ & ‘space’. Have you wondered how? Your body occupies ‘space’ while your mind is always in ‘time’. Isn’t it? Your mind is either thinking about the ‘past’ or the ‘future’ which is nothing but time. Also, while t

7 WAYS TO DE-STRESS IN THE TIMES OF CORONAVIRUS

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You thought you knew it all. Isn’t it? You were sure about what you were doing and why. You knew what was ‘important’ and what wasn’t. You accepted the look and feel of the world. You kept resisting change till like a coil spring, change rebounded so dramatically that you are now living in a world you couldn’t have imagined even a month back. Not just illness, Coronavirus has brought with it STRESS, unanticipated both in terms of quantity and form. Let’s look at 7 things you can do to mitigate this unprecedented stress brought in by Coronavirus and the subsequent lockdown which has restricted you to your homes. 1.        STAY INFORMED To defeat the enemy, you need to know it well. Find out exactly what is Coronavirus and what can you do to keep it bay and eventually defeat. It is important though that you get your information from genuine sources and don’t believe in everything that you read or listen. In fact, your first reaction should be to ‘disbelieve’ everything that

PLAY... FF… PAUSE… PLAY

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Think of all the stories from the 80s/90s we tell (or hear) when a car (read Maruti) was considered a luxury or the only way most people saw an airplane was when it roaringly flew overhead. When the summer vacations meant nani ka ghar and eating out was maybe once a month and that too mostly chaat , idli-dosa or chowmein. When we played chhupam chhupai, ikkal dukkal, gitti phod, kanche and flew kites. When we spent most of the time at home with our families or when we physically visited people to meet them. When we bought new clothes only at Diwali / Eid / Christmas and if we were nice then for the birthday as well. When a camera roll could only snap 36 pics which even how hard we tried to carefully click would end up with 5-6 out of focus or over exposed. When the starting salaries, even for IIT / IIM graduates, were just Rs 5,000-10,000 a month. When buying a house to live in was the prime goal. When SENSEX was about 500 while most people invested their savings in FDs which d