Among the many rituals I subject myself to in the name of mental levitation, reading speed and comprehension stands out as an amigo and adversary. I consider myself a slow reader (240 words per minute for full comprehension), which according to the internet puts me at a reading speed of a very distracted 12-year old with an early onset of cataract.

I have also noticed that my mind loves to go only fast enough to make sure each sentence is fully recognized and appreciated for what it is doing. It’s almost like each sentence sashays down a ramp, turns here, and there, swirls around, looks at me in an enticing manner, and sashays back—all in an effort to impress me. If I even glance at the next sentence without the previous one having made “total” sense, I feel like I have betrayed some unwritten moral obligation and then dissolve into a state of mini-panic.

Years of mastering this flawed technique turned me into a tortoise with a PhD in sentence worship. Such slowness satisfies my desire for increased clarity and illumination of each sentence. But this gives way to a cyclic causality where slow reading gives a glimmer of increased comprehension, which in turn makes me want to read even slower for an even greater understanding. The myth I believe is that the slower I read, the better I will understand.

On the contrary, my guess is that my mind is like a fat lazy cat stretching and luxuriating in the sun. It does not want to be pushed to do the work at hand—read and process faster. This laziness allows my mind to s-l-o-w-l-y ease into each sentence, when it could have been pushed to do the work of reading fast, editing concept formations and imagination, and encoding it.

Thus ensues the classic internal tug of war documented in the Bible. What I want to do I do not, and what I do not, that I do. I want to read faster but I fear I wouldn’t understand. And so I read slowly at a pace where I reach Pg 3 of War and Peace in 2029.

Whether this is a middle age crisis or spiritual sabotage, I intend to find out. I am in this for the long haul. So stay tuned!

I am unable to focus when I want to. I can barely remember my kids ages. Survival instincts, though, have forced me to remember my parent’s wedding anniversary and my debit card PIN.

This is the case. I start reading books with great interest, only to forget the first page by the second. My recall function sputters and misfires. And soon I drift away thinking of lunch, an argument with a colleague, my dead-for-thirty-years dog Bruce’s drool, and—wait, what book is this?

This kind of premature senility began soon after I was born. A love of comfort and entertainment made me frustratingly lazy to attempt any mental gymnastics more complex than 2+2=3 (which I still dispute). This cognitive decline isn’t genetics—it’s inertia laced with daydreams.

And so here I am. With a rising desire to master my mind, I am going to apply myself to learn to read faster, remember better, improve focus, and increase my state of awareness and other cognitive abilities. I blush when I think of my apotheosis—the venerable Johnny English himself.

Do I have it in me? Maybe Sister Bernita, my elementary school teacher, was right. I am, perhaps, called to the noble task of herding cattle or cleaning the hen coop. Nothing less. But for sure nothing more.

Anyways, I would like to document this journey as frequently as I can. I want to give my mind a fighting chance. As Michael Jackson… or Mickey Mouse… or maybe my uncle Georgekutty might have uttered, “Better to have tried and lost than never to have tried at all!”

But I knew that it was an illusion, an evil trick nature played on a majority of the men folk. Male-pattern hair loss was looming large upon me. The men in my family had been challenged on our head hair follicles for several generations. I had witnessed only two. But I had photographs of older generations as evidence.

As I moved through university and early career days, I was rocking it. My hair had become more pliable; nevertheless, it symbolized the fullness of life and fecundity. It was like a field glorious with vibrant and untamed shafts of wheat swaying in the wind.

My mid-thirties were when I noticed that the season for harvest was fast approaching. A receding hairline at the front corners was how it all started. It soon resembled the alphabet ‘M’, a condition popularly called ‘Widow’s Peak’. I want to say that it still looked formidable and respectable — a la Gary Cooper.

After I turned forty, things took a turn for the worse quite swiftly. I remember returning from a barbershop thinking my man did not do a good job at the crown (top of the back) of my head. He had left a tuft untouched. I reached my hand to the back and kept ruffling it between my fingers, quite upset that he left that patch over there. I usually had stiff and firm hair, but this was plumy and soft. On getting home, I took out my hair trimmer, quite annoyed, to finish the job.

Since it was at the crown, I needed my wife’s help in reviewing the fruit of my labour. She looked at my hair before I started trimming and commented, “Viv, I don’t see a problem here. The length kinda looks fine.” After some reasoning (and a few of her chuckles), I figured that my hair had started thinning at the rear thus making it feel soft to the touch. I had assumed that it was the longishness of my hair which made it softer. Well, this was a big shift. Things were happening to me. To make matters worse, I could not even see it now.

And then it was like dominoes falling after that. The hair on the top also started thinning. It turned out that every time I went to the barbershop, I had to debate with him how my hair should be cut. “The baldness can be cleverly covered”, he would confidently argue. And I insisted that he cut it the same way (some form of crew cut) as I always had him do. I was in no way going to buckle under his or anybody else’s gaze.

When I returned home from the barber shop, I would be the subject of deep family discussions. My wife would claim that I changed my hairstyle altogether. And I would insist that it was the same haircut. The only difference was that with each visit to the barbershop now, there were tectonic shifts occurring on the follicular real estate which made the same cut appear amusingly different afterwards. I couldn’t help it. The barber was getting frustrated because there were only so many tricks he had up his sleeve. And my family liked roasting me because I was now looking like a clown.

When I went to Kerala over this summer, my bald dad looked at me with glee. He didn’t have to say a word. I knew what was on his mind. Friends would comment heartily saying, “style aage mariyallo!” (“your style has altogether changed, huh!”). And relatives started whispering that I started to look like my dad.

A week ago, now in my mid-forties, I went to the barbershop for a haircut and experienced the same debates at the shop and at home. The barber wanted to attempt another creative intervention to hide the emerging baldness. And my wife claimed that, yet again, I changed my haircut, pulling out her phone to click the image (below) and prove her point. In the middle of these civil disputes, I had a moment of luminous clarity. Nothing less than an enlightenment.

I didn’t see a point in holding on to some aspiration that whatever remained of my hair would stay on. Nope, it was all going to go away. And that too soon. So, I announced to my wife and kids that I was going to get a ‘buzz cut’ (image below) and keep it that way henceforth. My kids wailed, “No, PAPA, NOOOOO!”. But my wife agreed with a vigorous nod of her head saying, “Yes, that’s better than this!”, pointing her hand to my head, and thrusting the image at my face again.

So, I set out yesterday to take the path of many luminaries before me. This includes the likes of Dalai Lama and Gandhi (peace legends), Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson (action heroes), Churchill and Putin (fierce politicians of war), Bezos and Domenica Dolce (businessmen), Jordan and Zidane (sportsmen), Phil Collins and Satriani (musicians), Darwin and Foucault (intellectuals), and of course, the inimitable style icon, Sean Connery.

As much as I am relieved, I am also at a loss because I had some fun headshots taken which are rendered irrelevant now. My wife had taken the picture which is proudly plastered on Substack with the logo. That was eight years ago. More recently, I had a professional headshot taken by a friend (Jordan Ervin, founder of The Story Company) some months ago which could and should have gotten more mileage. It now looks like the person on my Linkedin profile is a man trying hard to immortalize one last look with hair on. Well, until I meet Jordan again, and if he continues to be charitable to this soul, I intend on keeping it that way.

I'm going to try to teach you how to think about your work as a never-ending process, how to share your process in a way that attracts people who might be interested in what you do, and how to deal with the ups and downs of putting yourself and your work out in the world.

Flow:

1. A new way of operating: Be so good that they can't ignore you and be findable. It is the new way of operating. Do the good work and make it discoverable while you are doing the creative work. Crank away at work while taking advantage of the network.

Instead of wasting their time "networking", they're taking advantage of the network. By generously sharing their ideas and their knowledge, they often gain an audience that they can leverage when they need it-for fellowship, feedback, or patronage.

2. Scenius: The lone genius is a myth. Sometimes it feels like some are touched and inspired by the gods themselves and seemingly, out of nowhere, they spend time in their studios and come out with a great time transcending work. This is a myth which paints an antisocial color to the genius. A healthier way to see them are as a scenius (term coined by Brian Eno). In this way of thinking, great ideas are birthed by a scene of community of artists. They have inspired one another. This way of thinking celebrates the brilliance of the artist as well as acknowledges social contribution.

Find a scenius, pay attention to what others are sharing, and then start taking note of what they're not sharing. Be on the lookout for voids that you can fill with your own efforts, no matter how bad they are at first.

We need to forget trying to be a genius and explore how we can be part of a scenius where we can contribute- ideas, conversation etc.

3. Be an amateur- Amateurs are those who pursue their passion in the spirit of love regardless of potential for fame, money, career etc. The amateur has little to lose and are willing to experiment and share the results.

On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and something — Clay Shirky

Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing.

Be an amateur who takes the risks and pursues the passion and learns in the open. Forget about being the expert and professional. Share what you love and what you are doing. Other lovers will find you. Move from nothing to something.

4. Use your voice to find it: The only way to find your voice is by using it. When we talk about things we love, our voice will follow. One needs to put the work out there in whatever form with an amateur spirit. This is how you find your voice.

5. Process matters as much as product: Very often we only think of publishing the final product. That seems to be the traditional way of thinking. That way of thinking belonged to an older age where there was avenue only for the final product to be displayed. But now, in the digital age, there is no excuse for the creator to not show the work process. The artist can share whatever and how much ever of their process they are comfortable sharing. They can share work-in-progress too. The artist cares about the day-to-day process of the thing they love to do-—the thing that actually leads to the final product.

By putting things out there, consistently, you can form a relationship with your customers. It allows them to see the person behind the products—Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt in It Will be Exhilarating.

Become a documentarian of what you do. Whatever you do, there's some art and method to it and there would be people interested in that art. Show your work even when you have nothing to show. Don't just focus on the painting (final product) but the painting (the verb...the process). Document that.

The first step is to scoop up the scraps and the residue of your process and shape them into some interesting bit of media that you can share. You have to turn the invisible into something other people can see.

Document your work at the various stages in the process. Take photographs of it. Shoot videos of it. It need not be great. View it as tracking your work. Even if we do not share it, we will be able to see our work more clearly.

Once a day, after you've done your day's work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share.

If you 're in the early stages, share your influences and what's inspiring you. If you are in the middle of executing a project, write about your methods or share works in progress. If you've just completed a project, show the final product, share scraps from the cutting-room floor, or write about what you learned. If you have lots of projects out into the world, you can report on how they're doing-you can tell stories about how people are interacting with your work.

Do a daily dispatch of your work as it shows what you have been working on every day. The content of the daily dispatch can be depending on the stage of the project as mentioned in the quote above. When you think of what to share, go by the question asked by dribble.com "What are you working on?". Share only that which will be helpful to you (in terms of feedback) or others. Don't share everything indiscriminately.

Austin speaks of excuses that creators make. They fear imperfection (most are imperfect) and lack of time (find your time by quitting other things). He calls out the BS on both. And don't fear things being imperfect. Sci-fi writer, Theodore Sturgeon, said that 90 percent of everything is crap. That applies to our work. We can find comfort in that thought as well as leverage that to identify what is good by getting things in front of others.

‘Stock and Flow’ is an interesting concept that Austin mentions. He takes it from an economic concept that writer Robin Sloan takes from and adapts for media. Flow is the daily stream of tweets and posts of updates/info that one puts out. Stock is the more durable stuff which is something people find interesting even some months later. It is the stuff that people search on the internet. Austin says that the best way to capture it is to visit old posts and look for trends and patterns in our work.

You have to flip back through old ideas to see what you've been thinking. Once you make sharing part of your daily routine, you'll notice themes and trends emerging in what you share. You'll find patterns in your flow. When you detect these patterns, you can start gathering these bits and pieces and turn them into something bigger and more substantial. You can turn your flow into your stock.

6. Build a good domain name- Every creator needs to get their own space on the internet because many platforms come and go. Moreover, there are limitations of pursuing our creative endeavors on social media which is owned by others.

A blog is that ideal machine for turning flow into stock: One little blog post is nothing on its own, but publish a thousand blog posts over a decade, and it turns into your life's work.

7. Don't be a hoarder- We all have our treasured collections form various experiences of places we've been to, people we met, jobs we have done etc.

These mental scrapbooks form our tastes, and our tastes influence our work.

We need to utilize these to create. There is a connection between our collection and our creation. Your influences are worth sharing. He suggests that we need to look at the scraps of others. There might be treasures in what others are discarding. Celebrate your influences. Do not let others' views cloud or restrict you from sharing it. Own it. When you share others' work attribute it to them. Citation Attribution is important. It is a matter of showing respect to our sources and our reader. In an online format, hyperlinking is the most important way of attribution.

7. Work doesn't speak for itself- Though work has value in itself, it's value increases manifold when connected to an apt story.

Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work effects how the value it.

We need to study the craft of storying. There are different models to it. Every client presentation, fund raising request etc. are all pitches. They are stories with ends missing because we are living in the middle of that story. They are all essentially a pitch.

8. Talk about yourself at parties: Think through what you would like to say when you introduce yourself to others. Keep in mind different kinds of people.

9. Shut up and listen- There are many human spammers in different places. They are there for self-promotion and do not really want to learn from anyone. Life is all about themselves. There are newbies and famous people who are human spams.

They're everywhere, and they exist in every profession. They don't want to pay their dues, they want their piece right here, right now. They don't want to listen to your ideas.

Most forward-thinking artists are not looking for fans or passive consumers. They are looking for collaborators or co-conspirators.

These artists acknowledge that good work isn't created in a vacuum, and that the experience of art if always a two-way street, incomplete without feedback.

If you want fans, you have to be a fan first. If you want to be accepted by a community, you have to be a good citizen of that community.

Be 'interesting'. To be interesting, you have to be interested in the other person and their work first. That's what makes on interesting. This idea is from Lawrence Weschler.

Why is this important: This is important because it is important to let go of the illusion that geniuses produce stellar 'originals'. That illusion stops many from doing great work. People don’t put in the hard work necessary because of this limiting mindset.

Flow:

1. Where does one get ideas from? By stealing. A good artist understands that nothing comes from nowhere. There is nothing new under the sun. Thus we should embrace influence instead of chasing originality.

2. Garbage in garbage out- The artist is a collector and not a hoarder. Our job is to collect and curate good ideas. Steal that which directly speaks to our soul.

3. Climb your own family tree, read deeply, and make notes- Chew on one thinker you really love (writer, activist, artists) and study everything that person has contributed. Seek who their influences are and study them too. Repeat the process and you will have your own genealogy. See yourself as part of this lineage as you make stuff. You will be in great company now.

You have to be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else-that's how you'll get ahead.

Be a note maker. Make notes all the time of whatever inspires you of others work. Create a swipe file.

If I'd waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started "being creative", well, I'd still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it's in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.

How does one make when there is a paralyzing fear? The impostor syndrome is real. The fact is that all educated people feel it. The only way about it is to fake it till you make it. Nobody is born with a voice. It comes with pretending to take off from people we admire. The more people we admire, all their traits will influence us. It does involve studying the people we love and learning to think like them.

The reason to copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds. That's what you really want-to internalize their way of looking at the world.

Move from imitation to emulation of these heroes. Imitation is copying stuff. Emulation goes one step ahead where it breaks through into our own thinking and action. No one will be able to perfectly copy their heroes. We'll see the gaps and adapt. The difference is where you should amplify as your work and contribution. This goes back to the concept that it's in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.

4. Write the book you want to read. Do not write the story you know but the story you like. He draws this from his experience with fan fiction where he would write sequels and prefer that over what eventually came out in the theaters. So we should write the story we want to read. Understand what the gap between how our creative heroes and us are when we imagine what a better argument or plot would be. He ends that piece by asking:

What did they miss? What didn't they make? What could have been made better? If they were still alive, what would they be making today? If all your favorite makers got together and collaborated, what would they make with you leading the crew? Go make that stuff.

5. Engage in analog ways of working as we were made to use our bodies to think and work. Make two work spaces if we can. Let the thinking and rough creation happen in one space with paper, pens etc. Let the other be digital where we polish it up. When we get stuck we return to the analog space to rethink and get unstuck and then get back to digital to edit and finish the work. The creative will experience a dance between analog and digital.

   
   Likewise, keep all your passions active. Switching between these passions will help practice productive procrastination. You don't need to pick and choose between these. You need all these to live a full life. Keep hobbies that make you happy too. Don't worry about how all these passions will unite and create a grand theme stitched well.

Don’t worry about unity - what unifies your work is the fact that you made it. One day you'll look back and it will all make sense.

6. The Secret to being popular: Do good work and share it with people. If you do not feel like saying everything about something for various fears, share abstracted bits. You control what you publish. You need to do good work though. This will demand simple things like being isolated and working. Do it. Surround that environment with things you love, like books, art, etc.

7. Go away from home: Find times in everyday activities to step out without connectivity. Cut out the Wi-Fi during such times. Just take your notebook and pen. Even at airports, do not open the laptop, just write and make use of the notebook. Do not avoid boredom.

8. Make friends: Make friends online by saying nice things about them. Those influencers are on the internet. They will know if you have ever said anything negative about them. Avoid negativity by ignoring your enemies. Follow the best people (smarter and better than you) in your field. Pay attention to what they are doing and talking about. Write public fan letters!

Write a blog post about someone's work that you admire and link to their site. Make something and dedicate it to your hero. Answer a question they've asked, solve a problem for them, or improve on their work and share it online.

9. Keep the long view in mind: He says three things in this section. Assume you live a long life and build disciplines into it. Don't go crazy on your creative pursuit and spend yourself like there's no tomorrow as it will destroy your life. So eat health, exercise, play with your kids. Secondly, learn about money as soon as you can. Which means pinch your pennies and live well within your means. Life can be hard. For a long time you may have a day job to fund your creative pursuits. And that's GREAT! You get the money. But it also builds disciplines and routines that are helpful. It will give you the resources that will feed ideas into your work from people you meet, events you are part of etc. Finally, figure out what time you will be working on your project and stick to that everyday no matter what. There are no sick days or holidays. Get yourself a calendar and "don't break the chain" (Jerry Seinfeld)

10. Creativity is subtraction: We need to choose what to leave out. That's the skill that we need to master in this day of information overload.

In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what's really important to them. Nothing is more paralyzing than the idea of limitless possibilities. The idea that you can do anything is absolutely terrifying.

The way to get over creative block is to place constraints on yourself. Do something in an hour. Don't check for sources on the internet but from memory. etc.

Don't make excuses for not working-make things with the time, space, and materials you have, right now.

You must embrace your limitations and keep moving.

The other day I connected with the call center agent of a vendor who was expected to visit my residence and fix the broken chimney. I did not want to miss this appointment by being in another meeting at the same time.

On that call we discussed the condition of the chimney and the engagement process. On enquiring when the technician would swing by, he mentioned that the person would be able to do so only the following day.

The following day?? I had decided to work from home that day only so that I could get the contraption fixed!

With much restraint I politely requested him to organize the technician to commit to that day itself, explaining how I was not able to be home the next day since I had to be at my office and how I stayed back this particular day only for this promised visit.

In the middle of my spiel, he went..."I'm sorry, Sir. Your voice is breaking, Sir. What were you saying, Sir?"

Gathering my superpower strengths with a prayer, I raised my voice (as if the elevated volume could fix the fragmentation!) and repeated everything again at the middle of which he repeated, "Sir! Sir! I cannot hear you clearly. What were you saying? Please repeat that again, Sir?"

As he was speaking, I breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly. Could he hear me and not want to engage with me at this point? Was he trained for this at the call center? Perhaps he did not want to own up to the goof-up from his end which inconvenienced me. How come he could hear me just fine till now and not hear at this precise juncture?

All kind of thoughts raced through my prefrontal cortex, temporal lobe, and parietal lobe in the three seconds he took to utter his non-reception of my argument.

Reluctantly, and by now, pessimistically, I repeated myself again. Partly, I believed that he might have genuinely faced a technical issue. So why not, redeem him from the judgment and narration in my mind.

Again, he went, "Sir, Sir, I can't hear you, Sir. Were you saying something, Sir?"

At that point, I thanked him and requested him to dispatch the technician the following day. To my surprise, he heard that in full and responded in the affirmative. He gave me the updated twelve digit alpha-numeric Service Request Number too, which I repeated after him. Not a break in communication transmission.

Being the eternal optimist, I again tried sneaking in my request of sending the technician that same day, and he again went, "Sir, are you trying to speak something now? Sir, your voice is breaking? What were you saying, Sir?"

I hung up.

I wish I could say this was a rare phenomenon. I have observed the core pattern of such conflict-avoidance in my interaction with several others.

The loose patterns of QTD are:

• Stage 1- A clear discourse

• Stage 2- Rise in conflict

• Stage 3- Affected side hears and the other does not (in a repeated fashion, if I may add)

• Stage 4- The affected party gives up

• Stage 5- Clear discourse continues in the terms suiting the other party

The biggest hinderance to the treatment of QTD is the inability to truly assess whether the deafness really exists. Assuming the non-existence of the deafness makes the affected person look uncivil, judgmental, non-empathetic, and impolite while it is the other party who actually is impolite.

As hope springs eternal, I never assume that Stage 2 is always followed by Stage 3. On the contrary, I am refreshingly encouraged when conflicts in Stage 2 still end in Stage 5 by skipping Stages 3 and 4 and dealing with the conflict.

As for those suffering from QTD, though I initially am inwardly infuriated, I later empathize with their inability to deal with conflict. QTD has given me enough to think through the kind of people who, in other spaces, creatively utilize coping tactics which give them their way without the need for confrontation and resolution. What have your experiences been?

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The best way to appreciate the place is to embark on a forest trail at the site. We took the chance and hired a local guide for the purpose. His name was Shankaran, an alternate name for the god, Siva.

I have written about my interests in hiring a guide earlier.

Shankaran was a cheerful man in his sixties. He was short, stout, and strong. More importantly he lived by the side of the forest and did this for over four decades.

He was a man full of stories-of celebrities whom he had guided at the site, of cameo roles he had undertaken for movies shot in Bhoothathankettu, of ordinary families like us and their quirks, of the government and their policies towards forests, of the forest department and their competence etc.

He showed us trees that were several hundred years old, plants that were medicinal, trees whose tubular branches held water should we get stranded in such forests, and the diseases in trees (he called them 'cancer').

At one point, he stopped and showed us a log fallen near the trail. It had been lying there around for over three decades. He also called it a 'Lover's Bench' since many young couples have sat on it to while away their time. He also noted that couples these days just sit there, take a selfie, and leave. Shankar knew how the times were changing.

What drew me to the log was not the fact that it was lying on the trail for three decades but the reason why it was untouched by the forest department.

Shankar said that the forest department was, probably, a year late in taking action in removing the log from the trail. By the time they came, they noticed an eco-system develop and start to thrive around the log. There were insects and creatures all around it. In fact, there developed a lot of life and activity underneath the log.

The forest department, seeing new and reorganized life around the log deliberated over it and decided not to remove the log from the site.

Shankar was passionately animated as he was talking by now.

He halted, turned around, and said in Malayalam, "The fallen log is not dead. Even this log has life. The log has rights. And so do the animals, insects, moss, fungus, and weeds that are thriving around it. They all have rights. They have the right to live in their land. No one can take that way from them!"

Being a justice professional who is constantly thinking through violation of rights, his passion took me by surprise. It made me think afresh how rights cannot be restricted to humans alone. There is an entire life-system out there of which humans are only a part.

Isolating humans alone and working on their rights really does not solve even human rights because humans are linked inextricably to the entire eco-system. An abuse of nature by humans at one end of the globe does affect humans at the other end of the globe.

This should not be hard to understand. It is strange that people see how the fluctuation of dollar value affects a shopper in Tokyo, how the inadequate supply of fossil fuels in Saudi Arabia affects the normal Indian office goer, and how a war in Ukraine affects a builder in Lahore, Pakistan.

The Bible says in Ps. 24:1 "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it, the world and all who live in it." To see the world as the Christian/Hebraic God sees and to value the whole world as the Christian God would, is something that would benefit humanity.

This valuation of all that is in the world would lead to a compassion on nature in ways that have not been exhibited before. We would be less selfish when we observe how our actions have wider consequences.

Spending time in nature, interacting with it through touch and smell, using them with respect and gratitude, and nurturing the balance within the system are things human beings can be sensitive to as part of the stewardship of the precious resources.

The moment we distance ourselves from the tangibility of these, we become insensitive, leading to a warp in our perception from a devaluation of everything else. We end up submitting to the selfish core that pulsates and waits to deharmonize and demonize everything.

From that vantage point we become god and our mantra becomes "The earth is mine, and everything in it, the world and all who live in it."

Bhoothathankettu, as the name suggests from the native language of Malayalam, signals to a dam built by ghosts (bhootham). The natural fortification of hills and forests surprise the visitor by how nature 'knows' to take care of herself. One can be persuaded by the myth that the massive rocks were hurled down from the skies to flood the area and kill the Lord Shiva.

Of course, a dam was later built in the 1970's to conserve water for purposes like irrigation, hydro-electricity, flood controls etc. The ugly politics of dam construction is not something I want to engage in this article, though it must be stated that I empathize with the Anti-Dam Movement.

The landscape of waters, hills, and forest does something inexplicable to my soul. I stood soaking it all in as nature massaged every nook and cranny of my soulscape.

I hired a local guide to take us through the forest trail. Though there are people who guffaw at such exercises because, often, such guides only make a fool of the gullible tourist, I enlist guides for a few reasons.

For one, I want to contribute to the local economy and respect and dignify them. These people (often men) have lived in the surrounding areas and have proudly presented their culture and heritage for years. They could have left elsewhere for brighter prospects but celebrate their history and culture as their vocation. I respect that.

Secondly, I love listening to local legends. There is always a story that shapes the cultural conscience of the people. I seek to see the world through their eyes as much as possible in the few hours I have.

Finally, they have some facts in their armour which I would not have known apart from engaging in the slow casual dialogue.

As soon as I parked my car, outside the trail, I was hooked by a very peculiar sight. I seemed to be looking, from a distance, at an ecological mash. It seemed like a mini-truck was being invaded by the wild.

There was life growing and creeping out from the seats, pedals, engine compartment, and steering wheel of the vehicle. The cargo bed looked like a tree itself would grow out of it.

I was shocked by the sight. I thought of how we worry (rightly so) about the taking over of machines and the stripping of the planet's natural world. If this sight was anything, it was a visible proof that there is power in nature to restore and heal itself in spite of the tragic forces at play.

I was filled with hope. Even if we slowed down our technologizing pace, the earth could go through a course-correction with nature leading us out of the current chaos.

Of course, I understand that this is possible in tropical Kerala, India, and may not be the case in other parts of the world. Nevertheless, the potency of nature in any place cannot be underestimated.

As I reflect on this, I am persuaded that the earth needs a relief from the speed at which we are dumping garbage generated by the modern lifestyle. The only way out is through humans adopting alternative lifestyle choices to almost every sphere of their life.

I realize that this would decrease the demand of the many million products in the physical and digital stores, causing huge losses to every industry; resulting in loss of jobs too.

The way the world has been structured is essentially flawed. This is not a rant against neo-liberalism, capitalism, or globalization. There are far deeper thinkers who are erudite in their framing of the problem and proposing of solutions. This is too precious, though, to leave to the hands of the experts and the policy makers.

I digress. The potency of nature to heal itself is quite remarkable. One way for anyone to persevere in this path is through their commitment to examine and understand their individual/household impact on nature and set a plan to reduce it. We cannot wait on systemic changes to start this process.

Plant trees, stop consuming animal products, utilize only road/rail public transportation as much as possible, reuse & repurpose existing material, listen to the vulnerable, marginalized & dispossessed, and act on their advice, spend time in nature, and, yes, organize and advocate for these at various levels.

Start small and with what works for you.

These are simple ways we can reclaim what we are quickly losing. The earth has the power to heal itself. Nature is resilient. To clarify, using Nassim Nicholas Taleb's concept, nature is anti-fragile. The minor ruptures and breakages makes nature emerge stronger than it was before.

There was more to the walk in Bhoothathankettu. But the one thing I came back mighty impressed was in the power of nature. I under estimated it's potency and anti-fragility. It has given me hope. A future is still possible if humanity exhibits some restraint. It will bounce back and reclaim its natural place.

P.S: I wonder did you notice the flowers bloom in the cargo bed of the truck?

My wife and I started watching an ‘ok’ show called Manifest which was streaming on Amazon Prime in India. There are only a few shows that we have been able to agreeably watch in the many years we have co-habitated. We are usually very relieved when we find even a mediocre one we can put up with.

At a certain point in the middle of Season 2 Ep. 11, one of the casts utters

I have been staying alive and not living.

Manifest, Season 2, Ep.11.

The context of the character's story is depressing at this point. But strangely this phrase did not pop up at a dramatic moment in the episode. It is in the middle of a conversation he is having with his fiancé.

The line hit me like a ton of bricks. For one, the phrase is philosophically and existentially loaded. Secondly, it made me think through how the character's statement was performed at an ordinary moment.

I want to focus on the latter.

His statement was not treated by the screenwriter as extraordinary nor given significance in its positioning in the story or delivery.

It made me wonder—Is not life like that?

We live every moment not designing some moments to emerge as significant and others ordinary.

We live. That’s what we do.

We have normal conversations with our spouse, children, parents, neighbours, and friends.

We cook, clean, throw the trash, drive, talk, have fun, cry, watch a show, and exist in the ordinariness of everyday life.

I realized I need to lean more into my everyday moments as those moments are what life is made up of. Living the ordinary in an engaged manner is what will ultimately make life matter.

Ignoring the little moments—when my daughter sneezes, when my wife wants me to pick something on the way back from work, when my mother talks about the needs of a certain relative, when a colleague hands me a stapler, etc.—is what the ignorant do.

And I tend to be a fool. To my detriment.

But no more.

I want to be mindful and careful. I want to lean into the present. In this lies love, joy, and peace as I live within a community around me.

Staying alive and living are two different things. And I intend on make this life matter.

The details amused me. It was a competition between the girls who would go by the elevator and the solo boy who would scale the stairs.

As we got to the starting point, the entrance of the lift in the basement, across which the stairway began, I knew my son was, perhaps, being a bit overconfident about this one. There was no chance he could beat a bubble traveling vertically upward at a speed of 2m/sec.

Always one siding the underdog, I chose my loyalties immediately. I assured my son that we would win this by a large margin. Of course, my son believed me, as he believes almost anything I say. But I had no idea how we would.

At least when we started.

Then I thought of the fables I had learned growing up−of 'The Hare and the Tortoise'−where the tortoise won at the end. The theme was 'slow and steady wins the race'. But this was a race against technology−armed with back-up power too, in case of power failure.

The girls stepped into the lift and the boys were off. As I bounded over the steps−leaping over three steps at a time−my brain was working furiously in how I could turn the tide.

Over a decade ago, I had consistently beaten my family to the ninth floor, in a similar fashion. But now age was doing its trick on me. And this was the twelfth floor. Who was I kidding!

I had to find a way. In the three seconds I took to climb a floor, I thought of the Industrial Revolution and its socio-economic-cultural impact, the advent and integration of a computer networked world, and now, how AI was ascending the hitherto unimaginable peak of not just processing a single human's intelligence but harnessing the powers of collective intelligence.

Humans have to be the master’s over the machine. I had to win.

As I galloped three floors, I was ahead. But unless I slowed the elevator's progress there was no way we were going to win. I had to do something different in the next two seconds to change the course of outcomes.

And then it struck me.

An evil grin crossed my face. The plan was simple and genius. All I had to do was call for the elevator at every floor causing it to stop for around 10 seconds each time. This would grant my son and me enough time to get to our apartment before the girls.

I dashed for the lift and pressed the call button. JM found renewed energy as I raced ahead and pressed the call button on every floor. In time, we were at least four floors ahead.

At that stage I realized I had to slow down for my son. My energy was quickly depleting too. To win this race, we had to conserve our energy. At our worst moment, we only needed to be two floors ahead of the girls. Unnecessarily pressing forward in haste would be our undoing.

And... I had to continue my ritual of slowing them down on every floor.

By the last two floors, JM and I were slowly walking up. And the girls were at least four floors below us and stopping at every floor.

When the girls got out of the elevator, they were bewildered. JM and I strutted around like peacocks. We had caught our breath and done a few stretches by then. They did not suspect that we intentionally slowed them down.

On hearing how we got there first, the girls were furious on being tricked. I justified by explaining how the race was unequal to begin with.

I also told them that if they had thought through for a few seconds while being stopped on every floor, they could have observed a pattern and realized they were going to lose. I also reminded them that if they had observed it, they could have stepped out at any point and got on the other elevator. But they didn't.

The winner would always be the one who is more innovative. At the end of the day, we must realize that technology, money, and other resources can only get us so far. Innovation is the ingredient that wraps all the other elements to make a winner.

Technology is not an enemy. It is an ally. The environment is not for our plunder, it is for our use and under our care. The neighboring countries are not a threat, they are fellow-species members who we evolve together with. We exist in this world to facilitate its evolution without fearing the other.

With innovation on our side, we need not fear. It is what propels us forward. As we innovate, we should steward it in a manner that benefits the entire eco-system.

The Hare and the Tortoise taught me that discipline makes us winners. I believe it is amongst the most underappreciated wisdom. A better wisdom, I argue, is that "Discipline and innovation wins the race.”

I had been mulling over it for some days . I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. It was time to hang up my blogging boots.

It was 2009 and I had been blogging for only two months.

As a new blogger, I was perplexed by the many roadblocks a novice creator would encounter in their journey to the work of creation.

For one, I always wanted to know what my ‘voice’ should sound like. I had my favorite authors. I loved the humour of some, and I loved the research acumen and citation habits of others. The more I read various blogs, the more I wanted to sound like a mash of all my favorite authors.

I loved how each of them sounded unique and had the right approach and content. How did they do that? Did they have it naturally?

More importantly, what kind of a writer was I? Was it in me already? Or was it something I had to develop?

Was I a funny one? Did I want to be funny? But if I wrote funny posts, how would anyone take me seriously? Or should I take the scholarly approach? But that might just be drab and end up with no readership.

I somehow figured that this ‘voice’ business must be also tied to the topics I wanted to write on. So what topics did I want to write on? My interests were far ranging and diverse, from neuroscience to network theory to business management to social change to self-help to culture theory to philosophy.

I was getting frustrated. How was I going to discover my voice? I was desperate to figure it out so that I could start writing with confidence.

I soon realised that I could not sit on my bum and wait. So I randomly decided on a certain niche and wrote for two months.

Then I got bored.

If I was already getting bored, maybe this was not meant to be my niche, I figured.

Meanwhile, most of the blogging gurus, then, advised that we triangulate our niche early on. I was following their recommendation. I could not blame them. Many actually know what they want to do. They know exactly what their interests are. I was the dimwit who was confused.

Perhaps, people like me were never meant to blog, I concluded, and wound down my act.

Over the years, I have had many opportunities to think about this subject. I do not claim mastery over it but I have formed certain opinions. So how does one discover who they are and what their purpose in creation is?

Is it a journey to be taken or is it ‘already there’? Does one learn it, like a computer language, and then code? Or is it like learning a mother tongue − one word at a time, rooted in its context, defined by life and relationships?

If first learned (traditional style of reading, classes etc.) and then produced, production is dependent upon the act of learning and its (learning) perfection. But if the other way, they first create with what little they know, and learn and grow by working with their craft.

To address it from another vantage point, was Gandhi born as Gandhi or did he become Gandhi? Did he always possess what he believed, thus acting and writing as ‘Gandhi’? Or did his activism and dialogues cause him to continually learn and evolve into ‘Gandhi’?

To complicate it further, was Gandhi's thoughts in the 1910's the same as what he espoused in the 1940's? Is it possible that even Gandhi was evolving with time?

Could it be that 'who one is' is not a hermetically sealed concept? Our identities and philosophies are dynamic, directional, malleable, and responsive to the forces of life.

We are ever forming.

In his book Steal like an artist, the author, Austin Kleon, claims that one cannot find their voice unless it is used. The truth is that you cannot figure it out unless you are making and doing things. Discovering yourselves in inertia is not possible.

Kleon writes , "If I'd waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started 'being creative', well, I'd still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things."

It's in the act of leading that we learn leadership. It cannot be achieved by osmosis via intention. The action facilitates it. We learn to drive only by driving. The more we drive, we get to know our driving style.

As one keeps at it, over hundreds of artefacts later, your 'unique slice of the pie' emerges. As it emerges, your niche gets clarified to you and others.

It is a process which springs from doing the work, from the growing inspiration by work of your heroes, from the feedback from peers and consumers, emerging circumstances and opportunities, past experiences, and a ton of self-reflection.

But doing is the sugar that sweetens your cake and holds it together. It is the key ingredient that makes all the other ingredients lick worthy.

In the doing, one becomes. From the becoming, one then continues doing. From that continued doing, the creator moves into an ever evolving and continued becoming. And the cycle continues. As we do, we are always becoming.

The critical task is in doing the work irrespective of identifying the magic sauce. It is, I dare say, the only thing that matters. As you dish it out, over the years, you and everyone will figure out your dish.

I read them like a ravenously hungry street orphan, stealing, afraid that what I was consuming would be my last meal. I did what many Indians would have done − I copy-pasted interesting articles on MS Word documents and archived them carefully in my elaborate seventeen categories of interest. What if I wanted to read this later? What if I wouldn't be able to find this later? I operated out of a scarcity framework. It took a few years to stop the habit of hoarding information, realizing it was here to stay.

Slowly, I was inspired to start a blog of my own. Being social-media shy and yet having an urge to say something to the world, I decided to embark, rather reluctantly, on the blogging world. This was a daring step to enter the new world of the brave.

After going through the frightening process of setting up a blog, I did my best to write a weekly post. The process of generating a unique idea, developing an argument, illustrating appropriately, and getting the grammar right was tedious. Worse, I hated publicizing it. Notwithstanding, even I, started having a few committed readers.

Though I got marginally better at the craft, my writing came to a screeching halt in two months. I was struck by the un-documented misery of being a new creator.

Many novice creators are soon plunged into a complex paralysis. They soon realize that they lack the class, skills, focused niche, and value possessed by the seasoned creators.

This leads them to pause and study more so that their contribution could be pegged at a higher bar in their field of interest. Such a pause, unfortunately, also often causes them to:

• consider how they might actually be better at something else

• get lost in the sea of details in their field of interest...further leading to a sink in confidence

• hopelessly observe the gap widening between them and their heroes

• lose interest and wonder whether they prematurely waded into the creator economy

A look at this list strings together a pattern lurking in the shadows. It reveals the biggest obstacle that afflicts a novice. It is a terminal illness called perfectionism.

It paralyzes the aspiring creator to not only observe their lack in generating original and significant content, but also shines a torch into other craters in their aspirational work like delivery, medium of choice, production quality, etc.

They expect their very first poem to have the lyrical spell of Byron and the mass popularity of Frost. They insist on refining their intellectual and technical aspects of their craft and only then perform, crushed by the many polished creations on any given topic bursting on the internet.

Perfectionism forces them to be in a perpetual concoction of discontentment, uncertainty, comparison, and if still motivated, a state of study.

I have fallen into this trap several times over. I desire to be as literate as possible in my field of interest and desire to create masterpieces.

Every. Single. Time.

This is a death choke to the creator. In fact, perfectionism has stolen over a decade of creation from me. But only I am to blame as I handed over the key of my creative pursuits to the thief of perfectionism.

The way out is to remember that no one is and can be perfect. NO ONE. It is the most deceptive illusion in front of the novice creator. One would be petty to think that they are going to be the first perfect creator.

Brian Johnson of the Optimize (Philosopher's Notes 2.0) fame says that perfectionists are those who have exceptionally high standards and that it is important to have those high standards.

He claims that there are two kinds of perfectionists- the unhealthy kind and the healthy kind. The unhealthy kind are those who have super-high standards but reject the various constraints of reality (time, money, energy, other life commitments, etc.). The healthy kind maintain the same high-standards but accepts the constraints of reality. Because of their pragmatism, the persevere with an incremental optimization approach.

At any given point, they are fully conscious of the constraints they are up against, and they diligently factor them as they make their plans towards the ideal. For the healthy perfectionist (let's call them 'Optimalist'...a term I borrow), the ideal goal acts only as a 'guiding star' directing their journey and not necessarily as a definite 'shore' to land upon.

The Optimalist works within their constraints everyday and inches towards the ideal. They are not distressed by the constraints but they embrace reality. They do not struggle with negativity towards them but accept them as part of life.

The perfectionist wants to control their environment in order to perform their ideal. But the Optimalist plans, factoring reality, and acts with intention, aiming for incremental progress, allowing life to thrive holistically, on a daily basis.

My advice (as one starting over): Get out there and do the work of creating. Don't fret over quality (production or aesthetics) and significance. The very act of creating is to be treated as most sacred. Quality, then, follows as a distant second in priority (a second nevertheless) in the scheme of things. Thankfully, quality emerges with the quantum of creation itself.

The necessary criteria for a creator is to create. Should this basic act be ignored, they will never be creators. The ritual comes first. Quantum over quality. Weight over substance. Frequency over significance.

Perfectionism is a terminal illness; a death choke. It paralyzes. And it kills.

The very act of consistently creating will eventually build creation muscles, thought process, product understanding, and passion. The more one creates, the sooner the myth of perfectionism will be dispelled. Like fungus, it will thrive in the dark. Consistently shine the light of creation, and it dies.

Since my childhood I have lived in two worlds. One was the life where, as a seventh grader, I pressed on as one with above average academics and athletics, but sucked at football (soccer for Americans). Yet, everyday, I dreamt of being a great, sorry, GREAT footballer.

As I buried my head in books after school, I would find myself transported into a game, where I received the pass from the center midfield as I sped as a right-wing forward, dribbling past two able defenders, and flicking the ball deceptively into the corner of the nets as the goal keeper leapt the other way. I would see myself run with outstretched arms towards the fans, my fans, as I get piled upon by my teammates. Invariably, I would snap out, the dream cut short by my mother's footsteps closing in to check on my progress in homework.

I am a daydreamer. The above is only a sample of the many kinds of multiple daydreams I have on a daily basis. As a daydreamer who dreams without restraints, I see myself being a management consultant, a philosopher, a social activist, a carpenter, an executive coach, a musician, a fitness enthusiast, a futurist (yes, that's a thing), a thought leader, a public policy guru, and even a bi-partisan peace-broker.

All the while, I immerse myself in my role as a leader in an organization I love.

When I am not working, I daydream. I daydream while I take a shower, shave, press my clothes, commute to work, and watch a movie. To be honest, I am easily bored by movies. My daydreams are more vivid and entertaining than some soaring saga in 4K pixelated projections.

Older productivity gurus demanded one to be highly focused in their areas of expertise. Any energy spent and attention paid to other things would be, they claimed, a distraction resulting in dissipation of the vision leading to mediocre results and average life. But there are, thankfully, many articles based on recent research that outline the benefits of daydreaming.

Daydreaming has become a means of productive procrastination for me. It recharges me as I get back to my flow state at job. It does not stem from boredom or frustration with an ongoing activity. Neither is it an escape from the clutches of reality. Contrarily, it is an appreciation of the many good ways life could be experienced.

It is a soul picnic.

Daydreaming is a way to play with life. Unlike others, I transpose my mental meanderings into the real world by dabbling in bits and pieces of it. I get a taste for it. The more I taste, the more vividly I visualize myself in those roles and scenarios. That then motivates me to engage in more of it. And the cycle continues. In several different directions and settings. And aspirational lives jostle against each other vying to be acted upon.

As it so happens, yours truly has experimented with various vocations meaningfully in a professional capacity, lived in various cities and countries, engaged with multiple coteries of connections, because I acted on my daydreams.

It is one thing to daydream and it is another to act on them. For sure, life takes a hit at some level. Such a life is not for the faint of heart or for those who believe in change being the original sin. Needless to say, contributing to different fields will extract more of you as you get started in a new world and scale that ladder. It is hard work.

As I inch towards my mid-forties and type these words, I am starting to appreciate how the many disparate pieces of daydream induced lives are coalescing to make me whole. The journey in my mind becomes visceral at some point, and gets animated in the real world, which in turn propels my dreams through new worlds.

The tendency is to gulp down some narrow stream of pre-chewed ideology and be energized by it's quick uptake into the blood stream. The act of chewing is where eating begins. One needs to distinguish where the thorns are to spit it out and gag when one tastes something foul. How often, even the nobler ones, neglect this vital act and peruse an unhealthy path in thought processing.

I confess, some of this can also be attributed to the cultural forces buffeting us. With the insufficiency of time, deluge of information, proliferation of technology, virality of new media, and increase in unconscionable capitalist business models, the world is incentivised to lean on recommendations to stay on top of information.

Thus the intersection of these have created a fertile breeding ground for dissemination of skewed and polarized thinking, catalysing the modern crisis of thought erosion. As a collective, modern human beings have easily given up their USP that helped them evolve this far.

As I continue from Exercise 1, I continue to lean on Nick Milo in developing baby muscles in opinion-forming skills. Consider them the planks to develop the opinion forming core. As mentioned in the previous post, abstain from referring to external resources as you do this exercise.

The prompts he offers are:

______ is good because…
______ is bad because…
______ causes…

Allow me to continue using my previous muse, Elon Musk, to illustrate this exercise in a ten minute timeframe. Here I go:

• Elon Musk is good because he innovates and deploys technology in a way that is sensitive to earth's upkeep (Tesla is what I have in mind here) as well as ushers progress through technology.

• Elon Musk is bad because his business model caters to the comfort and advancement of the rich and they (the rich) spend on what he offers with abandon, causing him to be even richer. He could use his amazing brains to make the life of the unfortunate better but he does not.

• Elon Musk causes the gap between rich and poor to widen. Most of what he offers does not benefit the public but only the rich. I am not aware of his stance towards social causes. I remember he once mentioned that he would risk investing in alleviating global poverty. But his actions do not seem to follow such statements. To be fair, his offer of great electric cars have offered a direction for the next generation of mobility. If that picks up, he would have contributed a lot to decrease greenhouse effects and save the planet.

This was not easy for me because I had not given Elon Musk any serious thought till now. As I was typing this post, I was forced to contemplate and write, drawing from my own vague memory. I encourage you to engage in a similar exercise and flex those thought (and memory) muscles.

Once you are done with it, please feel free to write your opinion following the same prompts on:

• Air-conditioners

• Sleep

• Democracy in India

• High-rise buildings

The only thing that holds a person back from engaging in such baby step exercises is their own lethargy conditioned by prolonged inaction of actual thinking. Thinking does take effort. Unless one is self- motivated, they would not embark on the journey of thought development. They should tap into deep primal reservoirs because continued evolution of the species is depends on this.

As an optimist, I believe the primal features of the human species will eventually sense the threat and go through a collective self-corrective process. Though much damage has been inflicted by unprincipled capitalism and greed, and we will continue experiencing the spasms from various breaches, we will eventually emerge as a species from the various crises our planet has been experiencing.

We have the opportunity to minimize this damage by just rebuilding our thought muscles. Thought development is simple but not easy. A daily investment of fifteen minutes will compound over time. It will slowly seize everyday opinion-forming opportunities and unleash confident and reasonable personal assessments of the world around. Each of us has, not just the opportunity of exercising this muscle but the responsibility to do so.

From many great options, I am outlining below an exercise I have learned from Nick Milo of the Linking Your Thinking (LYT) fame on Sense-Making.

Developing one's sense-making skills is crucial as a baby step in the right direction. There are a few questions that Nick encourages people to wrestle with in the constraints of time. First, think of a topic, say, Elon Musk. Then use the prompts below to warm up the sense-making muscle:

• What does this remind me of?

• What is this similar to and different from?

• When have I experienced this in my life?

I recommend abstaining from any resources to obtain information. It is imperative that we learn to flex our thinking muscles by free writing on these prompts. If needed, the topic can be googled, but after an initial round of free writing, and then iterate. As mentioned earlier, constraints are good. So set an alarm for ten minutes. Below is an illustration of what this exercise looks like:

• Elon Musk reminds me of Musk Melon. I guess his parents liked the fruit and decided to name him Elon instead of Melon. It also reminds me of the musk scented after-shave my dad used to apply. Thus, strangely, the name also reminds me of my dad.

• Elon Musk is an entrepreneur who is similar to Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. All of them are among the richest in the world and work with advanced technologies. They all single handedly built their empires. Elon is different from them in that he has very diverse business portfolios. He owns Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, etc. He is also known to be more experimental.

• I have experienced Elon Musk through the innumerable Teslas I have seen in my neighbourhood in the US. I also witnessed, on the internet, the launch of the first private space mission through SpaceX.

The intention of engaging in such an exercise is to spark one's own thought process and to develop the confidence to lean on it. The lazy move to depend on google or any other search engine must be clipped. This exercise develops an individual to begin thinking more holistically from their own internal database.

Let me offer a few topics to spark this process. Try writing about

• Air-conditioners

• Sleep

• Democracy in India

• High-rise buildings

These are topics with a fair level of informational confidence most people have. Have a sense of playfulness as you engage these topics. The more you engage with this activity in a playful manner, the more you will be forced to not only engage your own internal databases, but you will have fun and will want to incorporate it as a lifestyle.

If you consistently do these on a daily basis, you will rewire your brain and your mind to restrain thought erosion. It will help you slowly regain confidence in your own ability to process data and birth your own opinions. Your thinking is to be treated as a muscle. When flexed often, and with added resistance, it will look good and perform well. If not, it will atrophy and lead to failure of the human body.

The one favour anyone can do for themselves is to develop their thought world. You need not be a statistic of this tragic cultural drift. In my next blog, I will offer some more exercises to strengthen the thought systems.

This has been attributed, among many factors, to the declining ability to stay focused in a highly distractible world and to the inability to evaluate knowledge in the information deluge.

In such a scenario, any one who expresses unidimensional awareness in their worldview, rises to be part of the intelligentsia. Narrow minded ideologies have emerged as a result of such shallowness and, in turn, continues to consolidate superficial knowledge.

As a result, humankind, wholesale, has slipped to being cynical of knowledge produced by the 'other' and have become skeptical of even having their own opinion. This has resulted in an unhealthy dependence on pseudo-intellectuals to do thinking for them.

Sense-making, rational-thinking, and opinion-forming, the privileges of the human species, have taken a hit. Dismantle that and there will be little to differentiate between our species and other primates.

Meanwhile, there is another challenge that some others need to overcome. This is deceptive because it can be confused with being sophisticated and intellectual when in reality, even this is an example of insufficient thinking.

This happens when someone has thought through a complex matter through thorough research but has not yet developed the skill to distill it down to its simplest essence. They could give a spiel on COVID-19 and its adverse effects on democracy but are unable to compress into three sentences their thesis nor give practical recommendations on it.

We live in an age where we are plagued by a crisis in thought. We are devolving and the socio-cultural conditions have facilitated this downward slide. The lazy and easy approach would be to blame it on technology or social conditions. Though they play a role, humanity has to take the blame squarely in this failure. Humankind has agency and has allowed this decline.

Such a negligence has resulted in the decline of democracy, lack of confidence in institutions, violations of human rights, ridiculous public policies, and degradation of the entire eco-system.

So how do we stop thought erosion? Like everything else, it is a muscle that needs to be exercised and developed. It needs daily practice and even mentoring. An engagement in critical thinking, collectively and individually, will move the needle forward and, eventually, facilitate the stemming of this crisis.

But often, and sadly, these prodigies, are renowned only for what they do best. There are other sides to their life which lack the same luster. And that happens to the best of people. As someone once said, 'the best of people are people at best'.

As one considers crafting life, and I operate under the assumption that there is more to this life, there is no better place to start than the basics. A firm grounding in the foundations would necessarily have to consider life as a whole. Such a rooting would germinate a fully formed individual who would contribute to the welfare of those around them.

But what are those foundations of human existence? Though there are many ways to tackle that question, as the sages of various religious orders have attempted in the past, the path I have chosen is simpler than most. Perhaps, a bit too obvious.

The key is in identifying the most universal and primal life features of the modern human species called homo sapiens.

As I work through this, I am also sensitive to the fact that many in the species suffer from their inability to fulfill what could otherwise be termed normative. These humans have been born in ways that are different from the ‘norm’ but are nevertheless complete. In other words, one does not need to tick all the boxes to be considered a human worthy of full dignity, which every species member deserves.

The easiest way to identify these universal features is by scrutinizing one's own life. If there are some very basic aspects to one's own human existence, chances are it might have been the same in 455 BCE in some corner of Sub-Saharan Africa and in modern day Tokyo, Japan.

At a bare minimum, humans breathe, eat/drink, move, cognize, relate, sense, emote, rest/reset, create. and are capable of a deep awareness. Awareness is the ability to just be conscious of what arises in consciousness even before it is interpreted as experience or thought. These are foundational features of primal life which need to be cultivated.

Most of these are external facing features—that which is easily observable. It's easier to understand what is more observable and thus undisputed. The inner world, though easily drawn into debates and controversies, must be attended to zealously yet with care.

It is important to remember that none of these are decoupled features but are entangled and inter-informed. Each feature is a function of the others. For example, if one sleeps only for two hours over two days consecutively, by the third day their appetite would have sunk, energy levels to move would have been depleted, and cognitive capabilities incapacitated. The primal features are each interconnected and inter-energized as they are within one human being. They are primal life features within an undivided human being.

Also, harmonizing each of them matter. In other words, eating too much or too little has a bearing on the quality of one's life. Moving too much or too little has a similar effect too. Each needs to be sufficiently regulated in relation to the other features in a dependent manner. That is where wisdom lies.

Mere knowledge and desire to enhance them would be insufficient. To build and synthesize, one would need to also develop scaffolding disciplines too—an askēsis. They help erect a sturdy and dependable foundation for evolving and fulfilling the fullest potential that each person is capable of.

Cultivating the primal life-features and scaffolding disciplines, together, constitute the foundations of life-craft. Once a person progressively learns to effectively and harmoniously breath, eat/drink, move, cognize, sense, relate, emote, rest/reset, create, and be aware in a holistic manner, they would have a robust foundation to build on and, thus, live more fully.

I love Goa! There was a time in my life when I made every attempt with my family to get away there. It was an eight-hour drive, and it was worth every effort and money spent.

I love being at beaches. Feeling the waft of salty breeze against my face, savouring the ocean scent, soaking the sound and sight of the valiant attempts of the weakening wavelets rushing towards my outstretched feet and retreating away, and indulging in the seafood platter by the sea—could life be better?

Often, people go on vacations to escape the demands and routines of the everyday. They need a break before they break down. Others resist conforming to the drudgery of the routines of commute, work, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning etc. For them, variety is the spice of life, and they create an alternate lifestyle where they have control over their freedom. They find creative ways to make ends meet and pursue leisure.

And I agree with both their sentiments in many ways. We need leisure. The hustle of everyday routines and work priorities force many to pull away for a recharge. And for the latter group, “life is to be lived!” and so, they do everything to not stray far from ecstatic experiences—every weekend and holiday is seized upon.

The common factor between both the groups is this—the stuff that life consists of is hard, boring, and tedious. What happens at the little vacations and getaways—that’s where the fullness of life is.

Everyone is convinced that there’s more to life. Only it’s not here but ‘there’.

Historically, religion has played a huge role in exploring and explaining the limitation as well as the expansiveness of life. Words like 'body' and 'soul' have found its way into common vocabulary because of deep metaphysical reflections or received revelation.

Later on, the modern world through its contributions in medicine, engineering, education, and economic enterprise made an attempt in improving the quality of life for many (albeit at the expense of the unfortunate subjugation and misery of many others through slavery and colonization). A long, healthy, and dignified life where one enjoyed a stable income with various freedoms, comfort, and access to material good or service emerged to be much more than what even a prince in the fourth century could have dreamt of.

For sure, the progress through millennia have revealed that there’s more to life than what was known hitherto. Even though the material quality of life had increased for many, like thorns among roses, deep discontentment sprang along with even such a life, thus pushing people to look for the elusive abundance elsewhere.

As I stare at this predicament, it becomes increasingly clear that there’s many ways humankind is quick to dismiss the present and live for the ‘there’. And when they get there, they realize that there’s no ‘there’ there but is freshly allured towards a new ‘there’, thus pushing the soul into a state of restless search and discontentment—a toil seeking the elusive neverland.

A life lived looking into the distance and being absent in the present is no living at all. The boring, the mundane, the pain, the repetitiveness, the toil, and the uncertainty is the stuff that life is made of. Should we create an ideal and normalize it we would experience the same frustrations. After all, we normalized it.

The richness of the here and now

So, can there be more to this present life? I argue that there is. And the way ‘there’, in fact, is the way here and now. All we have is the gift of the present. We need to accept life as a whole irrespective of our qualitative experience of it. Jesus over two thousand years ago said, “don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” The echoes of this ring true in many spiritual and philosophical traditions.

If the expansiveness and abundance of life can be experienced only in the here and now, amidst the mundane and quotidian, we need to lean into it and seize the present fully. Fully accept and embrace it, pay attention to its ordinary details, absorb the fullness of its mediocrity and shallowness. Make this present to be the substance of your life.

The diamond is in the rough. This will not transform the present. But it will transform us who experience the present. In that transformation we are able to shine through and celebrate the fullness of this life.

This is not an excuse for being lazy and living a sorry life. It is not a philosophy for accepting fate and letting anything be. It’s not advocating for a life imprisoned by unjust chains of circumstance and a resignation from life. Far from it, it allows you to be grounded, meet reality where it really is at, and pursue the change you rightly desire from the clarity that emerges from a non-judgmental acceptance and awareness of the full condition along with the associated range of emotions. This rare clarity is precisely what helps one to bring about an inner and outer revolution.

Such a life does not forbid you from daydreaming, longing for true beauty of nature, or seeking a life of peace in the midst of deep conflict. In fact, it highly values what is true, good, and beautiful, and calls upon each person to cultivate it. And the truth is you can cultivate it even in the tepid circumstances of everyday life.

So please go ahead and plan that vacation with abandon at the beaches in Goa or streets of Hi Chi Minh, not as an escape from the here to ‘there’ but to experience the fullness of the new ‘here’. Your ordinary life indeed is your extraordinary life.

Be soaked in the ordinary

So, the next time, you are rudely woken up by your child in the middle of the night, or your friend takes advantage of your amiability, or your colleague behaves unprofessionally, or you are doing the dishes—lean in and experience it fully. Stay with it till you are saturated with a non-judgmental awareness of each pregnant passing moment. Be fully aware of the pain, the betrayal, the sinking of your emotion, the absolute boredom, the sensation of the soap and grime slipping down your fingers as the cold-water splashes over your hands and the dish as you straighten your back and exhale. Be aware of all that appears in your conscious space. And pour love into it.

That, my friend, is the extraordinary life—a life lived and experienced fully. The simplicity of this ordinary moment is where the treasure is. When your mind drifts away longing for something and looking for something, and you catch yourself at it, smile. You have your opportunity to intentionally observe even that thought which is now part of your present. And as that thought fades, lean into the new moment, being grateful for the many opportunities to experience the extraordinary in the ordinary.

As a middle class Indian, bathing was a necessity provoked by the sultry and dusty environs, a discipline ingrained by the incalculable chasings by the venerable mother, brandishing the iconic broomstick. A bucket of water, a mug, a Medimix soap, and a simple cotton towel (which could double up as a net to catch fish, should the situation demand it) has kept more than a billion presentable to the rest of the world.

Here I was, staring at a bath tub, the night I moved into a new house in Philadelphia. It had all the expected bells and whistles. But the one thing it lacked that night, my oversight you see, was the shower curtain.

A shower curtain is not just a screen to prevent prying eyes from peeking into the world of wonders. Of course, even locking the door fixes that problem. The shower curtain is a flimsy barrier of skin that prevents the rest of the bathroom from getting wet. Water is the enemy in the American bathroom!

I always thought this paradoxical. How can there exist bathrooms where the floor is not allowed to be wet? Would not one want to design a drain in some corner of the floor for eventualities? Just in case?

As I stared at my predicament that night, I decided that I will not have these designers rule over my life with their stupidity. The lack of a shower curtain or a bathroom drain was not going to prevent me from my holy ritual.

Armed with a mug, I gingerly stepped into the bathtub. I looked up at the shower head and smirked. And then, I looked proudly at my invaluable Indian mug. I then descended into a squat to fill it with water from the tap at the bottom. Then, in the squatted position, I raised the mug in my right hand, like a sword, and leaned forward with head bent (remember, right hand still upright) as if an oath to the gods of war, and trickled the water from the top of my head and over my back. It was like an anointing that would make Aaron, of the Ps. 133 fame, jealous. I could feel my Longissimus thoracis and capitis extend in ways it had not done in the longest time.

I stretched. I bowed. I extended. I inhaled. And I exhaled. One legged pose. One handed pose. The whole works. Mine eyes had never confronted my obnoxious toes at such close quarters as I attempted to delicately bathe without causing a spill. The jurisdiction beyond the bounds of the tub had to be dry. Twenty minutes and thirty-five unique asanas later, I emerged enlightened. Even Patanjali blushed.

Welcome to the world of Bathroom Yoga. It comes with many benefits. This is the first form of yoga that truly integrates asanas into everyday life activities. For one, it does not make one choose between a bath and exercise. They are one! As the word ‘yoga’ suggests, it truly unites and causes a holy union, especially but not limited to bath and exercise.

As the International Yoga Day draws near, I plan on heading to Ranchi with my bath tub in tow, and showcase my unique contribution to this esoteric world. I am certain, the honorable Prime Minister of India, Shri. Narendra Modi, would be impressed by my sacred contortions.

If you are interested in exploring, expanding, and uniting your perceived inner and outer world, I invite you to push the limits, break the barriers, and undertake a course on Bathroom Yoga TODAY. Only today, will it be offered at a one-time grand discount of 50%. I also offer the in-demand Couples Bathroom Yoga course. But that would be priced at a premium of 200% as the complexity of the asanas increase with two in a bathtub!

I was tempted to end the post in the previous line. But I am reminded why I am writing this in the first place.

My life on the road can be described as a constant negotiation between speed bumps and pot holes. My devoted wife reminds me in a not-so-subtle manner that my angst against the universe is not empirically warranted. After all, all of humanity, privileged to be on powered wheels, is subject to it.

Let me pivot. I love personality tests. Some are born keenly aware of their wiring. Some are not. I am of the latter lot. I have done DISC (D), Meyers & Briggs (ENTJ), and Enneagram (8w7) to help me see myself more clearly. Ever since I did the MBT, I started being interested in others and their personality types too. I am sure I have quite a few friends who also have taken these tests because of my winsome 'can't-take-no-for-an-answer' attitude.

I'll cut to the chase. My distaste of speed bumps and my love for personality traits have led me to make a few observations. There are, fundamentally, four kinds of drivers when it comes to negotiating a speed bump.

The first kind realizes the presence of the speed bump after the fact. In other words, they and their co-passengers, are mid-air at that point. Their posteriors are four inches uncomfortably above the familiar security of worn cushions , the tissue box directly floating to the field of vision, and EVERYONE dreading the next two seconds which test the cars shocks and the connectedness of every limb to the body.

This kind of driver is of a particular kind. They are always looking ahead. The horizon is clearer to them than what's in front of them. The lower half of the windscreen is irrelevant to them. They may not be speeding. But they do not slow down when circumstance demands it. They are visionaries. Though they are fully cognitive of the fact that roads have speed bumps, the image in the distance is what arrests their attention, making them incapable of noticing the speed bump. They may care about the passengers. But there's no way to assess it.

The second kind of driver sees the speed bump well ahead of time and shifts gears and speed to gently kiss those little hills one wheel at a time. The travelers barely notice that they went over it. For all I know, the co-passengers may not even be cognizant of bumps on roads. They would have never experienced the tantalizing rides the passengers in the first car have experienced.

This kind of driver is very present and cautious. They are always looking for the dangers lurking in front of them. Is that an elephant? a cow? a crocodile?? oh phew, it's only a speed bump. The upper half of the windscreen is irrelevant. Their right foot is always ready to step on the brakes in a timely fashion. They will never speed. And they usually are not paying attention to the beautiful horizon. They do not dream. Dreamers are not survivors, they say. And puhleez don't toy with the idea that they truly care about others. Like, the first kind, we will never truly know. It is evident that they care about themselves and their car primarily. As a by product, the passenger may inherit the security too.

The third kind of driver is complicated. They speed along and suddenly realize that there is a bump an inch ahead. They do one of two things. They either slam the brakes, screaming "SORRYYYEEE!", tossing everyone out of their settled domains, popcorns flying to the front. As the passengers reel from the shock, and before they begin to make sense of their displaced world, the front wheels hit the bump with a vengeance, slipping a few discs off everyone's back like Frisbees. There is no drama more gripping than this. OR...they scream "SORRYYYEEE" and be more like the first kind of driver, blazing through the bumps. Like the first kind, it's Air India in action. All the vibrations at take off (will the wings fall off??), with everyone clinging onto their seat belts, croaking last prayers, and waiting with baited breath till the plane lands.

What's important to note is the complete cognition of the driver, before the fact, to the unexpected and unplanned inconvenience. They realize what they are getting into and make the choice split second. This breed is more like the first kind. They are visionaries but they are somehow alert to the present, albeit a bit late. They utilize the full windscreen, but more the upper half. The people around them, though they feel a bit unsafe, they are assured that the driver at least cares for them, somewhere deep inside.

The fourth kind of driver is the most complex. They speed along like the first kind but notice the bump in time. They shift gears and decelerate in time to glide the front tires in a manner that would compete with the second kind of driver. Thereafter, they do something strange. They hit the pedal and accelerate the vehicle throwing the rear passengers off the sunroof as the back tires fly over the bumps.

The fourth kind, is also a visionary. But they are visionaries who are governed by self interest. They use the whole windscreen in a biased manner. Though they are focused on the horizon, they are always watchful for very present dangers ahead for their own sake. These people are good at leading others to the destination but are not as bothered by what the journey does to their passengers. Others feel used in the process.

There may not be a full blown psychometric theory here. But if I put further thought to it, and a recruit a few quacks like me, I imagine I can out do competitions out there. Enneagram, with all their nuances, and multiple personalities, still need people to take a test. The frontal lobes need to be exercised to obtain the result. I am happy to make the case that I can appreciate and apprehend the personality of a candidate, more holistically, by asking them to take the wheel. SBPT is more real. It situates the person in a real world context. It is not a cerebral activity in the comfort of your chair and cigar.

Of course, I'm not blind to SBPTs demerits. This test, like any other, assumes some things. For instance, I am assuming that everyone knows to drive. I am assuming they are rich enough to have a car. It is obvious that I am assuming that these participants are not illegally settled and have state IDs. The list can be endless.

And for those who think automotive companies have arrived and that their tech can overcome the speed bump hurdle (pun intended) with sophisticated shock technology, you may have bigger problems with your frontal lobe that you may actually want to opt for SBPT instead of MBT, or DISC, or the venerable Enneagram.

I wonder, if you drive a vehicle, what kind of SBPT score might you have? How do your neurons fire? My son claims that I am definitely the third kind. As a card holding member of the third kind, I declare on behalf of all other 3's, we care about you...we truly do. But, often, we see the bump a tad bit too late. I apologize on behalf of the citizens of Threedom! Take a ride with us. But you may want to keep the pop corn and coke at home.