Tea & Dark Chocolate

Time for some Resolutions to follow in the New Year, right? TBH, IMO, you don’t have to set any resolution - we all must grow every day. But if you want to, might I offer one suggestion? Just one. Do not set a big bang resolution. For example, don’t say you’ll lose x kgs this year. Say what you’ll do to lose those? Start small. Maybe say, you’ll eat two healthier meals in a day. Give yourself some room to fail and get back up quickly. Don’t say, I’ll go to the gym regularly. Maybe say,  I’ll increase my average active time by X mins every week. This is my fitness story - I woke up on Jan 1, 2019 and felt immediately down coz I HAD a make a resolution and I knew the one I was averting - that I must get to the gym. Maybe it was the general interest in outdoors that started as part of exploring the parks in HK back in 2010. Or the series of hikes we went on, in Greece in 2013, for which I had to get fitter - but I’d been working out off & on for years.  Snap to 2016-...

  In 2021, I read a total of  80 books against a goal of 60 books . This includes the  26 books  written by non-native-English-speaking-authors, a goal I carried into 2021. Here are some of the best books I read in 2021, in the order of my reading them in the year -  1.       On Tyranny : Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century  - This tiny book gave me much required validation about my stand for constant vigilance against misinformation on regular & social media, especially the kind that can change governments and people's stances about important issues like public health policy, immigration, human rights etc. With multiple examples per lesson, this book was a great, informative read.  2.       The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides  - This is a potboiler book in the thriller/murder mystery genre - not my chosen genre. This book made this list purely because of how gripping it was, so much t...

What an year 2020 has been, right? We spent the entire time sitting at home, like everyone else, and realized in the first month that whining about not being able to travel is nothing but a sign of our privilege, when millions others were struggling for their daily meal. So with whining quickly out of the door as one of the options to spend time sitting at home, like everyone else, I had to look for ways to cope with the enormous bandwidth that was now mine. Work Work was busy, but with the added dimension of making it work across large teams driving decisions and making progress while everyone was remote and dealing with their own challenges. I got a lot of learning this year, both from the work perspective and from an internal dialogue on what I'd rather spend my time with. I still love the team I work with, people continue to be as awesome as they always were, and I still learn a lot from them. I think I have been fairly successful in working between 930AM-6PM on most days even ...

I believe that good poems come out of conversations and when you really feel! During one such conversation with friends today, the following stuff came out... On how I am forever penniless, and have to borrow money to fund my holidays... Oh, you cruel Vemu Making me the gruel Vemu Hoarding all the money Never giving me a penny! Separation of duties, he says But look at the bills she pays Yeah, the stocks I make Can't handle the breads I need to bake! Oh yes, I am on a roll Need more for my payroll On and on, I can wax on On how I drudge on! And on how I always underestimate our wealth... Round and round I grow and I count Taking away from my excel Giving you and you excel! At this point am saying that real pain gives birth to good poems *please insert a guffaw here* The anguish and the pain Along with all this rain This, the books and cooks don't help All I can do is yelp! I had a slighly unpleasant exchange with a co-worker when he mispronounc...

Off late, most of the conversations or debates I am having with friends fall in familiar patterns - someone in the audience would've said something that I disagree with, and I end up debating it with facts. Well, using facts not sentiments is the best thing to do, but what do you do in the world where every fact you pick might be discredited (either really because of the source of the fact or called as 'fake' news because people do not like this fact)? I have been thinking about this, I have a few options - I could move over from the argument and never touch it again with that same audience, or I could go at it in other ways. I flinch at the moving over bit, because that makes me feel that I am wasting an opportunity, both at learning and at giving it back. I am yet to figure out the right way to bring forth a valid point in a debate, something that will make the other person see the truth and not my face when I am uttering it.  This morning, a distant family member discr...

A few days ago, Hamsini , a friend from Instagram and GoodReads pinged me saying she was doing a profile on readers she knows. I answered the questions she had, and the resulting post on Curious Reader is here , which I liked very much. In the process of answering her questions, I put together quite some info about books that matter to me, and it made sense to record it all here. This post is in a Q&A format because I was answering questions for the profile. What makes a book, 'great'/ an-all-time-favorite/ unforgettable for you? Rather, in GoodReads parlance, what are a couple of those ingredients that make the difference for you between a four-star and five-star book? A quality book is something that stays in my mind - glimpses from the book should keep replaying in my mind, either when I am reading the book or much after. To name a few, I cannot forget - how my stomach squirmed when I was reading the chapter about the books being torn in Thirteenth Tale ; some pane...