Key To My Life

Words fail us as much as they shape us.     Take the word "God" for example. Its meaning ranges from an absolute God to an abstract idea/a metaphor that has widely lost its symbolic status.     Starting out as a person who believed in an all encompassing entity or agency as God but not too particular about the religious  practices around it, my journey has taken me to being someone who no longer believes in the agency of a God separate from the self (and is comfortable with the randomness) but has extreme curiosity and appreciation of  the evolution of the religious practices and rituals.      Religious practices may have started out as steps towards  more balanced and motivated ways of living. Sunday church/ pooja rituals are absolute means to socialize in harmony. Many ablutions and prayer steps help with consistent stretches of the body. Lighting a lamp in the evening could be that break you take to reflect on the day before...

  "Humanity is a thin layer of bacteria on a ball of mud hurtling through the void. I think if there was a god, he would've given up on us long ago. He gave us a paradise and we used everything up. We dug up every ounce of energy and burned it. We consume and excrete, use and destroy. Then we sit here on a neat little pile of ashes, having squeezed anything of value out of this planet, and we ask ourselves, "Why are we here?" You wanna know what I think your purpose is? It's obvious. You're here, along with the rest of us, to speed the entropic death of this planet. To service the chaos. We're maggots eating a corpse" - Quote from the HBO series, West World   I  find the above interpretation of who we are a lot more humbling, liberating and "real" as opposed to all the meaning, purpose and grandeur that we tend to give to human life. This is the basic message I took away from the book "The Courage to be Disliked". Yet another  lif...

  Team Pandav put the free time to good use by focusing on health, reskilling, networking and finding talent and onboarding them on to their would be team. They were determined to join back to GBC and show everyone their resilience as soon as the contractual hiatus period was over. However Duryo wasn’t going to make this easy for them since he had created quite a number of followers himself.   Dhrit as usual turned a blind eye and it was again time to decide who will head the most coveted BU s of   GBC org. After being booted out of the company, Yudhi filed a law suit against Duryo for the position.   None of the out of court settlement efforts were entertained   by Duryo’s lawyers and finally an arbitration council decided that whoever demonstrates their effectiveness shall get the position. A multi billion dollar, multi year deal was for the take through an RFP and both teams were asked to prepare and present. Duryo had his entire current team including the m...

        "Team Pandav and their Business unit was thriving under Yudhi's leadership and the core Leadership team including Arjun, Bhim, Nakul, Sahadev and Krishnaa Dru. Duryodhan decided to do something to bring this empire to dust- He onboarded the master of ceremonies and master negotiator, Shakun Gandhar to help negotiate a sly deal that would leave the Team Pandav stripped off of their rank and glory and respect. Duryo invited Team Pandav to an offsite with working lunches and team bonding activities. They played 2 Truths and a Lie, Improv sessions and finally Switch the Roles.   What ensued in those games and discussions was a very intense political power play led by Shakun that Yudhi was supremely unmatched with to meet. What was supposed to be a bonding activity turned out to be the start of a negotiation  that shook all bonds within the organization. Fuelled by ego of everyone involved, the negotiation outcomes were far from a win-win outcome....

A ritual that I adopted since 2021, inspired by Barrack Obama, is to create a reading wishlist at the start of every year and to reflect on the completed and abandoned book list as the year concludes.  The wishlist has served me this far as a  structure of goals that I am excited about for the year.   Here is my 2024 wishlist. The Maniac, Benjamin Labatut  Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier  Humanly Possible , Sarah Bakewell (Audible)  The Best Minds, Jonathan Rosen  All the Sinners Bleed, SA Cosby  Wellness, Nathan Hill  Bittersweet, Susan Cain  Night Crawling, Leila Motley Think like a Monk, Jay Shetty The Adapted Mind, John Tooby There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness, Non Fiction, Carlo Rovelli Until the End of time, Brian Greene Short stories by Nobel Prize winners- collection The Ultimate Deepak Chopra collection (Audible) 2023 list:  https://deepthig.blogspot.com/2023/01/2023-book-list.html

Corporate Kshetra is a corporate satire written in the form of a multi-part series. The characters and the stories from the epic Mahabharat  are transformed and fitted into the corporate world to continue to give valuable lessons but mostly to tickle my artistic bones. Part 1:  https://deepthig.blogspot.com/2023/02/corporate-kshetra-part-1.html Part 2:  https://deepthig.blogspot.com/2023/11/corporate-kshetra-episode-2.html Part 3: Taking shape Part 4: Inception Disclaimer: This is a work of pure fiction and a figment of my imagination. Any resemblance to anyone you know is a figment of yours. Acknowledgement: And yes, very much inspired by  " The Great Indian Novel" by Shashi Tharoor which I read almost 2 decades ago  and  " The Difficulty of Being Good " by Gurcharan Das   which I read a year ago and The Mahabharat TV series on Doordarshan which I watched 30 years ago and re-watched during  Covid Lockdown.