A Little Too Honest

This piece of writing is shit, get out while you can. Honestly. Lot of poo-talk coming up. Ok I warned you. I began writing this article when I joined the organisation I work for today. The biggest boss asked the new employees to write our "Sanitation Story". I am not sure if I was supposed to take a look at my life with a sanitation lens or sanitise my lens on life. I half wrote that piece and left it alone, like almost everything I do. Honestly if my life was a short story, it would be left incomplete, trailing, gathering dust and moths for years. After spending more than three years working here, I started going through these half baked lines of verbal diarrhoea and thought there is something here I should explore, and finish, for a change. So here is a small part of it, just the beginning because the middle is not written yet, I am still living it. Sanitation as a word was introduced long after I was able to think coherently and I don't remember when I just knew it. ...

It is very hard working from home. There. I said it. It is out there. It is also awesome, don't doubt it. How else can you work in shorts, no bra, ratty t shirt and listen to music as loud as you want while you work? The concept of company sanctioned working from home (if you are employed somewhere) is relatively new, free lancers and self employed people have been doing it for ages. I, however, have changed my stances several times on WFH (as we fondly call it) over the past few years. It was blissful being able to WFH, I was very grateful to the organisation I am working for, that it was possible to alternate between going to office and WFH. I worked from home when I needed to create, or focus on something hard. The grass was lush green on the other side. Now, I am working from home all the time. I rarely go for meetings, but until more developments happen in the project I am heading, this is going to be the status. Me, myself, my laptop, the laptop table and internet. Of ...

I moved to Bangalore a month and a half ago, but this is the first weekend I spent by myself in my home. It wasn’t easy making a house a home. Its not just things which help, but something extra, which I am still looking for. A vision I always had in my head was to be able to sit in my room, look out the window when it rains and have a hot piping cup of coffee. Bangalore is blessed with the best weather ever, among all the metros I have been to. It was just one of those days when the earth’s powers combined and gave me a perfectly rainy day, alone in my house on a Sunday, with nothing that pressing to do. As soon as the clouds which had been hanging around parted to give the first hint of the sweet rainy smell, I ran to whip up a frothy piping cup of coffee. By the time it was raining, I had a hot piping coffee in my hand, perfectly positioned seat and perfectly beautiful jazz playing in the background. Something still didn’t feel right, something was missing, or I should say som...

So this is a post which will probably go unread by everyone except me and my SO, but it doesn't matter. Let this be just something I am throwing out at the universe. This dilemma is something I have been wanting to share with the "Universe" for a long time, so here goes... Honesty, integrity, kindness and goodness were some of the most used words when I was growing up. It didn't matter so much how many marks I got or how well I did in school, as it meant to stick to the right side of the proverbial road. But, as I grew up, I saw its not all black and white. The line blurred between the two regions during my adolescence, and by the time I started working, there was a considerable gap that was grey.  Again I feel the widening of that gap, the grey shades continue to grow and confound me. What is wrong and right? Do small wrongs not matter? How small is the wrong doing to be passed as acceptable. It is human to err, or so has been taught, but how much of an err...

 People give a variety of reactions when we mention the scourge of the earth-the oppressed and the downtrodden. Some cringe, some show pity, some are disgusted and a few try to free them from their despair. Respect is something they don’t get, respect for surviving for so long without aid or interference. They haven’t gone to school like us, life is their classroom. They have learnt to cope with the situations and improvise with new ones on the run. One mistake is all it takes to perish the entire community so there isn't room for failure. Just for this, the ability to go on, they deserve respect. Sustainability is after all survival with security and self respect. How can we aim for sustainable development if these two factors evade them? To truly make them our equal, it is not enough to just reallocate resources from the rich to the poor. The challenge is to build an institution which can sustain on its own the progress which has resulted from interventions of NGOs or help gr...