Reclaiming the Present

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.”
– Alan Watts

I often think about this paragraph, and now, confined to the balcony of my house in the middle of an unending pandemic, I find myself brooding over Watts’ wise words now and then. Several of my friends and family have called me up saying that they are feeling a growing discomfort with this idleness, with this lack of movement and with this sudden paucity of things to look forward to. They express a deep disappointment in the lack of variety in the news which is “overwhelmingly about the pandemic”. Often, they gloat about the money they have lost with the crash of the stock market or the trip that they should have made in February that may no longer see the light of the day for a foreseeable future. Some of them are worried about how their jobs will turn out in a post COVID world, and rightly so, while others worry about internships and jobs that never materialized the way they had hoped because of how this unexpected visitor took us by a storm ravaging worlds and economies alike. 

On Swimming & Childhood Heroes

A couple of weeks back, I came down with a severe debilitating back pain. It was just that I woke up one morning and realized I could no longer sit on a chair anymore. My innately self-destructive tendency to undermine my illnesses, and the serious nature of what had hit me this time meant that I was in for a long haul. Since allopathic medicines were failing to provide me with any respite, the doctor suggested several lifestyle changes. One of these were that I was required to start swimming on a regular basis. Again.

Who Watches the Watchmen?

In a restaurant in Los Angeles, a white man walked into an innocuous pizzeria and open fire with assault rifle, firing three shots towards the walls and ceiling. The reason? He wanted to investigate the fake ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy he had read of online which alluded to a covert human trafficking operation being run by the food chain. In another more heinous incident closer to home, seven innocent people were lynched in Jharkhand when completely fabricated news of child kidnappers being on the prowl was circulated on WhatsApp with pictures of dead children. Let’s take a moment to absorb that – seven people lost their lives because of a WhatsApp forward!

The Smell of Paper

Clicked @ The Lello Book Store, Porto, Portugal.

I can’t really recall when was it that I exactly fell in love with them. It started off as a terribly homesick eight-year-old kid searching for solace in the yellow paged Enid Blytons that the tiny classroom-sized library in the missionary school on top of the hill housed. If I look at it honestly, it was an escape route. An escape route from being away from home silently crossing out days as they crawled by, an escape route from the wards of bullies that were not only elder to but stronger and more dispassionate, an escape route from how everything was so different there from how it had been imagined and an escape route from the world where one had been unassumingly thrust into and which would continue to be a reality of life for about a decade to come, whether you liked it or not. Boarding school is tough, and it that more so for some eight-year-olds than others.

Content is King

Notes on Content Marketing and why you should pay attention to it

The subject of this article refers to the old Internet adage that rose to prominence with a Bill Gates’ article of 1996 (although sources cite a pun reference to as back as 1914), and is still widely used today, not without reason. The spirit of this article is just the same. In the tech-savvy world that we live in today nearly all aspects of life are moving to a virtual medium, so is the same with businesses. The battle for customers is now being more fiercely fought online than ever before, and the rules of the game are completely different from what conventional business sense might have taught us. One such aspect that has been brought to the fore with Internet’s meteoric rise is democratization of content creation, dissemination and consumption. Thus, it is imperative that businesses pick up the tricks of the trade and familiarize themselves with modern trends as inbound and content marketing.