Do you have a story too?

I have a story inside me. But it refuses to come out. It likes hiding in the darkness, unseen and unheard. It doesn’t want to reveal itself just yet. It is waiting for the right time.

I am not waiting. It is. The story in me. There will probably never be the right time for it to find a voice, but it will wait. And it will linger on for an infinite moment.

Not for anyone to remember, but for someone to just ask for it. What do you have inside you? My story refuses to let me answer. If I am not loyal enough to my story, it will not be my story any longer. I cannot open my mouth, even if I wanted to.

My story won’t let me. It listens to me all day, it knows all my secrets but it won’t open up. No. Not even to me. I don’t own her. It owns me. My story. No one knows it. Not even me.

The only way to find out is to die. But then it won’t be my story anymore either. Someone else, somewhere who will miss me, will come to own my story. Then it will haunt him. It won’t speak up but its silence will be a painful reminder of what it owned. Of who it owned.

But I will have no regrets as my expectations from my story would be long gone with my end. But so long as I am here, I will keep trying to find my story. I will keep trying to make it speak. I will keep trying to prove it to her that she can trust me.

My story will always be mine until my end. It might disown me before that. But it will never be someone else’s. Until I am gone. Then she will be free. But not free enough to speak up. That bitch. My bitch. My story.

And you know what’s unfair about her? It’s not knowing if it exists. And not knowing if it’s for real. 

Age Reversal

Not this time...

She sat in front of her long royal mirror. She looked into her deep blue eyes. Fluttering them. Then staring still. Then fluttering some more. Something felt different. Her eyes felt heavier. Maybe she was just sleepy. Then she heard her cuckoo clock strike midnight.

She looked for her night cream, the one she routinely applied before retiring for the day precisely at 12 O’clock. She seemed to have misplaced it. She looked everywhere. The night cream had been there just a few minutes ago. She vividly remembered the rounded red glass bottle, lying right in the middle of her dresser. Staring back in perfect understanding. Where did it go, then?

How could she sleep without applying it? No she couldn’t. If she did, they would all know. He would know.

Her secret would be out. Her dark unthinkable secret.

She searched frantically. Her eyes felt heavier. Her throat ran dry. She started throwing stuff off the dresser. Where could the cream have gone?

Then she heard his footsteps behind her, “What’s wrong?” She turned and saw his silhouette against the wall of her bedroom, the dim yellow light from her night lamp contrasting her need to hide.

She panicked. “Nothing.. Er.. Nothing at all. What are you doing here?” Foolish question to ask.

He gave her a smile before speaking again, in his old crooked voice, “Do you need help in cleaning up?”

She lowered her eyes and began picking up stuff, as slowly and normally as possible. He would never understand how a bottle of cream could be so important. He must never understand. Where are you? Where are you, my pretty red one, she kept asking in her head. She had to find it. Otherwise the process would be reversed; faster, more drastic, more painful reversal. She could not allow that. She was the master of his age. And his wealth.

He looked at her. Her blue eyes started changing colour now. Her focus shifted from her search, to him. He smiled, approvingly. Then, he laughed. Laughter of a devil, only slightly more consoling. Last few bits of his love for her. She sensed it, as she started to feel the pain he had so easily grown used to in the past. Or she had assumed he had.

And then, she fell to the floor and at his feet. It was fifty minutes past twelve now. The clock hands were the last sight her eyes could see. Well, almost last until she saw the red bottle tightly clutched in his fist. His young, newfound voice echoed till she lost her last breath, “Not this time... Never again...”

Action at Intersections

“Do we stop doing something just because it is not measurable? Do we stop doing something because it is not scalable?”

These were a few questions raised at the UnBox Festival today. I was there attending this three days long event about design thinking and how it can be applied across disciplines. I am neither a design student, nor a design thinker or practitioner. What was I doing there? Good question. I asked myself that question several times as I sat through the first few presentations. Even though initially I felt like a square peg in a round hole, I knew that I was there on serious agenda. I had to do what I do best – attend the event and churn articles. But it’s easier said than done, especially when it came to covering UnBox.

Usually when I am reporting events, in my head I keep framing questions for the speakers, points that I will make in my article, where and how it will appear, even what the final copy might look like. At UnBox, this was so difficult for me that I started getting uncomfortable to the extent of doubting myself. And why couldn’t I get the snapshot images in my mind? Because every person who spoke, every idea discussed opened up so many new spaces for fresh thinking that you just could not have a plan running in a single strip in your head. The opportunity cost of sticking to a planned approach to this festival was a chance to find the missing pieces of a puzzle I had been trying to solve for many years, like most of the participants. Every one of us seemed to have come there with a puzzle of their own. Whether it was about where to make a start, or about taking home a reassurance that our path had a meaning beyond measurables or about getting slapped and thrown off the stage, the event really seemed to have answers too.

One of the things that were discussed was whether design and innovation must necessarily be scalable. Ideas in the commercial scenario are often rejected simply because a group of investors or users don’t see them as scalable. The design community seemed to think differently. One side of the argument says volume is everything. In India only if you play by volumes will you build an enterprise, an empire and of course, a fortune. This general mentality had gotten rubbed into my subconscious so deeply that unknowingly, just like several young entrepreneurs and business students, I started questioning every idea based on its scalability. As I discussed my strong case in favour of scalability with well known design thinker MP Ranjan, he asked me how many people would be touched by an idea if he teaches 200 people and they teach 200 more? I said 40 000. Simple Math. However, he contradicted it, saying that the impact will be manifold. With design, it is phenomenal. Just as he was explaining to me the multiplier effect, the stack of a dozen odd used lunch plates  at a tiny table next to us collapsed, shattered to shiny white pieces of a design that was. I guess that is what an obsession with scalability does in real life too. You can’t force scale upon an idea. Likewise, you can’t generate a path breaking idea if you are preoccupied with scale. How could I deny then that somehow small can be good too? While it is good to scale up, there should never be just one best way of doing something. Design is to constantly challenge set ideas and create new realities.

Is creation of something new also a necessity? A social worker in the audience raised a question about designs of cooking stoves in rural India, and how he is working on a new design to replace the old one. VK Madhavan, Executive Director of NGO Chirag, and one of the most humble persons I have ever met, asked, “Why can’t we improve what is already there? There is enormous pressure to create something unique. Often, it is nothing but ego.”

While scalability and creation were two aspects of entrepreneurship that were challenges by these thinkers, there were many similarities drawn up between design processes and building an enterprise.

Ayush Chauhan, Founder, Quicksand Design Consultancy that organised UnBox elaborated, “Entrepreneurship is an area where design plays out beautifully. An entrepreneur is constantly redesigning the models. Learning, prototyping and testing are all phases involved in a enterprise. We started out in the business of films and then realised it was not what we had envisioned. Thus, we moved into core design related projects.”

Both design and entrepreneurship involve experiential learning. They also involve experimentation. In either case, are you ready to take the first steps?

As news lives on...

Mahatma assassinated. 63 years ago. Who cares?
Aarushi murdered. 3 years ago. Let's march for justice?
Arab protests. Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt too. Constant unrest.
Front page lead? Take Egypt. Aarushi old news. Mahatma long dead.
Single? Anchor? Mast? Fly? Take a call.
Meeting in 5 minutes. What!? IIT professor sacked for sexual harassment? So what?
Kalmadi and Bhanot sacked too. Doesn't really change anything.
CWG should be made a case study at HBS too, just like the glorious Taj.
Mumbai's pride stands tall even after the blast, the burns..
Meeting in 2 minutes..Sonawane burnt to death.. War over oil.
It's the new era, says Calvin. But where are the flying cars?
Look at the US skies! O-M-G!
And by the way, is it time for war over water yet?
Gimme a buzz. I'll go hoard some.
For now, I hear the world's running out of chocolate.
Time for coffee. And some 'chocolate' cake.
And a meeting, as they say - to discuss news!!!

Morning

Cemented roads,
red running shoes,
greener grass,
this side this time.

Basket ball dribbles,
winter tickles,
fresh detergent,
morning air.

Running water,
streams of mud
burnt leaves,
crawling toddlers.

Barking dogs,
dead crows,
holy chants,
a crippled man.

Covered heads,
unmade beds,
sprouting saplings,
crumpled notes.

Heavy breathing,
silent vows,
close to home,
distanced soul.

Misty glasses,
clear sunrise,
breathing skin,
breath juvenile..

The Social Bug

Blurry Realities

I regularly contribute to a column ‘My Life’ for Times Ascent, a TOI publication. The column is special to me because I get to interview interesting people who’re leading more than just ordinary lives. Overtime, having spoken to a lot of people, I have come to see the variety of ways in which one can spend a typical day, of course a huge determinant of which is the profession you are in. At the same time, there’s something very common to the way most of us spend our days. If you wanted to take a guess on this one, you wouldn’t have to look too far for the right answer. The computer screen is right in front of you.

There was a time when I would get up, go for a walk, interact with a bunch of neighbours and see how everyone was doing. But nowadays, the first thing that I do in the morning is to check my email, read news on the internet and of course, log on to Facebook. In fact not even that, because I keep myself ‘logged in’ on Facebook to avoid the pain of retyping my password everytime. Now that I think about it, social networking has taken over our lives! I am surprised how Microsoft still makes that squiggle for spelling error in the word ‘Facebook’. It should’ve entered the good old dictionary by now. In case, dictionaries are still being used given the ease of ‘googling’.

We seem to be living in a time when there really is no right or wrong. We’re setting new rules for how we spend a day, how we spend every single day and how it quickly turns into an entire life. Sometimes I think I should be profiling a youngster belonging to the present internet age and interview him/her for just that. Why? Because he/she is definitely leading a life that is not ordinary, in fact not in ‘normal’ because at the end of the day, even if you haven’t spoken to a single person face to face, you are under the illusion that you’ve had your scoop of enough social insights for one day.

Given the comfort of reading up the life of my networks on Facebook (networks because many of my 400 friends I ‘have’ never even met), I never feel the need to call anyone except a handful of people I am really close to. In some way, aren’t we all building walls around us, making sure people don’t call us just to check what we are up to simply because it’s already on Facebook? Aren’t we all making sure that we can exercise perfect choice in how we choose to talk to and how much, in the process misjudging people and remaining confined only to those who think, look or work life us? Our lives are turning into the 'long tail’, losing their depth in the process. We are concerned with having more number of friends but less of them. So if you think that in spite of all the social networking exercise all day, you still feel lonely in bed, it’s time to switch on the light and look yourself up in the mirror. For all that matters, the first person who needs your attention the most is you. Don’t let anything rob you of it.

Charismatic Chail

Travelling is no fun when you have a plan and a destination in mind. All you need to start travelling is just an idea and a wanderlust soul. After long weeks at work, I decided to take a break and drive northwards, hoping to find a quiet, peaceful, serene hilly abode. As I neared Shimla, I found a sign board that said ‘Way to Chail’. I decided to take a detour, or not really, since I had no fixed destination in mind. Beyond that point, there was no stopping as I went on to discover this idyllic hill resort in the lap of Himalayan ranges.

My first impression of Chail confirmed that it was going to be nothing but vast expanses of greenery, of chir pine and gigantic deodars spread far and wide. The breeze became cooler and cooler as I neared this petite hill station. Sparsely populated, with minimal commercialization, Chail is a perfect getaway if you want to steal a moment from your life and feel life’s beauty. Chail brings out the writer in you, the romantic. Chail stands for what you want it to stand for. Truly, if you are looking for peace, Chail has it. If you are looking for adventure, then too you can find the best nature walks and animal sanctuary tours here.

Chail has an intriguing history. It is built on three hills. The Chail palace occupies the Rajgarh Hill, the Residency Snow View once home to British residents occupies the Pandhewa Hill and Sadh Tiba, the third hill. In spite of Chail’s fascinating history and the story that Bhupinder Singh, Maharaja of Patiala, built Chail as his summer capital when he was exiled from Shimla, what I love about Chail is that it makes time stop. You can experience a standstill, if you pause and look into the Satluj valley, or at the starry skies, or at just the silhouettes of dancing leaves at night.

For me, the beauty of the hamlet was magnified manifolds by my stay in the palace log huts. These log huts truly bring you the closest to nature. In the morning, you can sit outside, sip a cup of coffee and watch the sun rise beyond the valley. At night, you can enjoy the coolness and the quiet, by listening to the carefree breeze that surpasses all other natural manifestations. Just being able to hear nature is one of the best experiences that Chail can offer you. For someone like me, who had stopped writing poetry long back, Chail reincarnated the poet within me. There is something magical about the calmness and ease one can experience here.

In addition to the quiet moments, there is a lot more that a tourist can look forward to. The Chail Palace is one of the best places to start. Then there is the Gaura river, where one could go fishing.  Another place one can’t afford to miss is the Chail Circket Ground, the highest in the world. Maharaja Bhupinder Singh, an ardent cricket follower, had developed it. The pitch offers a spellbinding view of the surroundings and the rich, green valley. Built in 1893, this cricket pitch located at the height of 2,144 m is also used as polo ground.

Once in Chail, the best way to enjoy your stay is to be in the moment and explore a little bit every day. Where you stay is also important as Chail has only 5-6 options. The Chail Palace Hotel is spread over 75 acres of land. It has palatial suites as well as the log huts and cottages, for those who wish to experience the wilderness of nature.  The huts are located a kilometre away from the palace and can offer amazing walks. What you should also not miss is the ‘lover’s hill’! Walk around it, with your loved one and don’t miss the perfect snapshot!