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Sunday, April 5, 2026
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    The Magic of Watching Life on the Big Screen

    It had been a while since I stepped into a movie theatre. And so last weekend, on a whim, I decided to watch All We Imagine as Light running its final show at a nearby PVR. The film was already streaming online, but something about seeing it on the big screen felt important.

    So, I went alone, found a seat among the small but heartwarming crowd, and for the next two hours, I rediscovered something I had forgotten—the power of watching ordinary life unfold on a 30-ft scale.

    Movies often avoid the tragic truth about being human: the unbridgeable gap between what we want and the circumstances we are trapped in. Instead, they offer us glossy escapes into neat plots and perfect endings, let us vicariously experience the big emotions played by larger-than-life stars. But there is another kind of beauty, of everyday life. The quiet dreams we hold onto, and the small joys that make life bearable.

    The film’s key protagonists, Prabha and Anu, are two nurses restrained by traditions even as they live by themselves in a slummy quarter of Mumbai. Prabha’s absent husband keeps her from returning the love of a kind doctor, while Anu loves a Muslim boy. Their reality is one of cramped dingy homes, exhausting commutes, and words like “Passion” and “Purpose” must feel as distant to them as Port Wine. But their story isn’t just all bleak. Pierced now and then by moments of tenderness and joy: the curiosity and excitement at an unexpected parcel, the MRI of their pregnant cat, sea breeze grazing their skins on a stolen trip.

    Philosopher Hannah Arendt spoke of how even in the darkest times, humans find ways to keep a little light alive— “a kind of spiritual survival instinct”. This light, she said, is something that only those who struggle and those who are pushed to the edges of society truly know.

    It is this tiny light that I believe the movie’s title alludes to. The light that the ‘Drowned Man’ describes he tried to imagine as he remained stuck inside his factory for days.

    That light—that persistence of hope—shines through the characters’ stories and their eyes, and seeing it on a big screen rather than on my laptop greatly elevated the experience for me.

    For too long now the bigness of cinema-screens has been reserved only for spectacles of CGI-charged action and megastars dishing out their stardom. We have forgotten the wonder of a human face blown up to the same scale, an ordinary face like ours, but imparted a heroic quality in this largeness. Turning their quiet struggles into something epic.

    When darkness falls, the pupils expand to find smaller sources of light, and it was the same hugeness of these actors’ tired but wonderfully alive eyes that reminded me how life tinily compensates for its misfortunes by gifting us this spiritual sensitivity to its unseen but always-swarming beauties.

    I only wish we gave more screen time to these stories where the hero is our everyday resilience. Where we celebrate life itself in its plotless fashion, instead of always looking to escape it.

    Imagine the self-compassion we could develop if we were not always trying to flee our frustrated desires, but embracing them now and then, reflected in other characters, and realising how beautifully alive and human they really make us.

    Imagine we as a nation sometimes gathering together to quietly watch ordinary people like ourselves, persisting with the will to beauty and joy despite all odds. Will we look at each other differently when we step out of the hall? Recognise in each other the same struggles, the same search for happiness?

    Ordinarily when I step out of cinema that has immersed me for a few hours, the world jars harshly. But I stepped out of All We Imagine as Light with a soft sympathy for the bright chaotic world around me – and also a quiet joy in being part of this earthy resilient life we all share.

    Cover image source: Still from Iranian movie Shirin

    The Ultimate Life Hack: Stop Trying to Hack Life!

    Everywhere I turn, there’s someone offering me a solution for long-standing problems of life.

    Find Your True Love with these Three Easy Steps!
    Say Goodbye to Procrastination Forever!
    How to Self-Transform in Just Two Weeks!

    The promise is as unbelievable as it is intoxicating. Problems I’ve wrestled with for 40-odd years, now supposedly solvable with a clever tip or a quick trick.
    But deep down, we know how that goes.

    The allure of the “hack” has infiltrated everything—our careers, relationships, even our sense of self. But where did this idea originate from?And why did it become so viral and then a cult in itself?
    And, most importantly, why does it often leave us feeling more disconnected than fulfilled?

    Origins: From Programming to Pop Culture

    A little investigation revealed that the concept of a “hack” originated in the tech world of the early 2000s that I myself was a part of. As a back-end programmer, I often faced repetitive, tedious tasks that consumed too much time. For instance, debugging and optimising a database query would sometimes involve hundreds of lines of code — painstaking, time-intensive work. Hacks were clever shortcuts we would pick up from each other, helping us streamline such tasks, saving time and mental bandwidth.

    But as the idea of a “hack” gained traction, it morphed into something far bigger than its original scope. Blogs, productivity books, and social media rebranded hacks as practical tips for all aspects of life. They promised ways to simplify not just mundane chores, like organising your desk or meal prepping, but also life’s biggest challenges: finding meaning, eliminating anxiety, and transforming oneself into a “better” person. Whatever that meant.

    Life isn’t about being perfect—it’s about being present

    Why Life Hacks Fail

    Life hacks offer the illusion of quick solutions to complex problems. They thrive on the belief that life can be optimised, much like a piece of software. But life is not a code or gadget to be debugged. It’s messy, emotional, and deeply personal. Here’s why life hacks often fall short:

    1. They Ignore Deeper Issues
      Many hacks focus on surface-level fixes without addressing the underlying causes of our struggles. For instance:
      “Overwhelmed by your inbox? Set up auto-replies and filters!”
      But what if the real issue is your inability to set boundaries with work? Or, “Feeling unmotivated? Start your day with a cold shower!”
      But what if you’re dealing with burnout or depression? Life hacks are like applying a band-aid to a wound that needs stitches—they don’t go deep enough to truly heal.
    2. The Over-optimisation Trap The obsession with productivity has made us view every moment of our lives as something that must be optimised. We turn hobbies into side hustles, cram our schedules with self-improvement tasks, and measure our worth by how much we can accomplish. But in doing so, we often lose sight of what truly matters: rest, play, connection, and simply being.
    3. The Illusion of Control Life hacks promise control over chaos, yet much of life—relationships, health, and unforeseen events—remains unpredictable. No hack can prepare you for the messiness of human emotions or the randomness of life. And when these hacks fail, as they inevitably do, we’re left feeling more anxious and inadequate than before.

    It’s about how deeply you love, how deeply you work, and how deeply you connect with yourself, others, and the world around you

    Why We Keep Chasing Hacks

    So why do we keep falling for the promise of life hacks, even when they often fail to deliver?

    At the heart of it lies our cultural obsession with productivity and efficiency. Society has conditioned us to tie our self-worth to how much we achieve. We’re told that success is about being faster, smarter, and more efficient than everyone else.

    This mindset has turned projects and careers into the central meaning of our lives. Instead of seeing them as small, manageable parts of a greater whole, we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that life itself can be fine-tuned like a machine. If we just find the right hack, we believe, we can eliminate struggle and unlock the perfect life.

    But life isn’t about being perfect—it’s about being present.

    What Life Is Really About

    True personal growth doesn’t come from shortcuts. It comes from slow, deliberate effort and an acceptance of life’s inherent messiness. Here’s what we often overlook in our quest for hacks:

    1. The Value of Depth Over Speed Life is not a race. It’s about how deeply you love, how deeply you work, and how deeply you connect with yourself, others, and the world around you. These things can’t be hacked; they require time, patience, and mindfulness.
    2. The Power of Rest and Play In our rush to be productive, we’ve forgotten the importance of simply existing. Rest and play aren’t luxuries—they’re essential for a fulfilling life. They nourish our creativity, restore our energy, and remind us of life’s simple joys.
    3. Embracing Uncertainty Life will always be unpredictable, and that’s okay. Instead of trying to control every aspect of it, we can learn to navigate uncertainty with resilience and grace. This means cultivating qualities like patience, self-awareness, and gratitude—things that can’t be found in a hack.

    Living Beyond the Hack

    So, what’s the alternative to a life full of hacks? It’s a life rooted in mindfulness and intentionality.
    So in the spirit of a life-hack, I offer here four steps to embrace this approach. 🙂

    1. Take Time to Reflect: Instead of rushing to fix problems, take a step back and ask yourself what’s really at the root of your struggles. Often, the answer lies deeper than any quick fix can reach.
    2. Be patient and kind to yourself: The answers you will come with are not going to be easy to put in action. And don’t judge yourself harshly when you fail because you are working against years of conditioning, trauma, habits and personality. Change will be slow, but this trickle will become a larger flow with time and persistence. Celebrate whatever progress you make, knowing how earned even that little was.
    3. Prioritise What Matters: But you can begin with exploring and focusing on the things that truly bring you joy and fulfilment. Let go of the need to optimise every aspect of your life and make space for rest, connection, and play.
    4. Practice Gratitude: Life is fleeting and imperfect, but it’s also full of beauty. Take time to appreciate the moments, big and small, that make it worthwhile.

    Conclusion: There Is No Hack for Life

    I am not advising you to abandon life hacks as they can keep offering small wonderful tips to organise your desk, managing your inbox, or saving time in the kitchen. But when it comes to the deeper, more meaningful aspects of life, there are no shortcuts.

    Personal growth, meaningful connections, and a sense of purpose don’t come from clever tricks or quick fixes. They come from slow, intentional living—embracing life’s messiness, navigating its unpredictability, and finding joy in the journey.

    Life is not about how much you can optimise; it’s about how deeply you can live. And that’s something no hack will ever teach you.

    When Roads Close: Embracing the Art of Imperfection

    The first novel I intended to write, inspired by Saramago’s style, was about a man who, upon learning he has only a year to live, decides to retrace his steps and resolve everything he has left unfinished—from yesterday all the way back to childhood.

    I never wrote it beyond a few chapters, but the idea of things piling up that are seeking closure must have haunted me since college, because that’s when this novel was stillborn.

    The things we never do for ourselves, the forks we could have taken, the unmade calls and the unspoken words. And the more the years pass, the more the roads behind are closed for good. Houses are sold, friends have moved oceans away, a parent dies.

    Perhaps this is why, as we grow older, we naturally become more stoic. There’s only so much regret we can carry before it becomes too heavy to bear. We finally tell ourselves that what’s done is done, and what remains unfinished may never be completed. That we can only act in the present moment and accept the rest as it is.

    But there is another way to look at these regrets. A philosophy concretised in the strange Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold, kintsugi. 

    Why would anyone highlight cracks, instead of using the usual transparent glue and hoping no one notices the cracks?
    It wasn’t until I read about it that I discovered it was rooted in the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of Wabi-Sabi, which celebrates imperfection. Finding beauty in what is transient and unfinished. 

    I love this rich idea. It has shifted my taste in what I read and watch – I no longer seek neatly resolved plots but instead relish the beauty of hanging threads. (My review of All we Imagine as Light touched upon the same theme.)

    Wabi-sabi as a philosophy has helped me to shift focus from what I lacked to what I do have. From what I did not do, to what I did end up doing. It has made me embrace the life that partly I chose and which mostly happened to me; made me celebrate the people around me.

    As I grow older, more people and opportunities will slip away from me. But I no longer seek a perfection in my life, but instead see it as a mosaic made of shards that survived and the cracks that hold them together. These regrets and dreams deferred are not flaws—they are what make my life uniquely my own. The things we leave undone are not burdens to bear but reminders of life’s true nature—its strange, cracked beauty.

    Perhaps the truest form of closure is not in tying every loose end, but in the art of letting go: in embracing what we still have.

    Rethinking Success: The Ones Who Walk with Intention

    I used to think success had an expiry date. That if I didn’t ‘make it’ by 30, I would somehow fade into irrelevance.

    I wasn’t alone. Everyone around me was running too—because that’s what we had been taught. The better your academic results, the more pressure to achieve. The milestones were laid out for us: top schools, top jobs, rapid promotions, visible success.

    And it felt urgent. Like life had a window, and if you didn’t climb through it in time, you’d be stuck on the wrong side forever.

    You knew they’d still be here in ten, twenty years, doing work that mattered—long after the sprinters had burned out.

    But now, looking back, I see things differently. The people who made the deepest impact on me—the ones who earned my lasting respect—were not the young executives in tailored suits, climbing incredible trajectories, riding high on early wins. Strangely enough, they were the ones who seemed… unambitious.

    Not mediocre. Not passive. Just—not in a hurry.

    They weren’t fixated on the next title, the next jump. They cared more about understanding how things actually worked. Not just in business decks, but in the real world. They knew the back doors, the right calls to make, the places where the system had slack.

    And somehow, in the way they carried themselves, you knew they’d still be here in ten years, doing work that mattered—long after the sprinters had burned out. Or jumped ship when a crisis erupted.

    From what I have observed, these long-haul people share three things in common. Not a motto, not a philosophy—just a way of being.

    First, they chase Mastery. They are not in a rush to be seen. They take their time to truly understand their work, their industry, their skills. They can do what others only talk about in meetings.

    They aim for Balance. They are not grinding just for the sake of it. They know how to manage their energy, priorities, and the much debated work-life balance.

    And they have a great Perspective. They have nothing to prove and nothing to hide. They work with a kind of quiet confidence, even humour—the kind that comes from knowing your stuff as good as anyone else, if not better.

    I consider myself greatly lucky that many of them became close friends. And they taught me things beyond work, things that have stayed with me. Because the way people work is the way they live.

    Some people sprint ahead, and I say let them. But there are others who choose to walk with intention. Because in the end, it’s not who got there first—it’s who still has something worth saying when they do.

    How Getting Older Expands Our Heart

    In my 20s, the thought of my approaching 30s felt like some other planet. The older people around me seemed to belong to a different era; their lives marked by concerns I couldn’t understand. But as the years passed and my 40s arrived, something shifted. Suddenly, I could see the people ahead of me—those 10, 20, or even 40 years older—in a different light. It was like I was crossing an invisible membrane I hadn’t realised was there. Their experiences that had once seemed so distant, began to feel closer. More comprehensible.

    You stop looking at people through the lens of your own needs, and start seeing them for who they really are

    When you’re young, you spend so much energy chasing approval, achievements, or even just trying to figure yourself out. Everything feels urgent, and your insecurities feel all-encompassing. But as you grow older, a lot of those things just start to fall away. The things you once thought were critical to your identity — how people see you, whether you’re doing “enough”—starts to matter less. You realise that no one is watching you as closely as you thought. That it’s not all about you. And honestly, that realisation is so freeing.

    When all that mental clutter begins to shrink, something unexpected begins to take root in its place: understanding. You stop looking at people through the lens of your own needs, and start seeing them for who they really are. Philosopher Martin Buber talked about two ways we connect with others: “I-It” relationships, where we see people as roles or objects, and “I-Thou” relationships, where we truly meet them as whole, complex beings. Getting older nudges you toward the second kind. You’re not trying to measure people against what they mean to you anymore—you just see them. And that changes everything.

    I often remember my grandparents and wish I’d known them better: not just as grandparents but as people. Asked them what their dreams were, their struggles, regrets. I had some of these conversations with my Nani, who was a friend, and these are among my most precious memories. But how much more I could have understood her and others if I’d had then the empathy I have now. How much deeper I could have experienced their lives beside mine own.

    We’re taught to fear getting older, as if it’s a steady erosion of vitality or significance. But the slow letting go of youth and its ego creates space for something deeper. It brings us this profound gift of empathy. A way of seeing and understanding others that enriches your relationships and your sense of self.

    Getting older, in this way, is not a loss but an expansion, a broadening of the heart and mind. And perhaps that’s its greatest gift.

    The Philosophy of Regret: How Experience Shapes Us

    Like many young people, I used to be my own harshest critic. Every mistake, every failure felt monumental, like it revealed something essential about who I was. That inner voice was loud, unrelenting, exhausting.
    But as I’ve gotten older, something shifted. The weight of mistakes no longer feels crushing. Regret doesn’t gnaw the way it used to. But for a while, I wasn’t sure if this was growth — or just the dulling of sharp edges with time.
    But reading upon Kierkegaard’s biography, I came across how after he broke off his engagement to a Regine Olsen, it haunted him for years. He saw the decision as a sign that he was deeply flawed and unworthy of happiness. And he carried this guilt and relentless self-criticism right through his youth. I so resonated with his feelings here!
    But as he grew older, he began to see such “failures” more and more as experiences. And with this shift in mindset, what once felt like a devastating mistake, became the foundation for his groundbreaking inquiries into love, despair, and selfhood.

    Philosophy—real philosophy—isn’t just found in books. It’s lived. It’s earned.

    No one becomes wise by collecting profound quotes.
    We don’t gain wisdom just by reading about regret, longing, or failure. We only truly understand them when we’ve lived through them—when life makes us wrestle with loss, when our desires go unfulfilled, when we face the consequences of choices we can’t undo. A quote about love, despair, or resilience might seem profound when we first read it, but it’s only after we’ve stumbled through love, felt the weight of despair, or endured something that tested us, that those words begin to mean something.
    This is why experience matters. It doesn’t just add years to our lives—it shapes us. It forces us to move beyond theory and face reality as it is. What once felt like ruin becomes the ground where something deeper can grow. And the real difference time makes isn’t that we stop making mistakes, but that we learn how to sit with them, learn from them, and turn them into something more than regret.
    Philosophy—real philosophy—isn’t just found in books. It’s lived. It’s earned. And in that process, what once felt like an unbearable weight becomes the very thing that gives us depth.

    When life forces you to make a U-turn

    We are so afraid of hitting that wall where our best-laid plans come to halt.
    I hit such a wall into my thirties. After three decades of slogging through academics, passing through elite colleges and landing the cushiest jobs, I no longer related with what I did for a living. I knew I could no longer go forward. But there was no sideways for me, for this career was all I had skilled myself up for. And surely – after coming so far – I could not go all the way back! Right?

    Opportunity cost can be an ugly term when we apply it to our lives. When we measure our happiness and dawning sense of purpose against the years put into something that no longer works. The hard-earned degrees no longer relevant, and even worse, the monetary loss when we are no longer compounding on all that investment of our years. But my restlessness was thankfully so strong that I could no longer continue, and so I did go all the way back. Climbed back into the crucible, to melt and reforge myself.

    The thing I learnt from this little death was that life plans can change. We can grow past our earlier selves. The world we step into expands and throws us possibilities we never knew existed when we set our plans. Life-altering events happen that put into question all our previous beliefs. Or we just grow tired of being who we are one day.

    The wall we hit inside is because our plan no longer leads towards the new vague direction life is showing us.

    Of course, I was afraid when I had to begin all over again. And violently ashamed. These were days before the Great Resignation, and the background I came from there was no concept of passion – only hobbies. I dropped out of the radar for a few years. Mumbling some made-up excuse when cornered with the inevitable ‘So what are you doing these day?’. Feeling an utter failure before those who had once looked at me as an example.

    In the initial years, I thought my way out of this fear and shame would be quickly piling up new achievements. But here I was falling into the old trap of my earlier life: believing that my life’s success is measured by some outward-directed metric rather than the emerging sense of purpose and peace I was striving towards.

    If you can understand these three things, you will be better equipped than I was to deal with this great fear at the start:

    1. The key to living is what makes you feel alive. Sometimes you are done with the past and some new journey is beckoning within you.
    2. And hence the wall is nothing more than your life telling you to reconsider and take a turn.
    3. Something will happen, no matter which path you take. Emergence lies at the very heart of life, i.e., things will grow from where they are. And when you choose to follow the new direction life is taking you towards, what will emerge will be more organic to you. More suited to who you are becoming now and where your purpose and peace lie.

    If Success Means 70-Hour Weeks, Is It Even Success?

    If you live in Bangalore, you see it every day. The same tired faces, trapped in traffic—morning and night. The dull quiet of the office cafeteria at 9 PM, where dinner feels like an extension of work, not a break from it. Weeks of trying to meet a friend—only for work to cancel it at the last minute.
    The exhaustion isn’t just physical; it’s something deeper, like the air itself is heavier with the weight of long hours and unfinished to-dos.
    So when Narayana Murthy says that we Indians should work 70-hour weeks to build the nation, it doesn’t quite land as inspiration. It feels unfair.
    We are already burning out our bodies, our years, our lives. What exactly are we getting in return for this endless overtime? What, really, are we trying to prove?

    It’s easy to romanticise long hours when you’re a honcho or a founder. You can afford to equate relentless work with national progress or personal virtue. But what does it mean to the people on the ground? Forget nation-building—research shows that it doesn’t even lead to better results for companies. Just more burnout.
    A recent Leaders.com article confirmed what many of us already feel—this isn’t just opinion, the research backs it:

    • Productivity sharply declines beyond 55 hours a week. After that, you’re not working better or smarter—you’re just working more.
    • Chronic overwork increases stress, weakens decision-making, and even shortens life expectancy.
    • The real winners in hustle culture are not the workers putting in extra hours, but the companies benefiting from free labour.

    So if we already intuitively know this, why do we still believe in the hustle?

    The Indian middle class is particularly vulnerable to thinking that we have to always work more because we are only a generation or two away from scarcity. We saw our parents put in long hours, not because they wanted to, but because they had no choice. Somewhere along the way, this necessity hardened into a virtue.

    But here’s the truth:

    A 70-hour workweek is not a sign of discipline. It is a sign of inefficiency, poor systems, and a broken work culture.

    Because If working hours were the measure of productivity and success, are the people getting laid off working any less than others?

    I don’t doubt that Murthy means well. But we should be careful about who gets to write the narrative of success. Because when people in power say ‘work harder,’ they are not the ones paying the price.
    Someone in a previous article commented with a quote from Thoreau:

    “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

    And what is the real price of those extra 15-20 hours squeezed out of us every week?

    • The friendships we no longer have time for.
    • The small, golden moments with parents and children growing up—that won’t come again.
    • The version of ourselves that once had energy for things beyond work—evaporating, like unopened perfume, fading before it’s ever used.
      And this is not even counting the life-sapping commute.

    Success isn’t just about how much you work. It’s about whether your work is actually building the life you want.
    Hustle culture makes people forget they have a choice. But owning your story means stepping off the treadmill long enough to ask: Is this the life I meant to live?
    Because if success comes at the cost of everything else—is it even success?

    Raise your antenna higher to claim the future

    The world is always changing. Just a decade ago, none of us could have imagined the huge democratisation of success where almost anyone from anywhere can become a millionaire or a celebrity if they were doing the right thing at the right place and the right time.

    The trick of course is to know those three things. That right time, place and activity. What careers will be hot in a few years? What new technology will again overhaul how we connect, live and work? And most importantly, what should we be doing right now so that we have the right skills and experience to catch that next big bus when it comes?

    Consider first how you got to where you are right now. You may be that rare one who always knew what they should be doing in life, but more typically, your career was decided by the marks you got in boards and what your friends and your father’s friends told you you should be doing.
    And so it went on with college and career. You kept looking only one step ahead, where the others before you had gone, and followed them.

    But the world kept changing around you. Not once, but twice and even three times by the time you entered mid-career. Technologies and platforms you had never dreamt possible when you were starting off. The old hierarchies broken, new modes of working and living. The most coveted careers of yesterday now stagnant and laying off by the tens of thousands.
    And yet, when I was working in the NCR area more than a decade ago and considering a radical career break, the phrase I heard most often was ‘Aaj ke zamaane mein’. ‘In today’s world’. This was a world before Uber, Zomato, Zoom, AI, Covid, Netflix, Tiktok, stand-ups, and yet, everyone was certain that they knew exactly where the world was headed.
    This certainty killed their curiosity. They looked at only what was trending and not what was nascent.

    For here is the thing: ideas of the future look impractical, and even stupid, at the beginning. Let me cite two examples.
    Working for the world’s biggest retailer at that time, I sat at a meeting where the idea of having groceries delivered to homes was deemed too costly and vetoed without even a minute of discussion. Then, a colleague got an offer from a new e-commerce startup, to head their merchandising, but he rejected it, laughing how his particular category could never be sold online. If my company had ran even a pilot of that idea then, they wouldn’t have had to buy in a few years a newfangled e-commerce platform for many billions of dollars: they would have built the business by themselves. And that colleague would be now an angel investor with the money he would have made when that startup went for its IPO.
    The problem was not that they rejected the idea, one is allowed to be wrong about the future, but that they did so without much thought. They knew their today, and just extrapolated it to the future.
    But the future is no longer an extrapolation: it is one disruption after another. Which is why VCs prefer young entrepreneurs when betting on the future: because they do not know enough of today to know what is not possible tomorrow.

    Unfortunately, despite the radical disruptions we have seen in the past decade, I find that most people still don’t want to learn. They would rather be certain than curious. Because curiosity means leaving an opening in our view of the world, a seed of doubt, rather than the closure we seek.

    Closure is always a false position. It is a trick of gestalt, the human tendency to build a complete picture from partial information. Our worldview is limited by how much we can see around us. The people we interact with, the news we get. Think again of your schooldays. When your only source of information was your peers, who were as clueless as you. Think how that world around you has expanded since. The many cultures you have travelled through within and without the country, the people you meet daily who come from vastly different backgrounds and skillsets (sales, marketing, HR, finance, tech, security, etc.), the many debates and discussions available online on the state of the world in technological, social, ecological and cultural fronts.
    And yet most of us would still rather sit with people like ourselves, with mostly the same backgrounds and industries, or follow people whose opinions exactly matches what we want to see the world us. We do not invite difference in our thinking, only reinforcement.
    And then the world changes once over again, not caring about our certainties, and we are again left reacting to it rather than preempting it.

    So raise your antenna higher. Receive more from the world beyond your comfort zone. As I said, you have access now to a far greater pool of ideas than you ever had, and you are wasting that opportunity if you are sitting in an echo-chamber.
    Look beyond how things are – and reflect instead why they are that way. Because disruptions arrive when some factor underpinning the current reality is challenged.
    Read. Not time management books but what bona fide scholars are writing from their research into the sociopolitical shifts of our time and our psychological makeup. You can google ‘Top 10 books’ on virtually any topic and even if you read 3 of them by the end of a year, you would know vastly more about the world.
    Question your water. Those fundamental assumptions that you don’t even realise that they are only assumptions. This post here conducts a test to ascertain that.
    Most importantly, know yourself. Most of us come from backgrounds and schooling where we never really got to consider who we are. But today we have the resources where we can. Unfortunately, we are now caught in a late-capitalist machinery which conspires to keep us perpetually busy either producing for it or passively consuming.
    You are not your job, not your XUV, not your flat. You are your values, your peace and how you touch others’ lives. You are your core inner purpose, unique to you in this world, and that alone can tell you where you can really fit into the present and the future and make a real impact.
    So, slow down. Silence that constant noise around you, find that time to reflect upon these questions sincerely, and believe me eventually you will start discovering them.
    Carl Jung said ‘The world will ask who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you’. And this is how most of us live, with the world telling us who we are and what it is.
    But the world lies to us. It does not tell us that what we see of it is only a fraction of the smallest fraction, and that cataclysmic changes have begun somewhere that will upset everything we know.
    And the world cannot tell us who we essentially are. This is something that we have to tell the world. That we are more than just people who follow the herd. We are ourselves.
    If we know what that is strongly enough, the world will make room for us. Even bend to our will.

    Raise your antenna higher.

    What If You Never ‘Find’ Your Purpose?

    When my generation was growing up, the pressure on us was simple: get a job. Stability first, everything else later.

    But working with younger people as an educator, sometimes for several months at a stretch, I’ve noticed something else—a different kind of anxiety. It’s no longer just about getting a job; it’s about finding a purpose.

    The right purpose.

    Something waiting for them out there, their true calling, that they had to—had to—arrive at.

    It’s the same across generations now, I think. Purpose has become a mantra, defining identity in the same way a bucket list does.

    And when we don’t have an answer, we feel lost. We assume something is wrong, that we’re behind, that we haven’t searched hard enough. We chase passion, hoping it will turn into purpose. We read stories about people who found their one true thing and followed it all the way to success.

    But real life doesn’t work that way.

    For most of us, purpose isn’t some aakashvani breaking out from the sky, announcing our life’s direction. Nor is it some hidden treasure buried deep inside us, something we must dig for, uncover, and then dedicate our lives to.

    The fact is that most of us don’t have a singular, defining purpose that arrives fully formed.

    And the ones who do?

    They usually stumble into it—through years of trial and error, through accidental encounters, through commitment to something long before they were sure it was the thing.

    Because –

    Purpose doesn’t arrive as certainty—it grows through engagement.

    I’ve seen theatre makers who began with nothing more than a desire to stage one play — only for the work to shape them, not the other way around.

    People who built small setups in non-sexy spaces. Who started with just one client, one problem to solve, and only later realised that something deeper had begun to evolve.

    At the start, there was no grand mission—just one step forward.

    That’s how purpose happens. It’s not something you find; it’s something you build.

    This has been true in my own life. I didn’t start writing with a grand vision of purpose. I wrote because I had to.

    Same with teaching. In the beginning, it was just a gig. A way to make some money and also practice my burgeoning theatre skills. But the more I did it, the more I realised—this matters to me.

    And because I had removed all fallback options, I had to put in my all into these choices I was making, no matter how vague they felt then. The purpose began to evolve only later.

    But many people never get there, simply because they are afraid to commit to anything too hard. They are always asking of themselves –

    • What if I invest in this career, this skill, this direction—only to realise later it wasn’t my true purpose?
    • What if I choose wrong?

    And because they never find the answer upfront, they never do commit fully. And so purpose eludes them.

    Because you cannot think your way into purpose.

    You have to live your way into it.

    So instead of asking ‘What is my purpose?’, try asking:

    – What am I willing to show up for, even without clarity?

    – What feels meaningful enough to invest in, even if I don’t have all the answers yet?

    – What am I curious about right now?

    That’s all. No big pressure. No perfect answer.

    Keep it simple. Take one step at a time.

    Because purpose isn’t a destination: it’s a way of living. Purposefully — in whatever you do.

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