Reflections

We are all familiar with the famous proverb - "Little drops make the mighty ocean". Or its variants.  சிறு துளி பெரு வெள்ளம்.  Mountains are climbed one step at a time and marathons run one K at a time. Of course, the marathon version is a little close to my heart and I have really lived through this. At the 25th Kilometer marker of a marathon, one often does not feel the exhilaration of having run 25K, one feels the dread of having to run another 17K. More often than not, runners just employ the "take one K at a time" attitude and finish the race. I personally keep going back to this every time I encounter a problem that appears fairly formidable to begin with. Recently, I read this nice article where the author gives tips on how one can  read more . The answer is simple -- just keep reading a small number of pages, for example 20, every day. I just employed this technique to finish a 1100 page novel in less than a month. I set a goal of reading 25 pages every day...

Most of us seem to have developed a penchant for answering questions in an convoluted way, rather than just being just straight forward. I thought it would be amusing to recollect a few instances. 1. The other day, we had  Ragi Mudde  in our menu for lunch at work. Colleague -- "How does it taste?" Me -- "This is a healthy/nutritious food". That seemed to have answered the question beyond any doubt. 2. Typical conversations with my daughter. Me -- "Did you have chocolate today?" She -- "Anna (brother) had chocolate today" or "I did not have chocolate yesterday". That response serves a dual purpose -- Answering my question and pretty much absolving her of all sins for eating that chocolate. 3. Conversation between a long distance runner and his friend. Friend -- "How did the 5K marathon go?" Runner -- "Can you please stop calling 5K run a marathon?" Nothing can irritate a runner more than calling a 5K...

Well, as you might have guessed, the title of the post has nothing to do with the city by that name or worse, the mall by that name in Bangalore. It of course refers to the  mythical bird  that gets reborn automatically. I am hoping that my blog posting is reborn like Phoenix, after a pretty long hiatus. For the past several months, I have been sharing my ride to the office with my colleague Deepika, a young, cherubic and vivacious person, if I  may describe her so. Last week, she shared one of her writings with me, a post about her grandfather and what she had learnt from him over several years. It was pretty well written, but also had this interesting side effect - it just reminded me of how I have just paused my writing over the past few years (not that I was writing profusely before, but it had come to a screeching halt now). I went back and read my previous blog posts and it made me feel good. I had always felt good writing and was wondering why I do not write muc...