Reflections

 2021 has been a year unlike any other before. The year started with a lot of hope and optimism with the vaccines around the corner and a hopeful end to the pandemic. As the vaccine administration and coverage increased over time, the hope could only increase. And then came the second wave in April/May. I have never experienced such an horrific time in my entire life. People were desperately crying for help in all directions and ambulance sirens were screaming non-stop for two months.  The second wave was even more numbing because it hit people in our immediate circle. It was a stark reminder that human life is just too fragile. I personally lost a fine and young colleague, full of life and enthusiasm, leaving a 4 year old daughter fatherless. Nothing could be more tragic. Lots of other friends and family members needed hospitalisation. Covid after-effects traumatised even after people returned back home. And finally when things started to look up again, Omicron quickly put us...

Deepavali is upon us. Traditionally, we have celebrated Deepavali with new dresses, fire crackers and lots of sweets and savories. For a while, I have been hearing about Microplastics  and how synthetic apparels keep shedding them around. But given that more than 60% of all apparels in the market is made from synthetic, I decided to just research around this a bit. Microplastics, as the name indicates are plastic fragments less than 5mm in size. A substantial source of primary microplastics that pollute are from clothing. As per Story-of-stuff  (watch the video in this article, clearly educational), a single fleece jacket could possibly shed around 250,000 plastic fibers. Additionally the story-of-stuff article goes on to say that a single load of washing machine releases 1900 to 200,000 fibers. These are small enough that are not caught inside the washing machine and are often discharged to the home waste water system, eventually making it to the rivers and oceans. A...

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...

How to Lie with Statistics  is an amazing book. Educational, thought-provoking, humorous -- this book is all of these and more. That the first edition was printed in about 65 years ago makes it even more awe inspiring. All things that the author explains in the 10 chapters about the different devious tricks people use to mislead with statistics are pretty much relevant and applicable to current day. If you do not have time to read the rest of this post and want one takeaway, it would be to just pick this book right away and read it cover-to-cover.  You will definitely not regret it. The introduction sets the tone for the rest of the book. It starts with an example where two polls, one by Gallup and another by a newspaper come up with such huge difference in their estimates on how many people are familiar with the metric system in US. One said 33% and the other 98%. The author ascribes this anomaly to the massive sampling bias in the newspaper poll. There are similar such ex...

The  power of habit  book was a fairly enjoyable read and good start to the new year. The prologue of the book is fairly captivating, it starts with a story on how a 34 year old woman who was struggling with obesity, debt, alcohol and a host of other issues turned it around, became fairly successful at work and indeed managed to run a marathon. The author quotes a Duke university finding -- "40% of the actions performed each day weren't actual decisions, but habits".  It is by forming the good habits and overwriting the old habits that we turn around our lives. The book has three parts. The first deals with how habits emerge in individual lives, the second in organisations and the third the habits of societies. All the three sections are well laden with anecdotes and stories the make up for a interesting reading. The first section starts with the story of Eugene Pauly, a man who was afflicted with a viral infection that affected a tissue in his brain that was ...