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Meaning of life
If you have been looking for life's meaning, you probably haven’t found it. And it is not because you are not looking hard enough but because by itself, life has no meaning. If you take a purely materialistic/scientific view, life is just a series...
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Finding joy in pain
During my Civil Services training in Mussoorie, an especially memorable trek was to a place called Rabbit Farm, though we neither saw any rabbits...
The high cost of being busy
I was once attending a drug addiction conference in Melbourne, where the speaker on the stage had lost his beloved son to a drug overdose. He...
Living for today
When I entered the corporate world in the US after my stint in the Indian Civil Services, I heard this weird notion called ‘paying your dues.’...
Flow state
The fish packet vanished from right in front of my eyes -- how the hell did that happen, I wondered! This happened a few months ago: Sitting in my...
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Bouncing back from failures
In week-2 of the 1st semester at IIT Kanpur, I got my first big life shock - the physics quiz. This quiz was pretty nasty: An ant was supposedly crawling on a rotating disc and we were expected to figure out its motion in polar coordinates, or...
Finding Happiness
20 years after we first met, I ran into Mr. Michael Siromani, a retired IAS officer, under curious circumstances -- he was collecting roadside weeds in a plastic pouch. After the initial greetings, seeing a quizzical look on my face, he explained,...
How to win in an unfair life
It was an unequal race -- not fair. During my 6th grade, our sports teacher announced an impromptu bike race to celebrate the end of the annual sports day. The near-certain winner was the son of the Commanding Officer of the local air force...
Prioritizing & delegating in high-stress situations
Years ago, when I was heading Trivandrum City Police, a horse in our mounted police unit got seriously ill and was in severe pain. Since it was cruel to let the horse suffer, the veterinary doctor had to sadly seek my approval to euthanize the...