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Knowledge is the ultimate leveler
The value of your college degree is like radioactive material with a half-life of about 3-4 years. So we cannot sit on our laurels and degrees. In 10 years (3 half-lives later), your degree's value would be down to about 10%. Ultimately, which...
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Focus bubble
A few years ago, a friend inadvertently showed me the secret of extreme productivity. Here is the story. This friend was on a short sabbatical and...
FOMO and addiction
To get addicted, you don’t need the ‘white powder’. Here is my story. In my early days as an IPS officer, when I was back home after an intense,...
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...
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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.’ Apparently, the grunt work and suffering at the beginning of your career earn you the ‘right to live...
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 living room, as I was intently working on my blog, the fish delivery guy rang the doorbell. I...
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,...