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Leadership Requires Discomfort
Every leadership training I have been through, be it for the Indian Police Service or at McKinsey, was missing a critical element -- training people how to dissent. Without the ability to dissent, you only have yes-men (or yes-women), not leaders....
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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...
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.’...
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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,...
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...