Suresh Chandrasekaran's Blog, page 39

Homo Contradictus

God must have been in a particularly capricious mood when he created us humans. Or, perhaps, like all of us, he left everything to the last moment and, when he felt the deadline pressure of those 7 days, bunged in the brain without properly debugging it. As usual in such cases, it is we who have to live with the consequences. Take as simple a matter as food, for example. I mean, do you ever

Opinions

I really need someone to explain this opinions thing. I mean, yeah, it is not like I never had any, I have some but the problem seems to be that I am one of those mundane guys who can only have opinions about things that directly impinge on me. You know, like this summer is too hot this year, onions have become too expensive/never been cheaper...things like that. Not really the sort of thing

Change

I hate change! Oh! I know, you guys will all come around preaching sententiously that change is the only constant and I should not be such a stick-in-the-mud and all the huge collection of cliches that pass for wisdom in the world. But...I HATE CHANGE. Maybe, just maybe, if the darned thing happened in small doses, I could have swallowed it with a grimace and moved on. But this goddamn deluge

Writer's block

I kept hearing of this thing called 'Writer's block', which keeps writers from writing, and wondered exactly what it could be. Possibly laziness, possibly boredom and given a nice fancy name so they could feel important about it, I supposed. I mean, come on, ever heard of an 'Accountant's Block'? Where the figures suddenly danced in front of your eyes and you started wondering about exactly

Another Humorist

There is this problem with being a humorist. You keep guessing the punchline, expecting kinky ways of describing things and so on, to the extent that when someone says that there is another guy who writes humor, you are almost like, 'Oh! Yeah! Let me see." Not because of any competitive envy but because when you can guess the punchlines, the read is less funny...and, so, it takes a lot more

Aadhaared

I thought technology would make life easy for me. "Aha! That's what YOU think", they say, and get to work to ensure that life becomes even more complicated. Take this recent rush of Aadhaar seeding for all investments. (Ah! No! No! 'Bhakts' need not foam at the mouth nor 'sickulars' drool, this has nothing to do with Modi.) I sort of thought that, what with technology and all, linking PAN

A trek to Kudremukh

 When you board a train for a trek and, within minutes find someone else claiming, "25 is MY berth" only to later find that his berth is 26, it can be smiled away. Half an hour later if another person comes and says indignantly, "25 is MY berth" and later discovers that he has 27, you may laugh it off as a funny coincidence. YOU may, I cannot. For, after all, when you have the reputation of a

Parsimony

I have never understood why we are so unjust to some words. I mean, look, we have words meaning practically the same thing and one word we sort of consider embrace like a long-lost friend and the other we twitch our skirts away and walk around as though it is a turd lying on your primrose path. Take this word 'parsimony' for example. You have that other word 'frugal' which means about the

Dogged by the discerning

Into everyone's life some rain must fall. The problem, though, is that when it comes to my life it falls continuously and with all the fury of a Bombay monsoon. This particular occasion, though, I intend shedding copious tears about how little appreciated I am. You know, everybody seems to have a crowd of people who are not too discerning and, if discerning, not too nitpicking about their

Low hanging fruit

There are two ways to be considered learned. One is to know things that most people do not know. The other is to talk of things in a manner that people do not know or readily recognize.You would be pardoned for thinking that all of management consists of finding out pithy terms for things that everyone knows already so that you can speak of them in a 'learned' manner. Take this 'low hanging