I miss the road

It is almost eighty days since I last went to my workplace. As I sit before my laptop on my dining table, logged on to Google Meet, I start feeling nostalgic.

Last 5 years, I had been commuting every weekday from Delhi to Gurgaon for work. This commute easily consumed 3-5 hours of my day. I would crib about this to all and sundry.

Initially, I tried using the Metro for my commute. But, standing in a queue at the station before boarding and then in the crowded train and finally haggling with auto-rickshaw-wallahs every day would suck the juice out of me. So, I switched to my car despite the pollution concerns in Delhi. Some days it would take me 2 hours one side, and my calf muscles would hurt after having driven in first gear for most of the journey.

Almost an year ago, I moved to Shuttl. I could book a seat on an AC bus for my ride. My travel time did not reduce but everyday exertion did. The best thing about using Shuttl was that it allowed me to slip into my own private zone.

I would reach my pickup point everyday at a fixed time. The bus driver Bhagwan, had started recognizing me. He would stop the bus and open the automatic bus doors and welcome me aboard with a smile. I would press the chirp button on my app and walk towards my more or less fixed window seat.

Once seated, I would put on my headset and listen to podcast related to daily news, business or spirituality. In the evenings, on my way back, I would prefer listening to audio books. I managed to listen to more than 10 audio books in last one year. One was The Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection, which was almost 70 hours long and took me more than 2 months to complete.

On many days, I would doze off listening to these stories. At the start of my journey when I would be awake, a murder would occur and all suspects would be introduced one by one. And then I would be sleeping during the entire investigation by Holmes and Watson. I would wake up 10 minutes before my drop point and manage to listen the final revelation – the name of the murderer. That was enough for me, mystery solved, time to move to another story.

I would see regular faces on the bus everyday. Some would acknowledge my presence with a smile. It was a nice small community of fellow travelers. I got to know some through the journeys and became good friends. Sometimes, I would overhear people talking loudly on their phone and get a peak into their lives outside the bus. I was even witness to love blossoming between two fellow commuters. Like many such stories, it reached a crescendo and then withered away.

But today, I am missing my bus seat and the hustle-bustle of the traffic. The one and a half hour I had to myself in the morning helped me recharge for the full day’s work. And the two hours in the evening, helped me forget about the day, slipping into my dreams. What I miss most is the human connection, I felt with fellow travelers and strangers on the road.

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That wonderful pen

I have always been very fond of pens. But, my taste and sensibilities have changed over the years. I have been in love with ball point pens, gel pens, roller ball pens, pilot pens and use & throw pens at various stages of my life. When any of my relatives asked my choice for a gift, I would invariably ask for a pen.

When I prepared for my engineering entrance exam, I would use cheap use & throw pens and would practice solving problems on the blank side of used papers. My father would bring loads of these waste papers from office. I would judge my preparation for the exam by looking at the number of used pens and the stacks of paper I had filled.

Using fountain pen was mandatory in our school. At that time, I would crave for ball point pens as they would help me write faster in exams. Fountain pens leaked a lot creating blue spots on my fingers and sometimes on my clothes.

But, ever since I became a salaried professional, I have started writing with fountain pens. I yearn for that old world charm of writing mindfully on a piece of paper in this age of touchscreen.

About 25 years ago, my father had taken me to the best stationery shop of the small town that we lived in. My heart had gone out to a fountain pen priced at Rupees 120. But, my father bought me a much cheaper pen as the pen was not affordable and I might have ruined it quickly.

The image of that pen is still imprinted on my mind. I have tried to look for it but have been unable to find it.

Today, I bought a nice German pen priced at Rupees 2,700 for myself. As I write this piece in my notebook with the ultra smooth German pen, my heart pines for that wonderful pen from my childhood.

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The heavy burden of social suffering

This is one of the worst man-made crisis in recent history.

There is something wrong with this world, and gravely, astonishingly wrong with our moral indifference to this daily denial of humanity to others. How is it that we, corporeal beings, equally vulnerable to pain and anguish, allow others to experience states that we will not accept for a minute? How can we accept a process of self-formation that simply fails to make us moral? How can a nation be built without sahahridyata (shared feelings, empathy)?How can a social structure exist that renders superfluous those very people who put their life and blood in maintaining it? Are we engaged in an archaic ritual of violence which we know to be incomplete without the sacrifice of the most precious, the most indispensable amongst us?
The complete article

Rajeev Bhargava — The Hindu

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Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything

“Viktor Frankl’s Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning.”

Let us imagine a man who has been sentenced to death and, a few hours before his execution, has been told he is free to decide on the menu for his last meal. The guard comes into his cell and asks him what he wants to eat, offers him all kinds of delicacies; but the man rejects all his suggestions. He thinks to himself that it is quite irrelevant whether he stuffs good food into the stomach of his organism or not, as in a few hours it will be a corpse. And even the feelings of pleasure that could still be felt in the organism’s cerebral ganglia seem pointless in view of the fact that in two hours they will be destroyed forever. But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right, then our whole lives would also be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else — preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which now seems obvious to us.
The complete article

Maria Popova — brainpickings

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Invisible

As I step out of my flat, I see no one roaming on the society street. The cars are parked and most flats have their lights on. People like me burrowed up, have become invisible.

On barren highways, there is a procession of people waking. It is not a celebration, but tired families trying to reach their village on foot. I never could fathom that such large number of immigrants toil hard in the underbelly of large cities enabling them to operate every day.

The city under lock-down for months has started spewing out these invisible people. Their suffering has etched out a scar on the nation’s psyche. And scars serve as sad reminders.

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America’s Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further

This point cannot be overstated: The pandemic patchwork exists because the U.S. is a patchwork to its core. New outbreaks will continue to flare and fester unless the country makes a serious effort to protect its most vulnerable citizens, recognizing that their risk is the result of societal failures, not personal ones. “People say you can’t fix the U.S. health system overnight, but if we’re not fixing these underlying problems, we won’t get out of this,” says Sheila Davis of Partners in Health. “We’ll just keep getting pop-ups.”

The complete article

Ed Yong — The Atlantic

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The president’s job is to manage risk. But Trump is the risk.

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But he has always played with other people’s money and other people’s lives. “The president was probably in a position to make riskier decisions in life because he was fabulously rich from birth,” says Murphy. “But it’s also true he has had a reputation for risk not backed up by reality. His name is on properties he doesn’t own. We think of him as taking risk in professional life, but a lot of what he does is lend his name to buildings with risks taken by others. He’s built an image as a risk taker, but it’s not clear how much risk he’s taken.”

The complete article

Ezra Klein — Vox

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He Was a Science Star. Then He Promoted a Questionable Cure for Covid-19.

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The results of his initial trial have yet to be replicated. “I think what he secretly hopes is that no one will ever be able to show anything,” Molina told me. “That all the trials conducted on hydroxychloroquine will not be able to even reach a conclusion of no efficacy.” In recent weeks, Raoult has in fact tempered his claims about the virtues of his treatment regimen. The published, peer-reviewed version of the final study noted that another two patients had died, bringing the total to 10. Where the earlier version called the drugs “safe and efficient,” they were now described merely as “safe.”

He has shown flickers of what appears to be doubt. In one interview, Raoult quoted Camus, from the fatalistic coda of “The Stranger,” hoping that “on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators, and that they should greet me with howls of hatred.”

The complete article

Scott Sayare — The New York Times Magazine

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The Wallowing Monkey

I was reading a Ruskin Bond story which was about his father. Suddenly, I recalled somewhere reading that he has a brother. But, there is rarely any mention of his brother in his stories. So, I got curious about his brother.

I quickly checked on Google. Google showed that he has a brother called William who is settled in Canada, but there was no other information available about him. Then, I searched for William Bond Canada. It showed a LinkedIn search result. So, I went to William Bond’s LinkedIn page but the profile did not look like that of Ruskin Bond’s brother. For one, the person was much younger.

Then, I saw button notifications on my LinkedIn page. After quickly browsing through my notifications, I thought of giving a cursory glance to the home page. On my homepage was an article by a fairly popular young VC. Popularity judged by number of likes, shares and comments off course.

I browsed through the VC’s article about his learnings from chatting up with a startup founder. These founders are the most learned these days espousing pearls of wisdom as they speak. In the article, the founder had shared that how being a founder is uncomfortable because one has to try new ideas each and every day.

Then, I got curious about the founder. So, I clicked on the VC’s podcast link which was at the bottom of his article. I did not listen to the podcast but read the summary. I learned that the founder was a young lady and her name was Payal Sharma. My curiosity still not satisfied, I searched for Payal Sharma on Google. The search took me to her LinkedIn profile. I found on her profile that prior to founding her startup, she had worked in another small company. Now, this company was founded by my ex-colleague Ankur. I had worked with Ankur around 10 years ago. As the surnames of both my ex-colleague and the female founder was same, I had a hunch that they were related to one another.

I further searched for both of them on Google. In one of the article, I found that they were husband and wife. I further read that they were settled in Mumbai and had a kid. Then, I did some further Googling on my ex-colleague to find out that he had turned serial entrepreneur and manages some 3-4 startups.

I remembered the time when we worked together. I wondered how he had managed to achieve so much professionally.

Finally, my thoughts came down to how I had not been able to achieve anything in life and had wasted all those youthful years.

This was another of the usual series of thoughts that I have been having lately. From Ruskin Bond’s calming stories to another bout of self-pity in 20 minutes.

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The race to save a child from a genetic death sentence.

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Long read.

In the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health, between two and four of every 100,000 children are born with Batten disease. They can get it if both their parents are genetic carriers. There are 14 subtypes of the disease, each affecting a different gene, involving a different deficiency, and decreeing a different life span. Conner was diagnosed with subtype CLN2, distinguished by the absence of TPP1. Symptoms initially appear around the age of two; a speech delay is often the first noticeable sign of disease. After that come seizures, language regression, motor dysfunction, and blindness. Patients die between the ages of eight and twelve.

The complete article

Amitha Kalaichandran — The Atavist Magazine

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