My insights

To get smokey flavor in your tikka, coal’s smoke particulates need to combine with the fat in the marination. This and many other learnings I applied to my new hobby of cooking at time of great lock down.   Cooking videos were my daily dose of dopamine, making sambhar paste was my default response to a bad stakeholder meeting, cooking meat on weekend was my revival after a never-ending stressful week, a big chef knife was birthday present to myself after a forgetful encounter with “frenemy” at work. Now at a cyclical peaceful time of the year, I prepared my signature chicken karahi for few guests, it tasted same but cutting onions wasn’t akin to revenge, spices didn’t smell like victory the slow burn cooking didn’t transport me to my happy place.   It didn’t give me a high nor the feeling that I should do it more often, or a desire that I should leave my work and purse this full time. Are our hobbies and creative pursuits just escape mechanism?   And maybe reason why we don’

Many companies have lost number of “resources” in one Qtr what they used to lose in a year. Yours truly is also part of this phenomena what few advanced thinkers have described as great resignation and evolved CEO’s have called as great reshuffle Certain things are so personal that they become universal, and one personal/Universal phenomena was the suffering most of us went through for last one and half year Part of suffering could be imagined and exaggerated while part of it could have been self-inflicted, but suffering was universal, whether it was losing a loved one or dealing with cranky children or watching waist sizes create new records. Unfortunately, none of this could be wished away by coping mechanisms that we all had perfected before new normal hit us. Coping mechanisms were essentially the stories we believed in, like suffer at work to get to corner office and wield power, live in small houses for the charm of big cities, don’t buy a pet as who will take care of it when