Work life balance..huh

Okay, a post after 12 months. from a guy who thought writing is therapeutic. wow. where did i lose the track.


so without much ado, i'll wrap my thoughts around virtues of being happy. plain, simple happy. not making it a function of possessions, achievements and state of relative being. only happy. and that, doesn’t come easy. very recently, i was interacting with a French customer of Irish origin. his son was working with an NGO in India and had decided to donate his years of earnings to the school setup by NGO. Wearing my sales hat, i tried to fill him with details of Premji's donations to charity and all. Somewhere during the course of conversation, Mr Client made a very interesting remark - ' i am intrigued at how happy people are out here in this part of the world, in spite of not having much money or worldly luxuries'. Obviously, it was an observation borne out of what he would have read, heard from his son or people given to peans in praise of Indian penance culture. it was my turn to reflect. i thought, it was a virtue we lost in mindless race of 24x7 availability and professional demands. fat pay cheque, 2 BHK flat, mid sized sedan and secured pension, promises of future are robbing us of the pleasures of present. Its a sad phenomenon when you see guys my age reeling with stress related ailments. we have made great strides in advancement of medical science and longevity is going northwards. When i look at my father, gleefully gorging on all sweets and mutton curries followed by deep slumber, i long to have the same bliss for myself. there i am, with tingling neck pain, less salt, less sweet and guess what, its 1.30 AM and i am sleepless in Bangalore. not to say, i am on a reckless path, smoking was waved goodbye long back, drinking too got relegated to friends gathering and running is on my daily to do list ( my to do list is a fitting example of execution less strategy).


Few changes i have made to my professional conduct and might be useful for folks caught in whirlwind of demanding work space.

1. urge to respond to mail immediately should be curbed. one, you get more time to process the information. Secondly, many times our response loses objectivity when done at the spur. Rather, let the mail sit in your inbox. read it, let the response cross your mind and settle. Ignore it, do something else, come back to it and the right words jump from your keyboard. a repartee is a virtue in verbal conversation, in business emails its not.

2. Arguments are good. some where i read, good ideas invariably face resistance. Galileo, Socrates, Assange, etc etc. not to take away our right to be downright stupid and at the same time defending your ideas with conviction, that's something.

3. rest later..