Whispering Shadow

It is 12.30 PM. I have just woken up after an all night long party yesterday. In the first mail I have received in the day, my dad has sent me this poem by Swami Vivekananda. In complete contradiction to the hangover I have started my day with, the poem is intellectually invigourating. Read on. May peace be within you!! Behold, it come in might, The power that is not power, The light that is in darkness, the shade in dazzling light. It is joy that never spoke, And grief unfelt, profound, Immortal life unlived, Eternal death unmoored. It is not joy nor sorrow, But that which is between, It is not night nor morrow, But that which joins them in. It is sweet rest in music, And pause in sacred art; The silence between speaking; Between two fits of passion - It is calm of heart. It is beauty never seen, And love that stands alone, It is song that live un-sung, And knowledge never known. It is death between two lives, And lull between two storms, The void whence rose creation, And that where ...

One of my best friends is someone who I didn't meet for over a year into our friendship. For the people that we were, it was an oddity that we became such close friends over what was just a series of bytes exchanged over the net (I have one more reason why they call it the net, because you can catch some great friends here). Series of bytes is an understatement though. We literally shared our lives, or so I would like to believe. We knew what was happening with our common and non-common friends, our families, on the work front, inside our head, outside our head, whether emotionally, materialistically, spiritually and otherwise. Our wavelengths matched perfectly. Our attitudes were similar. We were both rational, ultra-liberal, thinkers and believers in reason and the merit of work. It was too much of a coincidence. We would ask each other if we were for real. The friendship seemed too good to be true. As a consequence, we would wonder if it would be the same when we met, whether th...

I just finished my lecture on Human Behaviour in Organizations (HBO) and have my Marketing Planning and Managerial Economics lectures coming up. The beauty of a b-school is that when you are doing the stuff you are supposed to do, i.e. study, you feel sleepy and when you are doing everything else that has no correlation with you becoming a manager, you are awake. It is involuntary. Which is why they have quizzes. Like today, our HBO teacher comes in and says I have a surprise for you. The whole class roars "No Quiz!!" Having a quiz is less surprising than not having one. But then 10 minutes of staying awake through those 10-20 questions is not as painful, is it? It is definitely less painful than a thirty page case study which you have to make a presentation on with one day's notice (my sympathies to my friends in HR). But then we don't start when we have 24 hours in hand, it is too un-manager-ly. We strongly believe that it is important to learn to handle crisis now ...

On my trip to Bangalore, I had gone out on a walk with my maternal grandfather, or Nana, as I lovingly call him. Most of the time he was feeling his way along the road. Feeling because he couldn't see. He developed Glaucoma a few years ago after a stroke and ever since his vision has kept degrading reaching a figure of 25% of normal this year. He was also not able to recognize the sound of approaching vehicles since he couldn't hear their engines rattle. He is deaf in one ear and partially deaf in the other. To illustrate, he would not know a truck is approaching him till it is around 10 feet away from him. Despite his health constraints, he has never missed his 5 KM morning walk in the past 23 years that I have known him. Of course, the walk I was on with him was not a morning walk since my morning happens a good four hours after his. It was just a stroll to the vegetable market. We reached a road crossing. It was a two way road with three lanes in each direction separated by ...