The Unabridged Version of a Rational Emotional Mind

I went on my first-ever work trip this month. Keeping the joys of newfound independence aside, I discovered something! So every day for the complimentary breakfast at the hotel I stayed in, sambar was served. Mind you they put extra ghee in their sambar and somehow, I love it!  But that's not the point of this blog today. On day 2 of eating the same sambar on the menu, I realized it was spicier. Day 3...it was tangier. And that's when it hit me...Our life is like sambar!  Each of us has a specific variation of vegetables, spices, water, and lentils in our sambar, i.e. life that we get to enjoy each day. Let's say, the water is the environment we are born in...our culture, family values, etc. The lentils are our specific variation of genes, the 'nature' part of our upbringing. The vegetables are our unique experiences, the schools and colleges we went to, the friends we made, and the jobs we do. Now here comes the most interesting part, everything I mentioned thus fa...

Two months from now, I will be one step closer to my quintessential quarter life crisis. Although life at present seems to be at a good place, I can not help but wonder where my life is going...neither can the people around me! As someone about to cross their early 20s, adulthood and adult-like situations seem to be the norm. I can no longer claim to be unaware or unprepared for life's inevitable challenges. The biggest challenge of them all is change. Not a uniformly paced, one size fits all type of change, but change that feels like seasons, only that every one is going through a different one. I see people my age getting married, moving miles away from family, buying their own homes, having children. And here I am, barely making it through each day of my new job. And no no, this is not a cry for help. This is an acknowledgment of reality that everyone's clock runs different. I am yet to find what my career needs to look like. Some of us are getting ready to get married. Some...

Anyone who has been following this blog consistently knows that I haven’t been quite consistent with putting up new content. I can give you a thousand reasons why, but rather today I want to share a thought. You see, lately, I started jotting down headlines for potential blog posts whenever the next big idea would strike me. I started doing this in the hope that whenever I find the time to sit down and write, I can pick a topic from the long list that past Shar made and voila, a brand-new blog post! But then came the problem. When I finally got the time to sit down and get a post done, I couldn’t remember in what context I had written those titles down. Now I have a list of potentially great ideas with no context for me to give any shape or form. Our life sometimes I think is just like this. Every time we get the next big idea, we stall it for a later point in time, stating lack of time and responsibilities as the reason why we can’t pursue them in the present. I would like to beli...

Lately, I have been trying to understand what my strengths are as a person. In this generation, self-awareness, especially about one’s strengths and weaknesses, is the biggest asset one can have to excel in the professional world. Every recruiter we go for interviews is trying to answer that question for themselves by what we say, to see if we fit the larger goal the company has. I can’t say I have a lot of experience giving interviews, but I know one thing, the most important strength that defines us as a person is not our overt skills, but what’s inside, particularly, our values. That’s what people resonate with the most, including companies wanting to hire us. Our value system grows over time, every interaction we have as we keep growing defines that part of us. We learn how to love and live based on our core values. And that’s what I want to talk about today. In my undergraduate days, we had a subject called educational psychology. The idea was basically to break down the pre...

I just graduated with a Masters’ degree a month ago, and the road from being a student to straight-up unemployed is a nightmare. Being a student means that you don’t have to worry about planning the layout of your day or knowing what you are supposed to do. There is an army of people working to make sure you are fully occupied and more, every single day. But with graduation, comes an unwanted aspect of freedom (at least for me), the freedom of being able to do, whatever you want with your time. And like any well-meaning young adult, I decided to devote my time trying to find a meaningful way to spend the rest of my days, doing a well-paying job. Let’s forget the well-paying part for a minute. The journey of trying to find a job opening, to begin with, that in itself is probably the most complicated thing I have ever done in my life. Add to that the pressure of not knowing what you are actually good at, the employable skills as some would call it. I always thought of myself as a goo...

I recently changed my phone’s home screen wallpaper. It now reads “Always find time for things that make you happy to be alive”. Maybe that’s why I am writing all over again after 21 weeks of absolute silence. Lately, I have been getting a lot of signs to take life a little easy and let it take its natural course. For twenty-one years of my existence on this planet, I was a planner. I had meticulously charted out every step of the way with almost an eerie sense of confidence that I WILL make it come true. But as life would have it, here I am now, far far away from where I thought my life would be. Does that mean I abhor the life I have right now? Absolutely not! Rather I am so grateful for where I am right now that I have begun to wonder how predictable and monotonous my life would have been if it went exactly as I planned it. All things come together in time…I have always loved this chapter in the Holy Bible that reads, “For everything, there is a season, a time to celebrate and...

Imagine our lives as a massive game. Not a game of chess with calculated moves we make against fate. But like a game of badminton where you win some, you lose some. We were born – Score We graduated well in school – Score We did not get the college we wanted – Counter Score We graduated somehow – Score We lost people we loved – Counter Score And it goes... Now when we sit and analyse our lives, we may or may not choose to assess it as an overall success or failure, after all, we either win or lose right? That’s my contention today. Sure, life can be a huge win or a huge loss in the grand scheme of things. But in this same fleeting life, if we really are keeping scores against fate and circumstance, wouldn’t it be nicer if we don’t view ourselves as one big disappointment or success; for there is redemption even for the most hopeless right? And that’s exactly what I am hoping for all of us in this New Year. It’s been half a month to yet another trip around the sun. So ...