Life, Laughter and Everything Else

I despised people who are always staring at their smartphones or smart devices. It was them I saw when I boarded the train to work every morning and them I saw again when I exited the train, those lifeless faces lost in the virtual world they had chosen to replace the present with. It is as if what there was in front of them was not enough, that they were not ready to adjust to the world around them, but instead the world they had to adjust to their tastes. I despised them because they to me resembled the roboticized populations of the future, who moved from day to day without opening their eyes to the world around them, the people around them. As conversations dried up, relationships became more hi-bye and friends too busy, the smartphone, to me, was Lucifer, the one who pulled the strings in a world that seemed to more and more lose touch with its humanity. As such I turned to books. While everyone had their head bent over a LED screen, I chose to turn to the single item that onc

13 hours, 5 days in a row.The idea used to be an anathema to me and yet here I was, slogging away from 730 to 830, until when the last of the never ending urgent reports were done, I grabbed my bag and made for the exit. The sticky note on my table at home displayed in cursive, hastily written what was to be done if I had reached home at 8. 8:00 - 8:30 Exercise 830 - 9:00 Shower, eat 9:00 - 9:30 Excel/VBA 9:30 - 10:00 Write 10:00 - 10:30 whatever And then sleep. Now I reached home at 9:15 with just about enough time to have dinner, make some polite conversation with my parents and head to bed before waking up the next day and repeating the whole routine again. There was either not enough time, energy or the will to exercise, learn, reflect or even just water the garden. Not that this left me depressed. Work was engaging that the hours flew by, and after a period of prolonged unemployment, I was just thankful I had it. Though, somewhere in the deepest recesses of my hea

The elevator door opened and a Chinese middle aged man walked in. Sturdily built, he was wearing swimming trunks and a white t-shirt with a towel hanging on his left shoulders. He appeared a bit surprised to see me as I tried to recall under what circumstances I had met him before. "People these days can be so inconsiderate", he remarked in a patriarchal, dominating tone. I turned my body towards him as the elevator carried on with its descent and noted the bottle of ice lemon tea with some drink still left in it lying quietly in the corner. "Hmm yea", was all I could respond, half in awe and half in fear, at this socially conscious stranger.  "Most likely it was one of the kids.", he carried on reading my thoughts. "The other day they found a condom in the emergency exit". The familiar elevator ding. We had reached our destination. "Let the cleaners clean it up tomorrow", he finished as he bade goodbye and walked o

I glance up from my book every time a new figure takes his place and stands within an arms reach of me. I look at the face. Sometimes there is eye contact, though I am more interested in the hair, the skin and the posture, the three pieces of information enough to make me decide on the next course of action. Most of the time, I get to keep the seat, but sometimes I have to let it go. In the past it used to be one seat at each corner of the row of seats that was reserved for them and by them, I mean the elderly, the pregnant, the one with toddlers and the handicapped. Though now they had increased it to two, perhaps in the face of an ageing population and the fact that some people had to be explicitly told that the seat was reserved for the unfortunates before they could be persuaded to give it up. The awareness around giving up seats had greatly increased, thanks to the public shaming on websites such as STOMP and it worked to the extent that the healthy and the youthful became re

I had to go back to work on a Sunday. For 4 hours, to solve some technicality issue that a colleagues was neither qualified nor had a pay grade high enough to solve. In normal circumstances, this would have been painful, the time meant for leisure being spent at work. But the pain was eased. Because they paid me 25 dollars an hour. "100 dollars in the bank", I boasted. Easy money. They concurred, for they did not enjoy the luxury of overtime."Like that, not bad lar", they affirmed my statement, my opinion. Of course, I was paid for what they did for free. My time was not wasted. Because they paid me 25 dollars an hour. "I do OT daily. Go to work an hour early and there is enough work for me to stay an hour more later", I claim proudly. "Your treat today man!", they respond, hoping, only to see their hopes dashed by my own stinginess. The more you have, the less you become willing to share it. The greed to accumulate, not that it made me s

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. - Mark Twain I am a sucker for reminiscing and an even greater sucker for recreating the same times and moments that were special. Perhaps there have never been and there will never be a time in our lives than the ones we spend in our last years of formal education. In fact I pity the ones who led their lives in university as an extension of the many years of rat race they were about to embark(though at the same time, I do acknowledge that there are circumstances and histories that put people on the paths they are on.)  As such when graduation came and fellow colleagues trotted around in their graduation robes and forked out thousands on graduation photo shoots, I wondered if they knew what they were about to leave behind and more importantly if they had any clue what they were about to start on, One just have to compare the number of idealists and optimists among adults and amo

What do you do?  So how does that work?  So, I read an article about its use to treat returning soldiers and why it was not working. Is that really the case? So, what do you think about ...? So, why would it not....? So who is....? The questions would go on and on, until perhaps he realised his subject could tell him no more, at which point he would start his usual playful socialisation. All the while I would just sit there and admire 1) his courage to be inquisitive in front a stranger 2) the amount of information he gathered in that short span of time 3) his thirst to learn and 4) his endless curiosity. He would repeat it with the next stranger we came across and he deemed to have something he could learn from. Any recognised expertise in anything under the sun, from sports to economy to business to farming never went untapped. For me, it was a refreshing change from the usual questions that began with 'what do you do' and ended with a slightly more detailed ela