Indelible Musings

I know it's been long since I wrote something in the #ChennaiThroughMyEyes series. My plans of making it a weekly series have definitely gone for a toss. But I am glad that I am back with something to share with all of you once more. In this post, I shall tell you about the bond that I have developed with a few online friends who have become an integral part of my offline world. Though there are many such friends I have made living in Chennai for the past four and a half years, these few recent additions seem like those long lost friends, whom I discovered thanks to Facebook. It is not just the friendship that I feel good about. It is the strength that I gather when I speak to them, mostly online, because of our busy schedules. How we connected We all share a different sort of camaraderie. None of us know each other for more than a few months, but the way we met and interacted seems like an eternity. It was one underline thing that connected all of us- Food. Part of a social m...

Source A friend remarked one day, as I told him about my ordeal at work, "You haven't really witnessed office politics. What you said about your earlier stints, is not politics at all. Office politics is worse than that. I have seen it. It can push you to quit the organization. That's the real office politics." I didn't know how to react to that remark. I barely nodded. A new genre of politics Office politics is the new-age "political news" that you get to hear on a daily basis if you are working. And, if you aren't working, then you'll get to hear it from the never-ending sob stories that your friends would have to share about their office. Work culture, work ethics, relationship management, human resource management etc are the new buzzwords. In the garb of these new buzzwords, what you get is ample amount of dirt thrown at you from various ends- top to bottom, bottom to top, left to right and vice versa. You never run out of ...

Sometimes you need to go back to old school. As a writer, carrying a pen/pencil/notebook/paper in a bag is a must apart from carrying the usual belongings. For me, pencil is a unique object. And, I am going to tell you much more about my association with this object in this post. I remember those early primary class days, when carrying two sets of pencil, an eraser, a sharpner, and scale in the pencil box was the norm. Right before stepping out of home, my father would invariably ask in his low yet firm voice- "have you taken everything?", "Do you have an extra set of pencil?". I would very timidly respond with a yes. I remember getting annoyed writing with a pencil and envy those students who could use/write with pen as early as in the fifth standard. Exams, drawings, homework and classwork- pencil was an important 'object' till the primary classes. As I advanced to the next classes, pencil became an object merely to draw the margins of exam sheets, ma...