Everyday Life

My mother: "Why didn't you come yesterday to collect the garbage?" Aunty: "Chachi (aunty)-I went to see a doctor. The day before, my husband came home drunk and started beating me. "   She also lifts her ghunghat (veil) and shows me her left eye, which was red and was swelling very badly.   "The doctor said that if this blood had been a little more, you could have lost your eye."   Me (with disappointment and anger): "Why didn't you hit him back?"   Aunty: "Yes, I don't let him hit me now. I pushed him away. "   My mother throws the garbage in her container. She picks up her container, puts it on her head, and leaves for the other houses.   My mother washes her hands and becomes busy with her household chores, and I, with a heavy heart for 2 hours, go back to my room and get occupied with my office calls that are way beyond any real-life challenges of most people.   If only these women could be financially ind...

  When I joined my first company, I didn’t even know how to sum two numbers in Excel. It was my manager who didn’t judge me while teaching me those things and never questioned me for making mistakes! It was a start-up, and as it happens in any start-up, many processes were broken, and coordination was lacking between different departments. To make a few processes, I worked with a colleague of mine and created a couple of trackers that worked like CRM software. Just listing down a few formulae that were the most useful in making trackers and dashboards: 1.  IMPORTRANGE :  Used to connect two Google Sheets and import data (used when you don’t want to grant people access to the entire sheet, but only to relevant data). 2.  FILTER :  Used to get a filtered view of data (mostly used for eliminating unnecessary data). 3.  SORT :  For sorting the data in ascending or descending order (mostly used in dashboards/summary tabs). 4.  VLOOKUP :  This func...

The second wave of COVID hit India in April-May of 2021. The notorious nature of the Delta variant made it devastating. People were waiting with their loved ones outside the hospitals. Innumerable people died of suffocation in the open air. I can’t recall even a single day when I didn’t hear anything unpleasant. A few phrases that I heard in that phase: “Papa ko ventilator par shift kar diya h…” “My nani, nana, and everyone from papa’s side family and mother’s side family has COVID. I am super scared. My father goes out to work. “ “Mummy ko kuch nahi hoga naa, wo wapas toh aa jaaengi naa.” “Papa toh chale gaye hame chod kar” “His body gave up at 1:13. “Please, meri maa ko oxygen chaiye.” “Nahi, ab nahi ho rha mujhse” “Both my parents passed away, but I think I’ll need to move on” “He fought for 3 hours without oxygen.” “110 ab heartbeat ho gaya h heartbeat rate” “Darr lag rha h” The fear of losing a loved one dominated almost everything. In those moments, most of the time, I didn’t hav...

Around two years ago, I wanted to read books and make this a habit but failed to do it. Thanks to covid, work from home, and a friend with whom I set a goal to read five books in five months. We achieved the goal, but what was more interesting was finding out more interesting output was finding out that I loved reading.   Sharing a few books that helped me in adding new perspectives to my thought process: 1. I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai: The book is written by women's education activist, Malala Yousafzai. She has written about her journey in promoting women's education in Swat Valley, Pakistan, and how she faced challenges in doing so. Learning: It is not just the risk-taker who needs to have courage, but it takes more courage from those people who love that person and support them in their journey.   2. We are displaced: The book is written by Malala Yousafzai about a few girls from unstable countries in the Middle East and their stories about how they escaped their c...

I started working around three years ago with a startup having around 300 employees and a CEO. For around one year, I got to work with her closely as a Chief-of-Staff. While I was working with her, I learned many things. One of them was Getting Things Done (GTD) training. Keeping your emails organised was a part of that training. Need to keep your emails organised / Why do we need to organise our emails? It must have happened to you that you read one email and then missed out on acting on it.  You responded to one email but forgot to work on it and hence missed doing the work. You read one email multiple times because you had a doubt if you had read that email in your inbox or not. You keep the emails on which you need to work as unread, and sometimes, when accidentally, you have marked it as read, you have to find that email again and keep it as unread. If you follow these simple rules about GTD for email organising, you can save a lot of time and will be clear on what emails you ...

My paternal grandmother (Daadi/ Amma) passed away in June last year. She was around 90 years old and was sick in the last 2-3 months. We had an idea that she might not be able to make it this time, but despite being aware of her age and sickness, it was not easy for me to accept that I wouldn't be seeing her in her shop everyday.   For the last 2-3 decades, I have been seeing her at one place – in her shop, irrespective of any occasion. The sight of seeing her in her shop was a constant that I had thought would become a thing of the past one day but when it happened, many questions started appearing to me - will keep it for some other time.  She used to wake up around 4am in the morning (except for the last one year of her life) and would open her shop around 7am and sit there every day. Now that she is gone for around 9 months, I could organize my thoughts and note down a few things that I admire about her:   Having a social network:  Sitting in the s...

Plastic is one of the best innovations and one of the worst things for the planet. On an average, an Indian consumes around 11kg of plastic every year. Only 9% of the plastic waste is recycled every year and it takes plastic around 400 years to degrade. Today, things are in such a way that we can’t stop ourselves from using plastic, but we can do a few things to reduce our plastic footprint. A few things that I do to reduce my plastic footprint: 1. Carrying a cloth bag while going out for grocery shopping. 2. Carrying any container if I am getting something like curd, milk, paani puri, etc. 3. Keeping two steel straws in my bag that stays with me whenever I am out — I don’t need to take paper or plastic straws. 4. Reusing plastic bags instead of throwing them away 5. Carrying my water bottle with me everywhere — I don’t need to buy a plastic water bottle outside. 6. At home, we don’t throw plastic in the dustbin. We collect it separately and sell it for recycling Doing all these steps ...