Santhosh's ramblings

I love foggy wintery mornings and nights in Delhi. There is a mystical and eerie feeling in such mornings and nights. I suppose this may be true for others like me too, who works from home mostly. For those who get out to work daily, foggy mornings and evening is not easy, rather disruptive.  Even driving in foggy roads, has its own charm. (As long I am not driving!) There is an adventure to it. It is enjoyable. Roads that are hardly visible, faint lights all around, moving at a snail's pace, and time stands still since you cannot move fast.  But then for those who are travelling it is a night mare. Delays, disruptions and cancellations are common.  Couple of days back, we had a family who was to come from Chennai to Delhi to stay with us for a training, but flight got canceled. They quickly made alternative plans to turn the training into an online one, and went ahead and did what they were expected to. What we missed was their company and fellowship. Same day another fa...

The question of living relevant lives in the era of runaway tractors is a challenging question to answer. (Read  this before continuing further)  https://santhoshsramblings.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-runaway-tractor.html Most days, I find myself behaving like an ostrich. “T he ostrich effect, also known as the ostrich problem, is a cognitive bias that describes how people often avoid negative information, including feedback that could help them monitor their goal progress. Instead of dealing with the situation, we bury our heads in the sand, like ostriches. This avoidance can often make things worse, incurring costs that we might not have had to pay if we had faced things head-on.”  https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/ostrich-effect#   On other days, I feel like a meerkat. The meerkat effect is defined as sticking its head up to look around whenever something might happen, in hyper vigilance, but then digging a tunnel and hiding. Their theme song is “Dig a tunnel before...

It was last night (31/12/2023) – I started to wonder, what will the next few years hold for us as humanity? Socio-cultural, technological, and political transitions that are happening around us have been with unprecedented speed and momentum. On one hand, there are people who believe, “This is the day” – we as humanity (or even as a nation) are reaching the pinnacle of our freedom and heights, and tomorrow will take us to much more new frontiers. On the other hand, there are doomsday prophets who believe this will be the decade or generation that will see the undoing of humanity as we have known thus far!   A few transitions, out of the many, kept skipping through my confused mind. Each of these positive in some aspects challenging in others…   A.      Technological Transitions (Feel free to skip over this section, but if you want to read more, explore “The Coming Wave” by Mustafa Suleyman).   One - The technology of intelligence: With AI reaching a po...

I went for a walk in the hills today. I saw a tractor-trailer struggling to climb the hills with a trailer full of bricks. The driver and his helpers were trying to shift the burden around to see if the tractor could pull it up. Once loaded, however, no matter how one tries, it is not possible to reduce the load by shifting things around; the only option is to unload. Unfortunately, I am not sure what they finally did. Is this not what life is all about? Overloaded, with many things, like a beast of burden. In the past, we used to overload beasts of burden; today, we do that with our lives—with work, wants, and worries.   Weary with work—working for self-promotion and fulfillment, working for upward mobility and the rewards that come with it. However, I am reminded of a statement by Frederick Buechner:  'The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's hunger meet.'  And the invitation from the Master in Matthew 11:28,  'Are you tired?...

Every morning, the haunting image of the old waxified beehive tomb outside my window serves as a stark reminder of a slow demise that didn't happen overnight. Examining old pictures reveals a gradual process, taking months, if not a year, for the colony to dwindle and succumb to 'waxification'. The cause, as per expert opinions, points to the queen bee deserting the colony—an intriguing mystery in itself. A slow death preceding the final demise, rooted in the absence of the life and purpose giving presence of a queen. https://santhoshsramblings.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-inner-rot.html Reflecting on our involvement in HIV work during the early 2000s unveils a different aspect of slow death. In the pre Anti-Retroviral (ART) era, individuals without access to ART or those presenting too late faced a gradual decline due to the debilitating destruction of the immune system. The body, stripped of its protective mechanisms, couldn't fend off opportunistic infections. However, s...

Growing up, I was constantly told that every aspect of life and choices you should think it over before taking decisions. Of course it was also emphasised that there is an element of faith in God too, but use your brains too! Becoming a doctor and that too a physician, who is trained to logically think through clinical problems and solve it, was great and thinking over things became a natural part of life. Mentored by excellent teachers, who role modelled critical thinking.  Later in life engaging with “Thought Leadership” (TL) programs and setting up systems for it, enhanced the skills for thinking.   Here is an example from the TL  podcasts if you want to know of this more https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-rpbxu-f014c2     But the challenge I am facing as I grow older is not thinking it over, but over thinking it! Well this is not word play, but a reality. Thinking it over – is focussed thinking about an issue. But focussed thinking comes with an end, where y...

"This is a story of empty pockets. During a recent trip to Rome, I enjoyed an evening in the company of a group that included a young Jesuit who had spent a year in El Salvador and was due to return there soon. At one point over the course of the evening’s discussion, Father Michael described the time he had spent at one of the L’Arche communities founded by Jean Vanier. L’Arche began in 1964 when Vanier bought a home in rural France and invited two adults with mental retardation to live there with him. Some sixty L’Arche communities now exist worldwide. The guiding spirit behind L’Arche differs dramatically from the therapeutic paternalism that often structures relationships between the “normal” and the “mentally handicapped.” L’Arche is a community dedicated to the unlikely proposition that the more able should not do things to or for the less able but should, instead, live with them in covenant. Writes Vanier, “Handicapped people are teachers of . . . the strong. With their tre...