A walk to remember: Goan edition

Lights out Alice!

Am writing to you from the airport in Goa on my way back to Mumbai after a four day offsite brand plan meeting. To be fair, all I did was see the inside of the conference room on most days from 8 am to 6pm and barely had energy or more importantly daylight after that to go out and explore.

Goa and what it stands for couldn't be more different from me. This meant that I was going into the place with prejudice.

I was happy to see that the infrastructure and the quality of roads were so good that it swept me away. To add to it, the backroads were filled with serene lanscape, hills and cliff faces, all of which were inspiring and captivating in equal measure.

Why does it hurt?

Lights out Alice!

On the face of it, in a short span of time, I have gotten to know a lot of people. The flip side of that is that in that same short span of time, I have been left vulnerable and wounded too many times. Obviously, on a micro level I must have bent the truth a fair few times, but on a macro level, I did everything with passion and intent, which meant that opening up took a lot of courage and although at the time I did not realize it, every time I got burned and the cycled repeated itself the wound that was just beginning to heal got scratched open again, time after time, till it stopped healing and started scarring.

I still think that the person will come back, 

that some person will come back, 

that anyone will come back. 

I still think that somebody will see that I stood by what I claimed, 

that I stood by my words, 

that I stood by them in their difficult times, 

that I supported them when they decided to let go.

I still see their faces every where I go...

To be fair, it has gotten better to the point that the pain, when it surfaces, is just a visual and a memory, but it no longer evokes the turmoil and the pain it once used to. I still remember the day, a few days post things ending in the last one, where I was writhing in pain and the sudden rush of emotions became so overwhelming that I had to leave cooking mid-way and come to the corner of a room to let it out. I was anxious, overwhelmed with emotions, with an overarching question reverberating in my head: What is wrong with me? 

Why is it that nobody stays? 

Why is that I bend over backwards to make others comfortable but they don't see the effort I put in?

I know things will fall into place when it has to and I am frankly grateful to have crossed the paths of these people in my life, but for now, as a twenty seven year old with just scars to speak of, it is not a great sight.

Lights out Alice!

What is it that separates?

Lights out Alice!

I often ask myself what separates the great from the average. What is it that makes them better? Is it that they have obscene amount of talent, a gap that can never be surmounted? Yes and No. No, because it is not insurmountable. Yes, because they do have an edge. No, because the race and the pace is different for different people at different points in time. Life is so varied that it would be difficult to ever give an accurate synopsis from a snapshot taken at any point in time. Yes, because they have gotten a taste, a taste of what it feels like to get rewarded for their efforts and succeed. As the saying goes, success is the best motivator. The view from the top is not something you readily forget.

There might be a lot of factors, intangibles and down right luck that needs to come together for something to happen, but if you just look at the things one can control or work upon, the equation can be broken down into simple factors:

• Discipline, for motivation wavers more than a speck of dust dancing in the sunshine.

• Separating the important and relevant things from ones that are not, for in this age of over-information and too many distractions, a person can become easily inundated by factors which do not provide adequate incremental value or overall cumulative representation to the larger pie. The previous sentence emphasizes my point. It could be simply written as being able to de-clutter and prioritize.

• Creating a SOP and framework for learning and growing in the field. This needs further explanation. It is very easy to get lost in such a vast corporate world. There are so many peers of ours who could step in and do our jobs any day required. Experience will lead to some amount of growth in the corporate ladder regardless. But to take a finance reference, this rate of growth is somewhat like inflation, it will happen regardless. There is a certain amount of stagnation that will happen every year (due to non-revision, changing priorities or just growing irreverence). If the rate of learning is just limited to the inflation rate (aka the growth achieved when you just do your job well), you are decaying faster than your are growing YoY and in the end you are just getting dumber and fish-eyed in your understanding.

• Being able to step back and do an honest evaluation - what am I doing wrong, what are my bad habits, what are others doing better that I can inculcate (think Natu's visualizing skills, Yasho's warmth, Harshil's humility, Dhy's people skills, Manish PS's way of making everyone feel included)
• Being able to step back and holding fire on reacting to any situation. Very little of what we do requires an immediate reaction or an emotional outburst. The world has become wired to react immediately and urgently, quicker ideas, quicker boredom, quicker actions. This has come at the cost that coming up with a response has become more important than coming up with relevant solutions.

• Being able to drill deeper in any situation to look at root cause rather than surface symptom. Are there any underlying variables that you are missing? Do you have all the data you need to properly analyse the situation? What are the extraneous variables that have crept into your analysis? What is the SOP that you have put in place to get feedback on the same? What is the iteration methodology you will follow? Are you jumping to conclusions too soon? Are you getting too absorbed into the nitty-gritties?

Additionally, I do pause to reflect on the fact that everything I mentioned above is just my point of view and the factors that are notable for me because they are the major areas where I lack in. Procrastination is my biggest Achilles heel, mainly because I am impatient and haven't been able to commit properly to a goal for long durations. I need everyday reminders and I forget and stumble every morning and evening. If I wanted to counter my own POV, I would say that people for whom sitting for longer hours on a particular thing is not a big deal are able to do more, but might struggle with other factors (what those are I do not know with confidence) such as inertia and being able to move out of their comfort zone. The advantage of being ADHD and restless is that I always am able to refresh and get another take. I would like to think that this second take comes without any prejudice, but we all know that it is not true.

This is far from an exhaustive analysis, but it is a start Alice!

Thoughts before every field visit

Lights out Alice!

My job involves a lot of travel. Travelling to different parts of the country as part of the field work to understand on ground reality that would in turn inform our marketing decisions. What I am noting below is a feeling that creeps us on me every time I am about to fly out of Mumbai.

I wouldn't call Mumbai home. At least, not yet. I wouldn't stop calling Kolkata home. At least, not yet. However, given that I have been in Mumbai or operating out of it for over half an year now, it has at least become a safe haven. 

To be fair, nothing feels like home anymore. Home is a feeling that one gets when one returns to a place which is safe, familiar and familial, the last one requiring presence of people you call your own. Reality of life has become such that two of my board members are in Kolkata and the third one in Delhi while I am here in Mumbai.

However, for me, a person of habit, a place becomes something that I can grow into liking when I establish patterns that cater to my specific needs. A specific place to walk, another place to watch cars from, a place to centre myself and shun the noise, another place to find solace in the humdrum of a crowd. As soon as I establish these patterns, I grow to understand the place a bit better, enough to give me a sense of belonging which allows me to happily sit on the corner while watching the metaphorical world pass me by.

What has also been going through my head, especially since December, is that every time I leave for a tour outside, I feel some heightened sense of importance or coming of age feel. Don't worry, I know my job is shit/ my contribution is negligible and I have zero heightened sense of self. But I do feel that somehow, because I am travelling outside, there is a niggling optimism that creeps in, spreading a positivity that sweeping changes would occur in areas that are aching, making things magically fall into place, similar to the ending of every movie I liked in the past(guess that fuels the irrational thought).

More to the point, every walk I take on the eve before I leave for fieldwork, a feeling crosses my mind, if only for a second (okay, more than that but I will not admit that). I always feel that somehow, someway, magically, she will come back. That she will see the error in her ways and the fact that I am leaving would bring her back to her senses. Irrational, foolish, narcissistic, YES. However, I do not agree with the feeling. I talk back to myself and ask why that would ever happen. It is not like I am going to serve in the army or for a cause. It is just another visit that is a pretty routine part of the job. More importantly, she made a choice. Good, bad, right, wrong, it was a choice. A choice to walk away from all this. It is only foolish of me to pine over somebody that does not reciprocate the feeling. 

To be fair, it hurts more than it heals. The only thing that I think keeps me coming back to this feeling is the fact that it is pretty hard for me to go through this process all over again. To figure out another person, to understand their bandwidth for communication and to match mine against theirs. Then ask the tough question whether I want to do that in the first place. The back and forth. The confusion. The eventual misstep that I would make. The inevitable overthinking that I would do which would lead me to conclude that I am being a bother and subsequent withdrawal from any communication initiation and telling my brain that it is the best course of action for all parties involved. 

In an honest evaluation, it is overthinking that gets in the way. The feeling that I am being a bother, that I should not text them first, that if they were interested they would have texted. It is hard for me to open up, it is hard for me to ask the questions that are necessary to get over the initial awkwardness towards eventual comfort. However, it doesn't mean that I am exempt from it. I must do the due diligence.

It hurts, but I must go on Alice!

Sit rep 18.01.24 edition

 Lights out Alice!

Been a while. Been a bit lost. Struggling to adapt to the pace of work, or lack of it. Yes, the lack of it. I have come to the realisation that unless I have too many things on my plate, I struggle to get anything done. Unless I am overwhelmed or near capacity, I struggle to function. In other words, in a sub-optimal setting, my productivity becomes near zero. Furthermore, having too many things to do ensures that I am always occupied and also get instant gratification on completing a task. To be fair, I would still be okay if I fail to complete, because given the condition that I started out with too many things on my plate, I effectively tell myself it is okay to fail. This backfires in exacting situations. Situations that demand specific outputs and or dedicated focus. Situations that demand singular course of action.

The lack of work these days is filling me up with anxiety. I am unable to utilize my time productively, because I feel that anything I do is not useful enough or not aligned and since I am not receiving feedback on it, I am afraid to be wrong.

Crap, that's pretty bad though. I have become so addicted to short term feedback and doing exactly what is expected of me, living within a system that going against it is crippling. A pretty sorry state of affairs if you ask me.

How do I rewire myself Alice? How do I break the loop? How do I tear down my limitations and grow good habits that will help me build my long term?

The ability to stay quiet in situations

Lights out Alice!

One of the most admired feature that my dad has, after his patience, is the ability to stay quiet in any conversation. He does not get irritated, he does not get instigated or forced into replying. It is the sort of unnerving and uneasy quiet that forces the other person to nervously bare their soul in front of him to get any sort of approval. I don't know if this quiet is a good thing. All it does is ensure that I am rambling on and I feel like the loser and the impatient one at the end of the conversation since I was the only one who talked and my dad kept his problems or his advice to himself.

But it is definitely a superpower. Most of the time, as post mortem analysis of any argument will tell you, both sides speak out in anger and are driven by emotions, either reacting to the other side's accusations or feeling misunderstood. In the moment, at least personally, I have the burgeoning urge to just clarify every accusation and why I am the model of perfection and why the other person is dead wrong. They can be, but in this fit of rage, I rarely LISTEN to what they are saying, barely understanding that their POV might be true and regardless of my intention, the effect on them can be negative. 

Especially with my mom, I have seen that I somehow always end up criticising her and making her feel bad about her emotions. To make it worse, I always try to point it out in the very heat of the moment, thinking that it is the best time to do it. Right now, I know it is wrong, but I still haven't been able to diagnose the root cause as to why I think I have developed that habit and how I can stop it. I definitely need to stop it because I need to behave in a better manner with my mom. I am often too rude and discourteous. I need to respect her more and not try to belittle her.

Same walk. Different Outcomes

Context: On my way to the airport from home back to Mumbai

You know what's funny, the walks are the same but effect entirely different.

Same routine. Same morning freshness. Same habit of walking without care and just to get out of my head. But one is more cathartic than the other. Call it nostalgia or familiarity/security/comfort of home, but when I went out for that walk yesterday night just to clear my head, it worked. Unlike the walks to clear my head that I undertook in Mumbai, which most of the time ended up filling me up with more anxiety, it just worked in Kolkata.

I didn't do a lot of things with my parents, but sitting with them and doing nothing, with each one of us going about our own separate routines, mostly hanging about our phones, was enough. I will miss them. I don't think I have a lot of time left with them. They are getting old and I live far away. I see the longing in their eyes. I could see when I was leaving and my mom was crying how even my otherwise "rock" dad was welling up and holding back. Their eyes were screaming to do anything that would bring back any form of engagement in their lives, the best being living with their kids. They are aging, so do not want too much to happen in their daily life, but after spending the last three decades of your life working on a project, aka kids, when your life is rid of any preoccupation, the void is gaping enough to fall into.

I cried as well. I still can't wrap my head around the irony of life where doing better in life means spending more time away from your loved ones in a job that you don't care about to earn money to afford a lifestyle that will soon be overtaken with unnecessary indulgence to numb the pain of this cycle of capitalist consumption. 

What is the point of everything if my family is not happy? What is the point of everything if all I see is sorrow around me? How am I supposed to go about being merry if the very people I care about are being left behind and lonely?

I find it quite vexing and really question the point of such an existence...I hope I find answers I am looking for sometime in the future Alice!