The music for this song is so fun to listen to, though I personally prefer other songs of theirs in which to immerse myself.

If you don’t know, Chemical Brothers make electronic dance music. Their music sounds heavy. There are elements of rock infused in their tracks. They have powerful beats.

Even the judgemental version of me from when I wore a younger man’s clothes that would balk at listening to EDM or anything genre besides what I considered “cool” staple music fare enjoyed the Chemical Brothers.

This is something I have been exploring a lot more these days. The ability to be genre fluid, and to tune into how something feels within me when I pay complete attention to it.

That’s why I have become more intentional with music listening. I treat it like immersion. I want to pay attention with my eyes closed to songs I get to listen to, or do nothing cognitively demanding.

I rarely watch music videos, preferring to go deeper within one sense (aural) rather than have my attention split between two senses (aural and visual).

There are some exceptions though. Some videos just blow my mind.

One of them is the video for Star Guitar.

The video is directed by Michael Gondry.

Gondry is from France. He started his journey making ad films and music videos. Then he began directing movies.

He’s more of a legend than I knew. I looked at his wikipedia page. I am not going to go fully in depth with what I read there1.

Instead, I’d like to share how Gondry made a commercial for Smirnoff Vodka (Smarienberg2) in 1996.

That commercial told a fantastic story in 60+ seconds of an espionage agent. She was with another espionage agent in a series of adventures they experience, complete with a bald supervillain character, and with scenes changing one after another as the perspective of the camera moves through a Smirnoff vodka bottle.

The first sequence in the ad is of a bullet slowing down before it hits the Smirnoff bottle. That is said to have inspired the Wachowskis to create all the bullet time visuals in the Matrix.

Michael Gondry, what a guy.

He’s also directed Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind and other trippy movies. He seems like someone who does really cool shit - ads, short films, feature films, documentaries and of course, music videos.

Star Guitar by Chemical Brothers didn’t seem like much when I saw it first. It was a video of someone’s perspective as they were sitting in a train and looking at the world outside.

When I first saw the video on MTV or Channel V back in the 90s, I switched channel quickly, hoping to see something a little more appealing to my teenage mind.

Thankfully, one time I did actually pay attention to the video.

AND MY MIND WAS BLOWN.

The visuals in the music video, all of them, without exception, are a representation of the sounds in the song.

For example, if you consider a house that appears on the screen to match the sound of a kick drum, then every time the kick drum is played, the house passes by on screen.

If the kick drum tempo speeds up, so do the visuals of the houses you see on the screen.

Digression - The kick drum is the big drum on which the band’s name usually appears.

End of digression.

It is not just the kick drum that has a matching image on screen. Every instrument, and every sound that is created has a corresponding visual object. They are represented by trees, hills, electric cables, power stations, chimneys etc.

This is a short post because I would rather you spend 239 seconds watching this masterpiece than read about me waffling on about it.

What a gift to the world.

This is another example that reinforces my idea that art is not discrete.

It is a continuum. Every piece of art that exists helps every new piece of art to come to life. It is an eternal river of human creativity, and it has the ability to help the best parts of us exist outside of us, long after we’ve ceased to be.

Go on and see some other music videos by Gondry while you’re at it. Enjoy the immersion!

Thank you for reading The Weekly Shuffle.

In those years, I worked in a software services firm writing code.

The kind of code I wrote for a living can now be written by an LLM in a few hours. Heck, with a basic prompt, it will write code that is waaaaaaaayyy better than anything I’ve ever written.

However, no LLM can match me for sass.

Evidence for that can be found in the comments that I left in the code I wrote. I knew nobody would’ve bothered sifting through all those lines with a fine-toothed comb.

I am glad I went to B-school, because my newfound qualifications allowed me to do the kind of work that LLMs can’t (yet) do.

For a year after I graduated, I worked for a business research firm in godforsaken Gurgaon.

My job was to research and distill information helpful to people in big companies. I had to prepare the theme, the storyline and the text for slides and documents through which this information would be presented.

Someone on a design team would make the slides look good.

Being fresh from B-school, I actively participated in a game which required me to tell other people that I had an MBA without telling them that I had an MBA.

2010 / 11 Hari took great pride in jazzing up his language to prove that he knew his stuff.

(More info about this image in the notes1 section)

Expertise area became Core Competence. Buying things on discount helped me gain financial efficiencies.

Oh lord, even trying to think of examples of jargon which shows you how I got high on the smell of my own farts back then makes me want to throw up.

When applied in a certain environment with the right nuance, these buzzwords actually make sense. They are short-hand for things that need to be spoken of in a business context.

For instance - “We need to fire people without advance notice. We can do this contractually. We are legally protected. We couldn’t be arsed about the morality of this decision.” can’t be said over and over, as a result of which we have the term “lay-offs”.

As Kevin Malone in The Office said, “Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?”

My B-school jargon misadventures all came back to me when I was on a phone call with a friend, Dhawal, who told me about the idea of Concept Creep.

I am interested in writing and languages and everything to do with them.

As my buddy Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”

Therefore expanding and testing those limits, and choosing to think with increasing breadth and depth makes life more interesting for me.

YMMV2.

I learnt that Concept Creep is the broadening of a word’s meaning to cover more than it originally did.

I am not talking about slang.

Slang is when words get new meaning and are used in different contexts. Like “sick” (once used to denote illness, now also used as a synonym for cool) or “slay” (once referring to putting someone to death violently, now also used as a synonym for - yo you did that really well).

Concept Creep is when something that should be better qualified with clear descriptors instead gets lumped under a broader definition.

For instance, a pin prick to draw blood for a test causes pain.

Getting crushed by a bunch of Mongol horses after being rolled up in a carpet also causes pain (and certain death).

There are different words to describe these different degrees of pain, with appropriate qualifiers so that people are aware that one type of pain can be beneficial, while the other kind is a wee bit fatal.

But if both a pinprick and being trampled by horses were referred to as pain, someone who hasn’t experienced either event might think they are similar.

That can be dangerous.

Concept Creep is specifically happening in therapeutic language.

Words that are often used in conversation as part of psychotherapy, in the space between oneself and one’s therapist can be incredibly helpful for someone’s mental health journey. To help with the healing process.

Words such as trauma, abuse, bullying, gaslighting, addiction often pop-up and are used as helpful substitutes, as short cuts so that one does not have to get into the graphic details of these disturbing experiences over and over.

Why is this happening now?

When I used B-school lingo instead of regular words in day-to-day conversation, I did that to appear smart.

I made the mistake of mixing the knowledge of buzzwords with epistemic authority.

Saying that someone possesses epistemic authority is a fancy way of saying that they are credible and can be trusted to be an expert in specific areas.

How can you tell if someone is credible in a certain area?

One does that by understanding how well they know what they are talking about. Academic qualifications sometimes help. Relevant work experience can also be helpful.

However, we’re in 2026.

We’re used to information snacking.

A person only has a few moments with you to hold your attention, and if you don’t give them the necessary dopamine or serotonin hit, they can easily switch away to some other form of distraction.

That’s why I stop talking the moment someone gets on their phones mid-conversation, and if I like them enough, I’ll give them shit for it.

Today, a person can seem credible by using buzzwords. The more sensational something sounds, the more attention it gets.

Content creators and platforms have one incentive - keep users engaged. Keep them clicking. Keep them scrolling.

They couldn’t care less about your health, your well being and your growth and development so long as they can capture your attention, your date and your money.

So what bro? What’s the big deal?

The thing with Concept Creep is that it leads to flattening of nuance.

The pain analogy I mentioned before - pain from a pinprick for a blood test and pain from being trampled by Mongol horses - both get referred to as pain.

When therapy terms encroach regular life, that is a slippery slope.

For instance - with bullying - what was once a difficult experience for a kid in school facing physical violence or facing regular cruel behaviour from someone more powerful is now used commonly at the workplace.

In the office, when a more powerful person is disagreeable, the word bullying comes up.

Two grown-ups, both with agency and rights in a professional setting have a different dynamic than one kid who is facing other kids at school in an unsupervised environment.

Another example - when reality doesn’t meet expectations, and someone goes through a challenging time, the word trauma is used to describe that experience.

Words like abuse, gaslight, prejudice, addiction etc are used for heavy experiences as well as for trivial ones.

If someone chooses to use heavy words to describe trivial experiences and thus ends up being medicated for it, then it is like using a cannon to kill a mosquito.

What am I doing about it?

I am standing on my soapbox to talk about this because words matter.

Language matters.

I am once again choosing to beat the drum about what Wittgenstein said - “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”

If a human being is able to use the right language to share an accurate, representative account of themselves and their experience, it leads to a better story.

A difficult situation can get the right kind of support, kindness and intervention from family, friends and qualified professionals.

A trivial situation is not turned into something that is bigger than it should be. Workplace experiences are shitty. Individual disputes can be shitty. But they may not all be as grave as other forms of serious challenges that come our way.

Beware of concept creep. Use your words well.

Thank you, as always, for reading The Weekly Shuffle.

1

This comic strip is part of a series named The Cold Call.

Two of my B-school classmates, Reetu Srivastava and Pruthviraj Haral used to create comics and send them out to the student body. They also compiled a book with these strips, and it is one of my most prized possessions from my time there.

Please check out The Cold Call on Blogspot

This is an experiment. I will curate five songs each month and put them on a playlist. I’m going to call the playlist Gummies by Thought Brownie.

Why not?

I love these songs and I’d like more people to enjoy listening to them if they choose to.

I find it better to listen to songs recommended by people, rather than by algorithms. I hope you feel the same way.

My general discontent towards existence is directly proportional to how much time I spend consuming content drip fed to me by algorithms. So I’m doing my best to wean myself off them with as much intention as possible.

Not easy to do, but inner peace and contentment are hard fought and hard won.

Music and words are an important part of my life.

I like writing, and therefore I read as much as I can.

I like making music, so I listen to as much of it as I can.

Reading and listening to music are activities that I try to give my full attention to. That’s opened up a whole new world of experiences for me.

When I close my eyes, in my mind’s eye the sounds I listen to get translated into colours that pulsate and move in time with the sound.

A graphic equaliser display on an old-school sound system is in the ballpark of what I see, except what goes on in my head is a full-blown colour party compared to these primitive displays.

I learnt that this is called synaesthesia (or synesthesia if you prefer the American spelling).

The specific act of associating sounds with colours is called chromesthesia.

Synaesthesia is sometimes referred to as a neurological defect, but hey, great “defect” to have. I think having this condition fills my life with more colour.

We’ve got that out of the way.

Now here’s five songs that have been fun for me to listen to. Here’s the link to the playlist (and I have it embedded at the end too, in case you want to listen directly off Substack).

BTS - Body to Body

I love K-pop. I know it sounds completely off-brand for those who have known me for a long time. I used to be a rock and metal journalist in my 20s. I was judgemental of those whose music tastes did not match mine.

I’m sorry about that. I know better, I’ll do better.

I’m genre fluid now.

The first BTS song I heard was their track Boy With Luv. I listened to it during the pandemic and I was mind blown.

There was the cynical part of me that kept saying that Big Hit Entertainment (now BigHit Music) which was responsible for creating BTS was a conglomerate.

The band was a highly classy product with big budgets to create amazing videos, have great music production and market the shit out of the band. That I was being fed mainstream pop that was easy, accessible and that catered to the lowest common denominator.

The curious part of me said that seven South Korean boys worked their asses off to do such amazing stuff, and bring so much joy and good energy into the world through their music and dance, and that I should stop being an uncle and enjoy what they have to offer wholeheartedly.

I’ve enjoyed plenty of their songs since.

BTS’ latest album Arirang (2026) begins with their track Body to Body which is the first track on my playlist.

The production is impeccable and the beat is catchy AF. My favourite thing about this track is the use of the Korean folk song, Arirang1 that blends in and out seamlessly.

Arirang has a rich history. Among other things, the song was the unofficial resistance anthem for Koreans when the occupying Japanese forces (1910 to 1945) made it a criminal offence to sing patriotic songs.

In the live versions, Jung Kook displays his vocal range by singing parts of Arirang brilliantly.

Imogen Heap - Hide and Seek

I came across Imogen Heap as part of the electronic duo Frou Frou.

Let Go by Frou Frou was part of the soundtrack of Garden State2, and everything about that song did a number on me in the best way possible.

Let go. Let go. Jump in.
Don’t know what you’re waiting for.
It’s alright.
Cause there’s beauty in the breakdown.

Imogen Heap’s voice when turned into colours in my mind looks like the northern lights. Yay chromesthesia!

Her song, Hide and Seek is the story of her parents’ separation when she was 12.

This song has no instruments. It only has Heap’s voice acapella, layered with a harmonizer. It sounds haunting.

“Crop circles in the carpet” talk of what remains imprinted after the furniture has been moved out.

“Oily marks appear on walls where pleasure moments hung before” is about photos that have been taken down from walls in the aftermath of a separation.

Heap takes a turbulent time in her life and turns that into a work of beauty through Hide and Seek.

If you haven’t yet listened to it, you’re welcome!

Mac Miller - Don’t Mind if I Do

Mac Miller fell short of making it to the 27 club by a year. He died in 2018 at the age of 26. Despite having a short life, he put out some incredible music before the curtains came down.

Don’t Mind If I Do is not as popular as his most famous song, The Spins, though I find myself so taken by the flow of his words on this track.

Here’s a sample of lyrics from the song.

Life good, never wanna end this
Me and Mary Jane got a really nice friendship
Yeah, they give me money, but I gotta go and spend it
Man, I been a bad little Jew

But I gotta pay the bills now, so I gotta chill out
I ain’t walkin’ ‘round like I’m splurging with a mil’ now
Feel like the kid working at the mill now
Used to just chill and smoke joints up at Bill’s house

Now I got a schedule, things I gotta do
Doing interviews, see it up on YouTube
I say it feels just like a dream
‘Bout to wake up from a nap, how fucked up was that? Like

I’m 43. I am so far from my 18th year that I have no recollections, except that I was studying my ass off and bumbling through engineering college.

However, through this song, I get to vicariously live the carefree life of someone young, who takes follies and fun as imposters, and treats them both just the same.

Don’t mind if I do, will you?

Emancipator - Anthem

This is an instrumental track that I shazamed at my friend Dhruv’s home. I did not know Emancipator (an American producer and DJ), though the song drew me in.

I looked around a little and found that Emancipator was one of the people that was signed on by Nujabes (a Japanese producer and DJ who died in 2010). Nujabes was highly recommended to me by my friend Sohan.

When I listen to the song, it builds up slowly in my body and I find myself flowing even as I sit down and relax, like I’m meditating. The track has electronic beats, pianos, violins, clarinets and cellos.

I feel a tinge of melancholia blended with optimism and inspiration each time I listen to Anthem.

Doja Cat (featuring SZA) - Kiss Me More

If you haven’t heard Doja Cat, and you want to, you’re in for a treat.

Rappers such as Cardi B, Missy Elliot, Ms Lauryn Hill, Nicki Minaj, and Doja Cat bring in empowerment and sass in equal measure, and get to use their voices and tell stories in ways their male counterparts can’t.

This was the first track I heard by Doja Cat, and same as with BTS, this song also popped up during the pandemic.

The song is sexy and playful, though more than that, it blends so many different elements within it that make it enjoyable for me to listen to. A melodic guitar hook that doesn’t sound boring despite repeating itself through the song, great harmonies, and non-stop movement through chorus, verse and rap.

I practice the rap section by Doja Cat.

Just like with the Mac Miller track, the flow and arrangement of words is smooth as fuck.

I, I feel like fuckin’ somethin’
But we could be corny, fuck it
Sugar, I ain’t no dummy, dummy
I likе to say, “What if?”
But if we could kiss and just cut the rubbish
Then I might bе onto somethin’
I ain’t givin’ you one in public
I’m givin’ you hundreds, fuck it

The internal rhymes (What if, but if) and repetitions (dummy, dummy) peppered through the whole song make it catchy catchy.

Here’s the playlist below on Spotify. I’ll keep adding more songs next month. Have fun listening!

As always, thank you for reading The Weekly Shuffle.

I am trying to explain to myself in my own words what I just read.

You’re welcome to join me in the party that goes on in my head.

Pema Chödrön is an American-born practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. I’m reading this book of hers - When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

I was sharing with two of my buddies on our Whatsapp group that this book has been life-changing. I haven’t yet gotten halfway through the book.

This is one of those books that I am going to savour slowly. Read just a little every day. Chew on what the words in this book do to my heart and mind and soul.

I read something here that made me change my mind in the most fundamental way possible. I experienced the need to make a subtle shift in my identity, and that was surprising to me.

It is called a journey of awareness for a reason. Awareness is not a destination. I find it to be a never-ending exploration, and it is an absolute fucking privilege to be able to let my mind meander through these places and spaces.

I used to think of myself as hopeful, curious, kind and resilient.

I’ve now dropped the “hopeful” aspect of my identity. Thanks Pema.

She describes hope as a dangerous thing. I recall reading something similar in Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. There’s a good reason people rave about that book too, by the way. Absolutely gangsta mind bending stuff. Strongly recommended reading if you ever needed more persuasion.

Pema says that hope and fear are two sides of the same emotion.

Hope - “I wish for reality to be better than it is right now.”

Fear - “I wish for reality to not be worse than it is right now.”

Until this insight, I used to think of hopes and fears as two boxes that were placed in my mind. I wanted the box of hopes to be as big as possible and the box of fears to be as small as possible.

I wanted to be optimistic about more things and afraid of fewer things.

The thing with hope and fear is that they are made heavy by the weight of expectations. Dear Reader, I have learnt through repeated trials and the occasional tribulation that reality does not give a fuck about my expectations.

Spoiler alert - Nor does it give a fuck about yours.

Things unfold. They move. They flow. We move. We have a choice. We are either dragged along, or we can go willingly.

Hope is like an itch that is waiting to be scratched by actions.

Change the room. Change the temperature. Change the channel. Change the music.

My mind begins to believe a dangerous story - that these changes will solve problems. Provide security. Alleviate our situation.

Granted, actions might bring temporary relief. It is similar to the feeling of hunger. I get hungry. I take action to stuff my face. I am satiated. I am no longer hungry. But this feeling of fullness doesn’t last long. I get hungry again.

Things are somewhat similar when my mind believes the story that peace lies elsewhere other than here.

In the chapter 6, on Hopelessness and Death, I was reminded of the things I do to feed my dopamine craving. I learnt that I craved dopamine to alleviate my present moment. To change things up from how they are right now.

The easiest way I can get that craving tended to is by losing myself in one of many infinite scrolling apps on my phone.

Side note - I wonder why governments haven’t yet ruled against apps having infinite scrolling. Perhaps that’s some legislature worth pursuing in the future.

My craving for dopamine was similar to the way Pema described one’s craving for hope. That’s why I thought I’ll be cute and clever and come up with “Hopamine” as the title of this post.

What can I say except you’re welcome.

Pema advocates for us to be familiar and comfortable with groundlessnesss. She says that certainty is a myth. We are never on solid ground. We are never anchored. Everything is connected. Everything changes. Everything flows constantly.

Comfort with uncertainty, with the transient nature of everything, and with groundlessness is liberating.

The Buddha said - “Bro attachments cause suffering. Don’t have attachments. Life will be chill.”

He didn’t say how to get rid of them, and in this book, Pema tries to help me see under the hood.

Instead of hope and fear, I want to embrace hopelessness and confidence.

When I first read the word “hopeless”, it took me back to my time in school where teachers used “hopeless” and “useless” interchangeably to demonstrate their indignation.

Thankfully, here hopelessness means something different.

I interpret it as my attempt to reduce friction with how the present moment is unfolding. To not feel angst or discomfort within.

It doesn’t mean I don’t want to take action. It just means that I will act from a place of inner peace and confidence, rather than being armed by the burden of expectations.

Hopelessness and confidence together help me have thoughts and actions that are being taken from the best possible place, for a more peaceful and chill life, moment by moment.

That’s what I want life to be all about. One great moment in which I am fully present. Followed by another moment in which I am fully present. Followed by another. And another. And yet another.

Till the last syllable of my recorded time.

Thank you for reading The Weekly Shuffle.

I had taken all the necessary precautions. I had closed all the doors and windows to minimise the amount of dust that might creep in. Thankfully, there wasn’t much dust.

My allergies would’ve otherwise started acting up.

I am like a human dust detector. Canaries die in coal mines from toxic gases sooner than the miners themselves.

Me? I begin sneezing much sooner than anyone else around, and I warn others that are similarly sensitive to dust.

I was also wondering if there would be many cobwebs at home. I am afraid of spiders. I’m not sure why. I’ve unpacked and dealt with quite a few things I fear, arachnid-based threats haven’t felt existential enough for me to deal with just yet.

There weren’t many cobwebs. Whew.

The house was in a surprisingly decent shape. It seems tranquil.

It is only when you look closer - when you glimpse bare walls where photos were once hung up, or open a door to walk into a room now exclusively used for storage, or look through closets to find clothes that belong to people other than the current sole inhabitant. that you might spot signs of turbulence that once took place here.

I had played my part in ensuring things were okay for my return. I love my future self, after all.

Each time before I have gone away from home, I have ensured that I am able to keep a few things to make for future Hari feel welcomed when he returned.

Fresh sheets in bed so I can lay my weary head to rest.

Two pairs of clothes kept ready. One as lounge wear to feel cozy in, soon after a shower. A pair of clothes for the outside in case I have to step out before my laundry has dried.

As I unpack, I try not to move from one room to another empty handed. I carry something that needs to be in another room. This reduces the mild annoyance I feel when I see clutter around me. Clutter that I caused myself.

The problem is responsible for the solution.

The shorts and half sleeve crew neck t-shirts need to be vacuum packed. I will see them again when Persephone returns.

My meds need to go into the first aid box in the kitchen + living room.

The process of settling back in for a few months at a time at most feels unsettling.

No matter what music might play, it is, after all the food of love, and so we must keep dancing.

That said, an empty house is merely a house devoid of human presence.

Its other inhabitants go about their own business, mostly unseen.

In the small bathroom, near the window sill, I spotted the corpses of few hundred fruit flies.

They looked like they had all been dead for a while. I didn’t see them anywhere else in the house. Just at this particular window sill. Almost like they were trying to escape, and were thwarted by their arch enemy, home insulation.

I was grateful to them that they all chose to die in that particular spot alone, rather than be scattered all over, for that made it easy for me to clean up.

I had learnt about the Drosophila melanogaster in school.

They are organisms that live their whole lives in a day. In 24 hours, they are born, they grow up, they mate and then they die.

I wondered what sort of art these fruit flies make.

I wonder what kinds of stories that were passed down from generation to generation (Once upon a time, in the ancient era, four weeks ago…)

I wonder how many of those flies that lay on my window sill felt distraught at the sight of their parents and grandparents and friends lying there dead, as they went about with life, running out of time as the end of their life at the end of the day approached.

I took a few pieces of tissue paper to gather all the flies in one corner, and as soon as I began doing that, they all crumbled. In a few seconds, a whole civilisation was nothing but powdery stuff.

All they were was dust in the wind.

On a long enough timeline, so are we.

Thank you for reading The Weekly Shuffle.

In 2014, I moved to Hyderabad to start a new job.

The apartment complex I lived in, Hill Ridge Springs (HRS), was the most comfortable one that I had stayed at till date.

Adjacent to the apartments was a hotel in the same compound. This hotel had a gym, a spa, and a wellness center with great discounts for residents of HRS.

I’m a ho for discounts. I signed up immediately.

They asked for my phone number. The moment they asked for it, I felt annoyed.

On moving cities, my new employer had given me a new number.

I had my previous phone number for eleven years. I chose to let go of it gleefully.

I had made the mistake of not getting a separate phone when I started work at a food and beverage retail firm. My phone number had been printed and displayed prominently in various stores with the title, “Customer Helpline”.

I should have been more sensible. I wasn’t. I wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.

It had been two years since I had quit working in that firm. Yet, I would get calls from random numbers at the most inopportune times.

I was once at a cinema hall when my phone rang.

“Hello, there is too much salt in your samosa. You are useless. You can’t prepare good food. I want a refund.”

This is the only thing I remember about the first Avengers movie.

The amount of spam calls I had to field every day, and the flood of messages from companies giving me loans, offers, and discounts made me want to throw my phone away.

When I moved, I thought - new job, new city. new number, new start and no spam.

When the spa and resort person asked for my phone number, I hesitated.

“I don’t want to give you my phone number.”

“Sir, this way you will get discount.”

So much dissonance. Like I said, I am a ho for discounts.

So I reluctantly parted with the information.

“Phone numbers are confidential. Please don’t share.”

“Of course sir, we will not share. Don’t worry.”

Barefaced liars.

From the next day, I began getting spam messages all over again advertising nearby properties for sale, asking me to test drive new cars, and check out restaurants nearby.

I was exasperated, but I had plenty of other things going for me that took my time, energy, and attention away from this thorn in my flesh.

I then moved to Dublin a few years later. It’s a lot more chill here.

Now, the only calls I get are spam calls saying that I should call a number immediately to reach my bank because a fraudulent transaction has taken place.

My friend Shrinidhi1 has a hilarious bit in his stand-up set about how he gets a call from an India number in an attempt to ensnare him in an online fraud.

The person with the India number, “Connor”, does not know that Shrinidhi is Indian.

I get messages telling me I should keep out my garbage bins, and occasional messages from my Indian bank. My phone is silent and peaceful.

During my 2026 India trip, I observed how every possible place was asking for my phone number. I understand if hospitals / doctor’s offices / dentists want my number. I don’t mind sharing it with them, albeit reluctantly.

I was at an airport buying a cup of tea when I was asked for my phone number. I purchased a belt at a Bata store and they asked me for my phone number. I was at an ice cream shop and was asked to give my number.

First, I declined. Some wouldn’t take “no” for an answer.

In most cases, the person at the kiosk or counter is just following their supervisor’s instructions. So if I declined and they were okay with it, that was the end of that.

However, if they continued to be persistent, I would ask for money.

“What? Why do you want money for this?”

“I wanted tea from you. I gave you money. You gave me tea. You didn’t give me tea for free. Now you want my phone number. You give me INR 5000, I will give you my number. I won’t give you my number for free.”

I recognise that there are bigger hills on which I must choose to die on. This issue is an anthill at best.

However, I choose to be fastidious about protecting my time, my attention, and my peace.

After all, a life with fewer notifications2 is a better life.

Protect your peace. Also, may every samosa you eat have the right amount of salt in it.

Thank you, as always, for reading The Weekly Shuffle.

Substack warned me that lengthy posts are not shown fully on emails. Which is a pain in your ass, Dear Reader.

I don’t want make your life inconvenient. I’ll leave that job to the government.

Please read Part 1 (Episode 71 of The Weekly Shuffle) to know the story so far.

If you don’t, and choose to begin right here, please know that it will be like watching the Matrix trilogy, but starting from the car chase sequence1 in part 2.

A lot of fun, but completely devoid of context.

Let’s pick up from where we left off in Part 1.

Back to October 2019, Munich

On our first day in Munich, Sai had an idea.

He wanted to shoot videos of me talking about how difficult it is to be the CEO of a unicorn. It was going to be mockumentary style footage inspired by The Office.

Sohan, Sai and I were laughing our asses off while drinking beer, imagining what we could get up to during this trip.

I was hoping to enlist their clever minds so the three of us could collectively respond to people who were being assholes to me on Twitter.

On our second day, Sai woke up and began shouting loudly from the other room.

The reason for his excitement was an article by Karthik Srinivasan a.k.a Beast of Traal on his website.

(Digression for added context)

Karthik Srinivasan2 is a communications strategy consultant.

He runs corporate workshops on personal branding. He has worked at Ogilvy, Flipkart, and Edelman. He has 380,000 Linkedin followers, is considered a top voice on the platform and runs a hugely popular blog named BeastofTraal dot com.

BeastofTraal.com3 is a communications / marketing / story-telling / advertising based blog that he’s been running since 2008.

It is a hugely popular site and for someone to be featured on it is a bit of a flex.

(End of digression)

I was featured on his site. That’s why Sai was so excited.

The title of the article was - “The 2 CEOs of BigBasket – one in the real world and one on Twitter”.

In the article, Karthik writes:

This is NOT the CEO of BigBasket, Hari Menon.

Why am I so confident?

This is Hari Shenoy and has nothing to do with BigBasket or Hari Menon.

Wait, he does have something to do with BigBasket, but that is more because people mistake him to be the CEO of BigBasket.

Yes. For some bizarre reason, many people tag Hari Shenoy on Twitter when they are complaining about BigBasket.

This is more because those people, with all their entitlement, presume that Hari Shenoy is Hari Menon merely because they start tagging a/any ‘Hari’ on Twitter and sometimes Hari Shenoy’s handle appears first.

It’s part entitlement and part ignorance and part arrogance that they do not bother to check his bio or ensure they are tagging the right person.

Disclosure: We order from BigBasket almost 2-3 times every week and have zero issues with their service.

Anyway, people tag Hari Shenoy, for their complaints about BigBasket. This must be quite a bother to Hari Shenoy who wished he was the CEO of BigBasket so he could do something about those complaints.

But he is not.

And says so very clearly in his Twitter bio (if only people bothered to check it). And people still tag him.

So, what does he do? He goes on an incredibly funny and sarcastic trip, taking their trip. Here’s a small sample.

I am sharing my favourite tweet reply from the ones Karthik picked.

If you are curious, I invite you to read the rest of my pleasantly sarcastic replies4 on Karthik’s website.

Link in footnotes, because there’s more to this story in 2026 that I want to share with you.

Karthik mentioned how this is an online reputation issue for BigBasket. He provided ways in which this can be rectified.

Soon as the article was published, a bunch of people I had known reached out from far and wide saying that they always knew I would make them proud by saying random funny shit.

Soon as the article was published, all the mentions and complaining stopped.

Looks like BigBasket figured out the problem and solved it.

So much so that even their real CEO Hari Menon joined twitter in March 2020, six months after Karthik’s article was published.

I can imagine a hypothetical conversation where someone is imploring Hari Menon to join twitter.

He seems like a sensible person, and there is good reason he didn’t sign-up until 2020.

“Sir, you need to join Twitter. We’ve been telling you for years now.”

“Ey what rubbish. I have enough things to do already.”

“Sir but if you don’t join people will tag that other idiot fellow and he will say all sorts of shit. It is a full online reputation problem that one.”

“Ugh. FFS. Seriously bro. Fiiiiiiiiiine. I’ll do it. I’ll take one more for the team.”

The Twitter mistaken identity problem went away.

2026, Bangalore

As I recall all that happened seven years ago, I wish I had done things differently.

No matter how assholey the person was that tagged me and spewed anger, perhaps quote-tweeting them was a bit much.

I’d like to think I’m better now.

Heck, Pokemons can evolve. What excuse do I have?

Since the Twitter saga, Hari Menon has left BigBasket and is doing other cool stuff.

Six days ago, he posted on Linkedin5 and said this:

For the uninitiated, busking means performing on the street. An art form that Bengaluru has the right ingredients for... lively neighbourhoods, lovely weather and no shortage of people who’d stop and listen to good music.

So we thought we’d do something about it.

Our little idea has finally taken shape... as my music studio The Jam Room joins hands with UnboxingBLR on “The Music Scene.” An initiative to help budding musicians take their music to the streets and people of Bengaluru.

Every Saturday at Sobha Mall (on Church Street), we take care of the necessary approvals and setup, and 8-10 musicians get to showcase their talent doing what they love.

I swear I did not know he had anything to do with this. I’ve busked in Dublin, and I’m a ho for the mic.

On 26th September 2026, myself, Thought Brownie will be one of the musicians performing at The Music Scene on Church Street in Bangalore.

I filled out a form. Shared my details. Included a bunch of videos and my Instagram profile and was selected to perform. Ooooh yeah!

If you’ve read this far, I have two requests for you.

1. If you are in Bangalore, pull up to see me spit bars.
   
   Or if you know someone in Bangalore, please ask them to show up and see me perform.
   
   Date - Saturday, 26th September 2026
   Time - 1700 to 2000 (exact slot to be confirmed)
   Place - 1 Sobha on Church Street (Google Maps link)
   

2. I invite you to play a wholesome prank.
   
   Back in the day, I was mistaken for Mr. Menon on Twitter and faced a barrage of rage online.

   
   I wonder what would happen if people were go to his Linkedin and start leaving comments not meant for him.
   
   Call him Thought Brownie.
   
   Commend him for a great hip-hop performance. Encourage him for walking away from a cushy corporate job to start again later in life. That sort of stuff.
   
   Be nice and kind. Always.
   
   He is still getting random comments on his busking announcement from disgruntled BigBasket customers who don’t know he’s stepped away from the CEO role.

   

Trust me when I say I feel Mr. Menon’s pain.

If our paths cross on Saturday, I will for sure click a photo with him. Hopefully share a laugh or two about all that went down on Twitter in 2019.

As always, thank you for reading The Weekly Shuffle.

But when I finished writing this, Substack issued a warning that my post would be truncated on emails due to it being so lengthy.

Reading it this way would be a pain in YOUR ass, Dear Reader, and as much as possible, I’d like to avoid causing you inconvenience.

In the unlikely event you know about my Twitter-based mistaken identity misadventures, these two posts give you additional background.

Plus, the next post in episode 72 of The Weekly Shuffle, Part 2 of this series contains a 2026 update to the story.

Now, in true in medias res1 tradition, let’s start somewhere in the middle.

October 2019, Munich

Three of us friends, Sohan, Sai and I decided to go to Oktoberfest in Munich to fulfil a childhood dream.

On our second morning there, after an evening spent consuming and pissing out plenty of beer, Sai woke Sohan and me up with an uncharacteristic burst of high-energy excitement.

He was shouting loudly and beckoning to us from his bedroom. “Fuck you Hari! You bastard! I told you so! Woohoo!”

He said it a few times.

Sohan and I, both groggy and hungover, looked at each other, shrugged and trooped into his room to see what the commotion was all about.

Sai showed me an article written about me. That was my moment of internet virality.

My fifteen minutes of fame2.

Sometime in 2013, Bangalore

I was a brand new customer of this internet-based grocery delivery service named ZopNow. ZopNow was awesome.

They had light green cloth bags in which they packed fruits and vegetables, and delivered all sorts of groceries. Directly to our homes.

They became my regular dealer grocery supplier. I stopped going to the store unless there was something I needed urgently.

Over time, I began growing dissatisfied with ZopNow. Some of the items that they delivered were coated in dust. Especially milk cartons and other food items.

I complained to the customer service team. I told them I love their service, but I wasn’t a fan of the cement or the dust.

They shrugged it off, saying their warehouse was in an unfortunate location and that they couldn’t do anything about it.

I had to say goodbye to ZopNow. It’s not me, it’s you.

Hello BigBasket. Let’s see what you can do.

I switched from ZopNow to BigBasket. I enjoyed BigBasket’s service too.

I told my cousin Devrat about it. He also began ordering from them.

Back in 2013, when Twitter wasn’t X, and it wasn’t a cesspool of vitriolic discourse, people posted cute stuff.

I quit Facebook in December 2017. I deleted all my tweets in the early 2020s, but kept my account and revamped my profile to be a placeholder for my music. I don’t tweet at all.

I’ll spare you the trouble of going to my profile. This is what it looks like today.

I don’t have my old tweets. Nor do I have access to what my cousin posted.

What follows is a reconstruction of what happened, from my perspective. My memory in this matter serves me far too well.

Devrat tweeted:
Thanks (@)HariShenoy for introducing me to (@)BigBasket. No more grocery delivery woes.

BigBasket official account replied:
Thanks (@)Devrat (@)HariShenoy. We are so happy you love our service. Incidentally Hari is also our CEO.

2013 was a time when companies were slowly waking up to the idea that they needed social media presence. In 2026, people register social handles before they buy domain names or go register their entities officially.

The BigBasket handle was run by someone who a word or two.

Yup, that previous sentence missed a word or.

What the BigBasket twitter handle said:
Incidentally Hari is also our CEO.

What the BigBasket twitter handle should have said:
Incidentally our CEO is also named Hari. Hari Menon.

But an overzealous and enthusiastic social media manager in 2013 did not do that.

I read that tweet. Didn’t think too much about it. Devrat read that tweet. He joked that I was CEO. I said their social media manager a few words.

I thought that was the end of that.

Spoiler alert - It wasn’t.

2018 / 2019, Dublin

I moved to Dublin from Hyderabad in early 2018.

New city. New country. New continent.

I took comfort in the fact that my employer, Hoolicorp3, was going to be the same whether in Hyderabad or Honolulu or Hanoi or Dublin or Dallas or Durban.

Big mistake. Big big big mistake. Big big big big mistake.

The technical infrastructure was the same. The tools people used was the same.

The culture in the office was different.

I know the word “culture” when it pertains to a workplace is thrown around a lot without having an actual definition. It is seen as something binary. Culture at work is good. Or not.

Let me digress here to say that my definition of culture denotes how people interact with each other on a day-to-day basis to come together and get shit done. How they talk, how they act and how they treat each other.

I walked in naïve as fuck, assuming I’d fit in and work with a group of people who worked and behaved so differently. Internal job transfers do not follow the plug and play approach.

Over time, I adapted well enough to build great teams, do good work, get promoted, and have lots of fun, but it wasn’t without plenty of initial hiccups and missteps.

Big tech from the outside looks glossy, though there’s plenty of non-glossy mucky stuff that one consistently needs to navigate under the hood.

After I moved to Dublin, I felt lonely. This is not a sob story. I am just stating facts.

I was struggling on the domestic front. I was not doing well enough professionally.

We had moved to Ireland on a one way ticket. Had I fucked things up at my workplace and lost my job while on a non-EU visa that was tied to me staying with my employer, I would’ve been screwed.

My friends continued to be my lifelines, though they were mostly in India, with a few of them scattered all around the world.

If you are reading this - you know who you are, and I love you.

In the middle of all this, I noticed that my dormant twitter account began receiving plenty of notifications. Twitter sent me emails whenever I received a DM or a mention. Sometimes I got over fifty mentions in a day.

I logged in to see that I was being ripped apart by disgruntled strangers who were unhappy with their grocery delivery orders.

I was confused. I ignored the mentions. I updated my twitter bio.

I specifically called out that I AM NOT THE CEO of BigBasket.

I figured that would solve the problem.

Spoiler alert - It did not.

You see, BigBasket had grown like crazy from that time in 2013 when an overzealous social media manager had written that tweet which said “Hari is our CEO.”

In 2018, they received funding from AliBaba group, and received more money from investors. They began running TV and print campaigns.

They even enlisted Shah Rukh Khan’s assistance to endorse their brand.

Twitter had grown in India. It was being used by celebrities, politicians, and sports icons.

Riff-raff like me, and early adopters who were on the platform to goof off suddenly became part of the “old Twitter” subculture.

Twitter also became the largest public customer complaint forum.

As a result, someone at BigBasket had setup automated Twitter replies whenever someone tagged them, with standard responses such as (and I paraphrase) - “Your complaint is important to us. Please give us the order number and we will help you out.”

They figured that would solve the problem.

Spoiler alert - It did not.

The aggrieved customers began looking for higher-ups to complain to. The online equivalent of “I’d like to speak to your manager. NOW!”

They’d go to the search bar on Twitter and type “BigBasket CEO”. Out of all the search results, the one that popped up on top was the 2013 tweet.

The one that said:

Thanks (@)Devrat (@)HariShenoy. We are so happy you love our service. Incidentally Hari is also our CEO.

Fucked.

As a result, a hapless man living in Dublin would wake up each morning and look at his phone to find people baying for his blood on twitter because of challenges with their grocery delivery orders.

This wasn’t an improvement in my life.

I used to wake up each morning and check emails anyway, paying no heed to the fact that my stress levels were amplified because my mind was racing even before it had time to wake up fully.

At some point, something in me snapped.

I stopped ignoring the complaints on Twitter. Instead I began responding to them. I flexed my sarcasm muscles so much I got swole4.

At the outset, I was worried about someone suing me for my tweets. Or about someone at Hoolicorp finding out about these adventures and chastising me.

Stuff like this had happened before.5

I was imagining tabloid headlines such as - “Hoolicorp employee impersonates unicorn CEO on twitter to insult customers.”

Then I figured that my ass was covered. I had explicitly called out in my bio that I was not the CEO of BigBasket. Also, I never mentioned who my employer was on Twitter.

Feeling safe, I began writing to people who tagged me. I tried being selective. I left genuinely helpless people alone, hoping that BigBasket would solve their problems.

The entitled folks, those that resorted to extreme indignation and misplaced entitlement?

I rage-baited them. My intention was to amuse myself and those that followed me on Twitter. NGL, I loved the attention.

This was one place where at least someone seemed happy with me back then, and as always, it was all because of my writing.

I quote tweeted people and had a blast.

So much so that one person actually wrote to me saying my replies were “pleasantly sarcastic”, unlike any other unicorn CEO he had seen on twitter.

I loved the phrase. I included that in my twitter bio.

This went on for a few months in late 2019. My friends and I were having a laugh.

Then I went to Munich in October 2019.

The story continues in part 2. Episode 72 drops shortly.

Thank you, as always, for reading The Weekly Shuffle.

May all your grocery deliveries be completed on time. You have my blessings.

I was at Hoolicorp1, and my mind was muddled with company jargon.

My mind took me to A/B testing2. If you don’t know what it is, the footnote has plenty of details.

“A/B principle?”, I asked. I was puzzled.

“Avoiding boredom”, he responded with a cheeky grin.

That was one of my favourite conversations with this boss.

His character arc was like that of Jaime Lannister’s character in Game of Thrones, except in reverse.

In the first episode of Game of Thrones, you despise Jaime.

He pushes Bran Stark, a 10 year old boy, from the top of a high tower with no remorse.

“The things you do for love”, he said to Cersei before shoving Bran.

By the time you get to the final episode in season 8, you see him evolve as a person and you don’t want him to die.

I was a huuuuuge fan of this boss until I returned from parental leave and he turned horrible, but that’s a story for another day.

The first 80% of my time with him was incredible, and I will choose to forget the last 20%. Human beings are beautifully complex and messy. This boss was no exception.

When he said he worked to avoid boredom, that felt good to hear.

Finally, I had someone I looked up to that chose not to give me bullshit.

It inspired me to look within and understand if there were parts of work that I found boring. I wanted to avoid them as much as possible.

There will always be boring and unavoidable parts of work. No getting around that. Pointless meetings run by people who get paid more than you, for instance. Also a story for another day.

Which brings me to the topic du jour3, avoiding avoiding boredom.

Boredom - the evolution

Boredom is a signal we experience from within.

It is an urge to go do something else.

Back in the day, when our species was in hunter gatherer mode, boredom compelled us to go do something else.

If we didn’t do something else, we would have stayed in one place without hunting or foraging. Then our species would’ve died out, and there would have been no heaven, no countries, no religion, no possessions, no reels, and no Harlem shakes.

Doing something else led to movement, and took us to new places where there was food.

Our prehistoric ancestors were bored AF, as a result of which you are reading this.

The Death of Boredom

In the last twenty years, we’ve been spending most of our waking hours in front of some screen or the other.

Unless they have compelling reasons not to do so, the average human spends 7 hours in front of an internet enabled screen. Gen Z spends 9 hours+.

We’ve gone from not caring about screens to having a digital slot machine in our pocket.

I’ve mentioned this before too. Screen time is as bad, if not worse than smoking. Except screen usage is unregulated by most governments and societies, unlike cigarettes, drugs and alcohol.

Brain things

When awake, our brain is either in focus mode or in default mode.

Focus mode requires attention and energy. When we’re at work we are focused. When we are on screens even if we are not working, we’re still in focus mode.

Yes dear reader, doomscrolling or bingewatching is also focus mode.

I am as surprised as you are.

When we need to pay attention by being in focus mode all the time, it is equivalent to constantly lifting weights in the gym for hours .

Rep after rep after rep after rep.

That’s why even though I held white collar jobs and sat in front of a screen for a sizeable part of my professional life, without exerting myself, I felt tired as fuck at the end of the day.

Constantly being in focused mode leads to increased life dissatisfaction. More bleh.

I know that when I was in peak screen hogging mode, I was picky, impatient, distracted and demanding. That made me quite insufferable, even to myself.

When we’re not in focus mode, we’re in default mode.

I urge you to learn about the Default Mode Network.

I first came across this term in Michael Pollan’s book, "How To Change Your Mind”.

This book basically says, “bro try psychedelics in a controlled environment to make benefit your mind in particular and your life in general”.

However, before getting into specifics, Pollan also talks about the Default Mode Network (DMN).

When our brains are resting and chilling, the DMN gets activated.

Worst case, the DMN causes us to overthink. To ruminate. It is linked to our narrative self. The inner voice that tells us stories about ourselves and our life and how things are going.

When in overdrive, the DMN causes us to experience anxiety and depression4.

Best case, our DMN leads to mind wandering and day-dreaming. It can bring about spontaneous, unstructured thinking and is often associated with the creative and problem solving process.

History don’t lie. Even if these are embellishments, the following stories are compelling enough to make me want to get bored.

Archimedes was taking a bath when he figured out how to test the purity of gold in a crown and thus had his Eureka5 moment.

Newton all by himself sitting under a tree.
Apple falls and he discovers gravity.

None of the insanely creative people would’ve made the kind of art that enriches my life if they were in front of a screen all day, or if they weren’t giving themselves permission to be bored.

If boredom is eradicated, when will we go do something else?

Don’t Let Boredom Die

The Dutch have a practice called Niksen6.

It roughly translates to “Fuck productivity”.

Naah I’m kidding.

It means “do nothing”.

Don’t do anything for the sake of being productive. Don’t extract value out of every ounce of your life force.

Hang out. Touch some grass. Take deep breaths. Look up at the sky. Let your mind wander.

Do it intentionally for a certain part of your day. Everyday.

I found that carving out time to let myself be is one of the best gifts I give myself.
I call these my daily micro-vacations.

When my focus mode isn’t active, and my mind isn’t lifting weights constantly, I feel lighter, brighter and more upbeat. More curious, more optimistic. And I’d love for more people to feel this way.

Now that I think of it, perhaps Niksen actually does mean “Fuck productivity” after all.

Thank you for reading The Weekly Shuffle.

Go bore yourself.

I didn’t sign up for it. I was co-opted.

As the years progressed I moved through a mix of emotions while being in this relationship.

I felt awe. I felt powerlessness. I felt overwhelm.
As I grew up, critical thinking emerged.

Then I began questioning this relationship.
Challenging. Fearing. Loathing.

It got to a point where I decided to break-up after becoming aware of my own agency in the situation. It wasn’t a clean break. I kept doubting myself and questioning whether I had taken the right decision.

I went back to the relationship. I then went away. I returned again.

In those days, my relationship status would’ve read “It’s complicated”.

A few more years passed, and the complications began to unravel.

The passage of time can help clear the fog.

Pride and prejudice fell by the wayside. Sense and sensibility eventually prevailed.

The answer is crystal clear.

Now, whenever someone asks me what religion I practice, I tell them truthfully that I am single.

Religion and me

This post is not about my relationship to human beings. It is about my relationship with religion and spirituality.

I grew up Hindu. I had my thread ceremony in 1995.

My parents couldn’t afford to have a big function, so the four of us (my sister, my parents and I) went to our family deity’s temple - Shree Navdurga in Madkai, Goa and got this obligatory ritual out of the way.

I know, right?

Most people go to Goa to party or to escape reality. I went for my thread ceremony as a pre-teen.

I wore the sacred threads well into my early 30s and at some point, just gave up on it.

My mother taught me prayers. Said that belief is important.

It is possible these prayers helped me develop my memory and provided me with the foundations for unaided active recall1.

Being part of the Indian education system meant that I was conditioned from the get-go to maximise my grades. If I didn’t understand something, I would just memorise it, write it for an exam and be done with it.

That’s how I cleared my Microwave Engineering and Antenna Theory paper in in my engineering studies back in 2002. All I recall is the Yagi-Uda2 antenna.

I guess I was showing signs of being a Nihonjin-gao (Japanophile) before I turned 20.

In my 40s, unaided active recall has helps me remember lines and lines of verse, so my skills be doubling when I spit bars in bars in Dublin.

Prayer helps, after all.

Mythological stories depicted in books and on TV captured my imagination.

“Humans were used to flying in ancient India. They had television. They had state of the arts weapons through which to wage wars. These innovations were named based on the vocabulary of that time, and you find evidence of that in our great epics.”

I had elders often say this with enough belief to start believing this myth myself. They were great storytellers who had been told great stories.

Eventually, I began thinking for myself.

If God existed, I wondered, why did that superhuman entity do such a shitty job on some occasions and yet demanded blind faith and unquestioning reverence?

Why did God not take kindly to dissent?

For someone who felt extreme cynicism towards organised religion as a concept, I’ve been on quite the theological trip. I’ve enjoyed visiting holy places, especially ones where the atmosphere was serene and peaceful.

That ruled out all the major Hindu temples I went to.

No matter when I visited them, they were consistently crowded. One’s proof of piety lay in one’s ability to stoically endure long lines that culminated in a hasty encounter with the idols in the inner sanctum.

You got a hasty glimpse, you barely get a chance to touch the statue and then you are unceremoniously shoved ahead.

“Never meet your idols”, they say. I agree with the sentiment, especially if your idols do not talk to you.

Encounters with Monotheistic Religion

Any religion that says there is one true god, or that there is no god but god is a monotheistic religion.

My voyeuristic fascination for theology led me to visit to the holiest sites in Judaism, Christianity and Islam3 in my mid-20s.

Some of my contemporaries went to Ibiza. I walked the Stations of the Cross (ironically, I did that on Christmas day in 2010).

Whenever I want to revisit that journey, I go back to Guy Delisle’s book, Jerusalem.

Delisle shares his experiences of visiting the Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Al-Aqsa mosque, and the Dome of the Rock atop the Temple Mount.

The photos I took from my trip exist in some digital camera SD card that I have lost. I see no point in re-living too many memories, for space should exist for new ones to be created.

However, Delisle’s illustrations do a wonderful job of transporting me back in time, sixteen years ago.

I had inserted slips of paper within the cracks in the Western Wall praying for the good health of my family and friends, and prayed for our dog who had passed away earlier that year.

I went to Bethlehem on Christmas eve, curious to see what the fuss was all about.

The return journey that involved walking along the concrete wall erected by the Israelis, and passing through the border checkpoint that took a few hours was more eventful than what happened at the Manger Square.

The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem was serene. After the noise and chaos of the old city, this place was like an urban oasis.

Oh, I also hung out at the Vatican in 2016 for a whole day. Mostly for the art, though I confess I was thinking so much of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when I was there.

All these theological excursions were supposed to help me get clarity.

Except I was left more muddled than before.

Who is God, after all? Does she even exist?

Being Single

After years of thumbing my nose at people who were into meditation, I began my practice in earnest in 2022.

My cynical outlook towards meditation emerged because it was being prescribed by self-styled god-men. Followers of these leaders displayed cult-like behaviour and that made me stay away.

As a result, I also stayed away from meditation and felt smug for my choices.

However, from 2022, I have stayed consistent. I will soon complete five years of meditation.

I’ve felt immense benefits. My book reading habit has returned. My mind doesn’t wander like it did before. Things that are could’ve caused extreme emotional hurt have felt more manageable. I don’t react or feel triggered like I once used to.

I experience increased empathy and compassion towards everyone.

On the surface, I’ve been told I come across as having lower energy and being more passive. On the inside, I feel more centered.

The most important benefit from this practice wasn’t mental, emotional, physical or cognitive.

The most important benefit I felt was spiritual.

The best way I can explain it is that my main character energy has completely dissolved.

I have increased feeling of connectedness and compassion towards everyone, even those who have intentionally acted to hurt me or make me feel less than.

There is no self. There is no other. We are all one.

That’s why, if you ask me what religion I am, I will say I am single.

The religious philosophy that I found most inspiring came to me from my buddy, Gautama Buddha.

Here’s what he discovered during his own meditation practice.

My life is made worth it,
Every day, every minute
For the best reasons ever,
Because you are in it4

Thank you, dear divine being, for reading The Weekly Shuffle.

I like journaling. I write to myself. My journal is private.

I started journaling in earnest because I wanted to do things to stay away from my phone and clear my head.

I suspect I was, and to some extent, still am addicted to my phone. If I am not mindful, it is easy for me to turn to the device, unlock it and disappear from the world for more time than I’d like.

The dissonance I feel from being on my phone without good reason isn’t about productivity. I am not in search of lost time. I am done conflating my sense of self with measurable output.

It’s just that I feel like shit when I have been scrolling mindlessly. I can’t explain why. I wonder if you feel the same way too.

Journaling began as an escape from an escape.

Soon, it became one of those things that grounded me every day.

The word “Journal” comes from Latin diurnalis (of a day).

There are only three things you need to do to begin journaling.

1. Buy a journal. Any notebook will do.

2. Buy a pen. It shouldn’t be out of ink.

3. Write.

That’s it. Journaling is easy, mkay?

Although, I am sure you might wonder what to write. If I say write anything, it isn’t helpful. So let me get specific.

Here’s how I journal.

The stuff in Italics is what I wrote to myself. I’m sharing my journal entry for today to show you how mundane it can be.

This is like you seeing me at home in my sweatpants and an old t-shirt with a couple of holes in it, but damn that t-shirt feels good to wear so to hell with the fact that it is holey.

When I journal, I start with writing about something that happened during the day.

I do not document every single event. Every incident. I merely pick out one thing that I would like to write about, and then get going.

Today, I went to the store near my home to buy ice cream. That was the only time of the day that I stepped out. I did spend some time outdoors, though I paced on the terrace while listening to music on my headphones, letting the gentle evening breeze cool me down. Mysore is hot. I don’t remember it being this hot in September when I lived here as a kid or as a teenager.

Ideal ice cream has some awesome flavours. Sitaphal. I wonder why that fruit is called Sitaphal. Figs and honey. Chikoo. I’m grateful I got to buy them.

Banal stuff. Weather talk. Mild complaining about things I can’t change. Gratitude for ice cream.

Then, I write about something that went well during the day.

I spoke to Nimit today about the Clear Voice Club and we divided our work into three sections - Create, Convince and Communicate.

Create was about refining the landing page. Deciding that we will run free webinars to generate leads. Figuring out topics.

Convince was to ensure we connected with people to get sign-ups for the course. A spreadsheet has been made. Stuff is being written. We are reaching out to people.

Communicate is about how we partner together, how we communicate with the master class facilitators and what we say and when to the cohort participants. Delegated to future Hari and future Nimit.

There is progress. We’ve moved since yesterday.

Also finished watching Traitors Season 2. I think I am done with the show. It was fun when it lasted but I want to watch properly scripted content now. Enough reality is there, why should I see more of it on an OTT?

(Not part of the post. A plug for The Clear Voice Club program that Nimit and I have started. Three Saturdays. Ten masterclasses. Non boring. More details here.)

Then I write about something that did not go as well as planned today.

Every day, my to-do list has more items on it than I can get done and I end up feeling a little like shit. Then I need to bring in self-talk to cheer myself up. Am I being too ambitious and overestimating my capabilities? Or am I incompetent?

Perhaps I should make my to-do list at the end of the day. That way I will write down things that I’ve already done and strike them off. Then everything on that list will be complete. Voila!

Maybe we should have started promoting Clear Voice Club earlier. We have eleven days to go.

Once I have finished writing these three things - something that happened, something that went well, something that didn’t go as well as planned, I get to the part which I’ve now begun to enjoy.

Here’s where I have started to see long-term benefits from merely being able to sit with my thoughts.

I get to zoom out and understand how the things that took place today are part of my bigger picture.

Many philosophers have said that human beings are storytelling beings. That whether we choose to or not, there evolves a narrative about our lives to help us make sense of the time we’ve spent on the planet so far.

This narrative then shapes our view of ourselves, our view of the world and how we choose to move through it.

If a narrative is formed by default, and if stories are created by us in our own heads no matter what, I want to ensure that I can script my own story. Author my own narrative.

Better that I do this life-defining thing for myself than have someone else do it for me.

I wrote this after I was done with the first three paragraphs.

I continue to look back and tell myself that there are things I should have done. That those things would have helped take me closer to my desired outcomes. I beat myself up for inaction. For choices that I made which didn’t have the desired results.

I beat myself up for not exercising enough, and spending more time on my screen than I should. I chastise myself for the things that didn’t happen.

I find that ironic because I try to convince others to be kinder to themselves, while I am not able to get to 100% myself. Which explains the need for this inner dialogue.

Perhaps the big lesson for me is to continue anchoring on direction, not destination. There are no fixed destinations. After one thing is done, there is always the next thing to go for.

It has been a recurring theme. Get promoted at work. Celebrate for a few days, then start thinking of the next promotion or the next role.

That need to keep going for the next destination didn’t stop when employment and I parted ways. Soon after I finished staging my musical, I wanted to assess how I would do it differently. My friend Sohan (who, bless his soul, travelled to Dublin from Amsterdam and saw both shows) and I sat down and he gave me notes on what can be done to improve what was created for the next time I get to take this to stage.

Getting to the desired destination has never felt satisfactory, even though that’s what I have been gunning for.

Joy from achievement after achievement isn’t permanent. There will always be a million things that I would like to do next.

I either need to make peace with the mild undercurrent of dissatisfaction I feel within, or find ways to make that dissatisfaction disappear.

If I can practice radical acceptance towards the world, what stops me from practicing radical acceptance turned inward?

This conversation I have with myself gives me a chance to pause. I like the phrase, “direction not destination”. It feels soothing.

What’s the point of all this, you might ask.

It helped me reflect and assess.

I noticed that I paid attention. That I have gratitude. I observe patterns in how I think and act. I acknowledge momentum. I challenge myself. I berate myself sometimes, but try to pull it back to have a kind, benevolent inner voice.

When you journal, if you do it for long enough, your narrative evolves.

If your inner voice gets kinder, then what you have done will be worth it.

Keep a journal, will you? It will all make sense someday.

Thank you for reading The Weekly Shuffle.

This guy.

There are two sentences that he says frequently. More like chants frequently.

Dani Rojas. Dani Rojas. Dani, Dani Rojas. Dani Rojas.

And

Football is life.

Dani Rojas is like a raven haired golden retriever on the football pitch. His love for football and his joie de vivre is enough to lift me up when I’m feeling blue.

In comparison, I am like a mellow middle-aged chocolate labrador. I’ve gotten fairly chill in my early 40s, though I do have moments when I continue to get the zoomies.

Just like Dani Rojas, I have my own mantra.

Writing is Life

Writing is life.

Or if not, I’d like to say that the act of writing has helped me every time I’ve wanted good things to happen in my life.

I wrote my resume. Got jobs. Earned money. Paid rent.

I wrote my B-school application. Got an admit. Picked up a professional insurance policy.

I wrote letters. Lots of them. They helped me love the people who I wrote to even more, because thanks to them I was getting do what I love the most - to write.

I wrote songs. I wrote a musical (a hip-hopera). I put myself out there in ways that will make teenage Hari proud. I performed what I wrote in different venues in Dublin, in Mysore, in Bangalore, in Liverpool. I’m just getting started.

What I wrote took me to places and spaces I did not know I could go.

I write to myself. It helps me think. Helps me reflect.

I write to increase self-awareness. To help me understand myself. To create glimmers on dark days filled with doom and gloom. To amplify the light on bright, beautiful days, the kind of days when you wish you could keep time in a bottle.

I write on Linkedin to fuck around and find out (Henceforth referred to as FAFO - you’ll see this show up a few more times).

On that platform, I write things that I hope will entertain, educate or provide value to those reading what I churn out.

Sometimes, writing on Linkedin leads to meeting new people.

Clear Thoughts on Linkedin

I stumbled upon Nimit’s posts on Linkedin.

Nimit Kathuria and I have known each others’ names for a while now. Through a mailing list we’ve been part of. Through the Clear Writing Community founded by Amit Varma1, a writer who runs a course called The Art of Clear Writing.

(The note about Amit is lengthy. There’s good reason. Don’t miss it).

What made me reach out to Nimit were his posts on Linkedin.

Post 1 - This started as interview advice and ended with a Roadies2 reference.

I’ve interviewed 200+ people at my time in Hoolicorp. The process is intense and rigorous. I’ve hired 100+ people for my teams. Nimit’s post resonated so well with me as a hiring manager.

Post 2 - Uncle, you need a mic.

I used to complain a lot online. Like you’ve no idea. Or maybe you do. In which case, mea maxima culpa. I swear I’ve toned it down. However, when I see good reason for others to complain I enjoy reading their perspective.

Nimit landed on one such, where some people don’t take the mic when it is there and think about themselves, rather than about creating a good experience for their audience.

Post 3 - The cobbler’s children have no shoes.

Nimit wrote about posting in public and committed to writing and sharing his perspectives, so that it could bring him more connections, and more leads.

Seeing Nimit write in public was inspiring. Because FAFO, I slid into his DMs.

Thanks to this initial conversation, a few emails, spreadsheets and video calls later, the idea for the Clear Voice Club was born.

Clear Voice Club

Why are we doing this?

One - Nimit and I agreed that we want to play positive sum games with each other, with people we partner with, and those who will be part of the Clear Voice Club.

A positive sum game is a fancier way of saying “win-win situation”.

We want to win by making others win.

Two - We both enjoy teaching and facilitation.

Nimit founded the Clearthought Academy through which he runs popular programs, including a highly popular GenAI workshop for enterprises, to help companies move from “yo let’s play with ChatGPT and see what happens” to “let’s use GenAI to build business value”.

He’s part of the visiting faculty at Jai Hind College where he teaches brand management and marketing. He also guest lectured at XLRI Jamshedpur and SDA Bocconi.

I enjoyed my side quests in my big tech job in addition to my bread and butter role of leading sales teams and hitting quarterly revenue targets of $XXXMn.

One of my side quests was to coach and mentor people 1-on-1 on career development, story-telling, and concise customer communication.

Another side quest was to facilitate workshops to teach people different stuff - project management, business story-telling, and data visualisation.

During the pandemic, I got so bored with virtual meetings that I tried solving the problem by running a workshop (that I very creatively named) “Make Virtual Meetings Less Boring” for 3000+ people.

After consciously uncoupling from big tech, I guest lectured at Trinity Business School in Dublin where I taught B2B marketing.

I must say that the best thing I’ve done so far was to run poetry and rap workshops for school kids (classes 3,4,5 and 6).

Like I said, we both enjoy teaching and facilitation.

Three - both of have mortgages to pay. Enough said.

Is the Clear Voice Club for me?

The Clear Voice Club is for three groups of people:

1. Founders / co-founders of young companies
   You + your co-founders have a vision. You care so much about bringing this vision to life that you’ve gone through mad levels of red tape to get started.
   You want to hire great people, you want investors to give you money, you want customers to pay you.
   All this will happen if you can clearly, concisely and compellingly talk about who you are, what you stand for, and what you are doing.

2. Senior leaders in established companies
   Your reputation as a leader will attract or repel people. Rather than have stories told about you, take control of the narrative. Tell your own stories, both within the company you work at as well as in public.
   Hiring becomes easier. Your network expands. When your current company thinks you’re costing them too much money and shuts the door on you, you have many other doors that can open up.

3. You want to write under your own name

   But you are not sure where to start. You’re either a soon-to-be leader, an aspiring founder, or someone who wants to build a personal brand by putting yourself out there.

What will I get by the end of this course?

1. Evolve your Clear Voice - have compelling stories you can tell about yourself, your mission and vision.

2. Blunt and kind feedback from facilitators and mentors - Most well-meaning people don’t do more than like your posts. Our facilitators will be like great driving instructors and help keep you on the road.

3. A bank of stories that will act as seeds you can plant on different platforms - Linkedin, Substack, X, investor pitches, customer communication, panels, keynotes, podcasts and more.

4. A system to keep creating more such stories in a fast, easy and scalable manner - This way, you don’t have to sit at your desk each day waiting for inspiration to strike.

5. Clear Voice Club Community - Lifelong connections to people on a similar path as you (all cohort members, facilitators, mentors) so you don’t feel alone on this journey.

Cool story bro, but this is not for me because:

1. I don’t have time for this shit - Telling stories to bring people along is a critical part of your job. It is the part that makes the rest of the work land.

2. Writing in public is cringey as fuck - Granted, it might be total cringe when you start, especially if your posts don’t get attention. But everyone you follow started somewhere. Their first few posts didn’t get Yanni Laurel level virality.
   The first time you rode a bicycle you fell off. That did not stop you getting back on and going at it until you got it right.

3. Go away, I’ll get a ghostwriter - Then you might as well have the ghostwriter speak on your behalf at interviews, in high stakes meetings, on podcasts, keynotes and panel discussions. Leaders who craft their own stories come across as more authentic, compelling and charismatic.

4. I can always use AI - How much AI slop do you find inspiring? If you were an investor or a customer reading generic messages from a founder, how much confidence would you have in their ability to deliver?

Won’t this take a lot of time?

The first cohort will run on three Saturdays - 19th September, 26th September and 3rd October 2026.

We will do this online for 4 hours from 1000 IST to 1400 IST.

We understand screen fatigue. We will do whatever it takes to not be bored or to bore you.

Therefore, we promise to keep things crisp and engaging, with lots of breaks, and hands-on exercises.

There will be time to connect with facilitators and mentors 1-on-1 through the whole program.

Mentor Masterclasses

The masterclasses will be run by Sidin Vadukut, Deepak “Chuck” Gopalakrishnan, Utsav Mamoria, Niharika Anjan, Tanvi Agarwal, Devansh Malik, Vikramjit Chaddha and Aditya Ramakrishnan. (Linkedin profile links)

If you are unfamiliar with their names, no problem. Nobody’s perfect.

Each of them is an industry leader with deep expertise in writing / communication / story-telling challenges, and in their masterclasses each of them will focus on bringing value in three ways:

Now - helping you learn during the session

Next - exercises / homework that can help make your Clear Voice journey fast and easy

Long - ways in which to scale what you’ve learnt

Do check them out on Linkedin. They’re all awesome human beings!

How is the course worth the money?

The course costs INR 24,999 (early bird price - INR 14,999).

1. If you want to get 30 minutes 1-on-1 time with each facilitator, you will pay upwards of INR 100,000 combined. So this is a great package deal.

2. Imagine you are interacting with a VC. A crisp elevator pitch you develop in the Clear Voice Club lands you a meeting. One step closer to a term sheet. You’ll get a little more than INR 14,999 on a term sheet.

3. You have a ghostwriter / corp comm / marketing team. Their output is as good as the input you give them. If you pay a good writer INR 100,000 per month, great input from you developed through Clear Voice can amplify their output.

4. You run team meetings / all-hands. Assume each person minute costs INR 100. A team meeting of 10 people for one hour costs you INR 100 X 10 X 60 minutes = INR 60,000. For a 100 people all-hands, that goes up to INR 600,000.
   Improve the quality of your meetings for a month and boom shankar! ROI.

What exactly will be in this course?

Here’s the program details for all three Saturdays on the Clear Voice Club page

I have follow-up questions.

Three ways to get them answered:

One - slide into linkedin DMs.

Two - Email - hshenoy at cleershot dot com

Three - Book a 30 minute slot on this calendar link. Email me if you can’t find a slot.

Would you like to help, please?

Firstly, the fact that you’ve read this is awesome. Thank you. Means a lot!

There are a few simple ways in which you can help.

1. Sign up if this is for you.
   Signing up is easy. Here’s the link to the course page.
   

2. Share this substack post or the Clear Voice Club webpage with a person / people who might benefit from the Clear Voice Club.
   
   This offering is tailored towards start-up founders, senior leaders who want to build an audience and increase their credibility, anyone who needs to tell stories to influence their audience.
   

3. Give advice and / or blunt feedback.
   As my buddy Maya Angelou once said, when we know better, we will do better. Promise.
   

4. Share this post on Substack / Linkedin / Whatsapp groups with a blurb of your own so we get wider reach. Every little helps.

5. If we’re not already connected on Linkedin, here’s my profile and here’s Nimit’s profile.

Writing is life.

With your help and blessings, it can also be livelihood.

Thank you for reading The Weekly Shuffle.

When I sat at my desk to solve calculus problems, I did it for the grades.

When I studied the trajectory of celestial objects and how equations can predict them, I did it for the grades.

When I studied cleverly crafted, deeply reflective literature and poetry, I did it for the grades.

An undeniable way to suck out all the joy from something enriching and life-affirming is to bring grades into the picture.

Make it even worse by saying that these grades will make or break your future.

This kind of pressure was enough to curb-stomp the goodness I felt within me from discovering how the world was full of magic, patiently waiting for my senses to grow sharper.

Then I grew up, or so I thought.

I began doing it for performance ratings, and I did it for a pay raise.

When I did things at previous workplaces that I didn’t enjoy, I did it for external validation. I enjoyed the praise.

My inner child, as I found out, still did it for the grades.

They just had a different name - performance ratings, and a pay raise.

When my corporate job and I consciously uncoupled in 2025, I thought I’d finally get off the extrinsic motivation hamster wheel.

However, 40+ years of conditioning is hard to unlearn in a few months.

I began building habits through which I showed up consistently each day to do the things I wanted.

I found I was motivated by streaks. While external validation no longer featured, I still worked hard to earn my own love.

Unconditional love is tough to direct inwards, though I’ve been successful in channeling it outward. Ich hoffe, du hast es nicht vergessen.

Chasing streaks by showing up every day eventually fell by the wayside. I learnt that I didn’t need to push myself to do the things I loved doing. That behaviour became default.

Since then I’ve started doing things only for the sheer delight they bring me.

And that includes reading poetry.

Just because.

Reading Poetry versus Reading Prose

Once upon a time ago, I didn’t have patience to read poetry.

Poetry requires a different reading approach, that I hadn’t been attuned to.

I was used to prose. Parse sentence after sentence. Slow down or speed up based how much I understood of the sentence.

Sometimes, if things got complicated, I’d read the paragraph again, or skip it entirely and hope that I didn’t miss too much by choosing to ignore the tough, rubbery bites in an otherwise well prepared literary dish.

Reading poetry, on the other hand required a lot of patience.

I learnt that I need to know how lengthy the poem is right at the start, so that I can choose how to pace myself to savour the words and the rhyme and the meter.

If it didn’t rhyme, then the poem needed even more work to comprehend.

I straight up give up on poems that are too abstract for me, because not all art speaks to everyone all the time, and that is perfectly okay.

I’ve enjoyed reading poems like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge. This poem once appeared in my Class 10 English textbook and as much as I liked it, I also felt bleh about it because I had to study it for my exams.

Now I read poetry ONLY because the words are awesome, well put together and spending that time brings me joy,

Not because I need to answer someone who will evaluate me and give me grades.

There are more such poems that light up my days. In particular those written by Emily Dickinson and by Robert Frost.

The Sound of Sense

And you read your Emily Dickinson
and I my Robert Frost
and we note our place with bookmarkers
that measure what we’ve lost

from “The Dangling Conversation” by Simon and Garfunkel

One of my favourite poems is “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost1.

My curiosity led me to stumble upon some letters that Frost wrote to his friend2. In those letters, Frost speaks of two concepts that felt interesting - the “sound of sense” and the “sentence sound”.

This is the closest we will get to understanding how Frost thought of poetry in his own words. A few excerpts below for your reading pleasure.

It is so [by listening to sentence-sounds] and not otherwise that we get the variety that makes it fun to write and read.

The ear does it.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

I have known people who could read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them.

They can get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work.

Having been an “eye reader” before, I can vouch for the fact that I tuned into the meaning and the narrative, and missed out on the sounds that the words made.

I don’t think eye readers are bad readers, they merely skip one part of the reading experience.

To judge a poem or piece of prose you go the same way to work—apply the one test—greatest test.

You listen for the sentence sounds.

If you find some of those not bookish, caught fresh from the mouths of people, some of them striking, all of them definite and recognizable, so recognizable that with a little trouble you can place them and even name them, you know you have found a writer.

Who has time nowadays to listen to the sentence sounds? I don’t know.

I’m trying to find time because I’ve seen how life-changing good words can be, and I have come to believe that a chance to pay attention is a gift that also always leads to rewards.

Just so many sentence sounds belong to man as just so many vocal runs belong to one kind of bird.

We come into the world with them and create none of them.

What we feel as creation is only selection and grouping.

We summon them from Heaven knows where under excitement with the audial imagination.

The humility in Frost’s admission feels liberating to me.

We come into a world where words and sounds exist.

What we feel as creation is just us stringing already existing words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into pages, pages into chapters, and chapters into books.

So we might as well rearrange words in a way that they slay.

Finally, here’s the last thing I will share with you that my buddy Frost said:

If we go back far enough we will discover the sound of sense existed before words.

That something in the voice or vocal gesture made primitive man convey a meaning to his fellow before the race developed a more elaborate and concrete symbol of communication in language.

I kinda get why Frost is so revered.

There are two layers to how he writes.

There’s his intelligence through which he tells a story that can be sensed from the sentences.

There’s also this primal aspect to his craft, that transcends the words alone and provokes me into paying attention to the sounds.

Check out the whole poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” below. I have highlighted the end-rhymes, and showed you how Frost constructed the rhyme scheme.

Beyond the end-rhymes, there were plenty of words that were repeated. Woods appears four times in sixteen lines. Stop / stopping shows up too.

The words are simple. There’s nothing grandiose about Frost’s vocabulary in this poem.

I now get the connection between the way great poems are composed, and the way that some hip-hop verse sounds so alluring.

When I read lyrics, cleverly constructed bars with end-rhymes, internal rhymes, alliterations, and assonance now look like different drum sounds and the word patterns make sense through sounds as much as through the meaning of the words used.

Back in 2022 / 2023 when I was working on my debut album, the same Robert Frost poem had popped up in mind.

These words are part of my track, “In Medias Res”3.

I enjoyed making references to the myth of Sisyphus (roll my rock up this slope) and to Robert Frost (through fire, through Frost) and a line from his poem (with promises to keep) and tying it all together with how writing bars helps me find peace through (external) turbulence and (internal) turmoil.

I’d like my words to matter,
much after I’ve ceased to be.
Before that, though,
I have places to go,
Before that, though,
I have people to see.
I have miles to flow,
before I sleep.
Before I’m laid to rest in our forest,
finally at peace, six feet deep.

Sleep well, gentle reader.

Thank you for reading The Weekly Shuffle.

I love my father at all times, though he doesn’t makes it easy for me to like him at all times.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he said the same thing about me.

In Bangalore, I got to spend time with two friends, Prasad and Dhruv.

Prasad’s son Evaan is ten. Dhruv’s son Rumi is three.

I’m a big fan of both Rumi and Evaan, and thankfully they both seem to enjoy hanging out with me too.

Evaan and I watch ten minute Youtube videos with titles that say “If you laugh twice you’ve lost”.

I lose in the first thirty seconds and keep giggling away, though Evaan does his best to stifle laughter until it’s no longer possible, and then he’s rolling on the couch laughing his ass off.

Rumi has a remote controlled car and he enjoys making a few of us stand in line and drives the car between our feet. That’s the one time I’ve felt like the Colossus, with a car passing between my feet just like how I imagine ships sailing in and out of the Rhodesian harbour.

Dhruv told me how Rumi and him have playtime each evening, and how it is a shared ritual they both look forward to. Three year olds love playtime.

Evaan, who at ten, is a newly appointed school prefect and secretary of the quiz club, bonds with Prasad when they play badminton and watch movies together.

Recently, Prasad, Evaan and I watched Ip Man.

If you don’t know, Ip Man is the story of a legendary kung fu master named, you guessed it, Ip Man.

Can you imagine how cool you must be if your passport name already sounds like a superhero name?

The characters in Ip Man speak in Chinese (I presume in Cantonese and not Mandarin because this movie was made in Hong Kong), which we saw dubbed in English.

The movie features Japanese soldiers whose words aren’t dubbed. So they sound the most authentic of all characters.

As a result, we experienced a Cantonese movie in English and Japanese.

It was thrilling to see all three of us feel the same jaw-dropping awe from the action sequences in the movie. Two 43-year old men and a ten year old boy, all of us swept away in the masterful choreography of the wing chun kung-fu style fight sequences.

Prasad later told me that he picks movies that he can watch with his son, just to see the looks of shock, horror, awe, wonder, and delight on his face.

He said that the movie that blew Evaan’s mind, and one that the two of them can watch on repeat is Terminator 2 - Judgement Day.

I heard from my friend Praveen a.k.a PGK that when Terminator 2 was released in 1991, there was no mention of Arnold Schwarzenegger being the hero in the movie.

The posters just showed his face, same as with the first Terminator movie from 1984.

Even as the movie unfolds, until T-800 (Arnold) rescues John Connor (Edward Furlong) from T-1000 (Robert Patrick) in a mall, the audience had no clue that Arnold was playing the role of the good guy.

Imagine the audience’s surprise when they find out that Arnold has gone from killing machine in the first part of the movie to saving machine in the sequel.

When I got to see Judgement Day, a friend of mine had already told me the story.

On a long bus ride in the morning that took us around half of Mysore before dropping us off to school, one of my classmates told me the plot.

He did a lovely job of telling me the story in vivid detail.

Of how the T-1000 was able to put himself back together from molten metal. He described that scene where one piece of metal is absorbed into the T-1000’s shoe after a car chase sequence.

How Arnold was able to reload a shotgun with one hand. How John Connor rescues his mother Sarah with the help of Arnold.

As a result, I was aware of some of the spoilers even before the opening credits began.

This is similar to how I got immersed in the Harry Potter universe. I read book 4 - The Goblet of Fire first, then read books 1,2, and 3 and was able to get on track before book 5 - The Order of the Phoenix was released.

In 2022, I read all the seven books in sequence and I wouldn’t mind going through that journey all over again in a few years from now.

Movies with my Father

The conversations with Prasad and Dhruv about movies and shared experiences with their sons reminded me of when my father used to take me along to watch movies in Mysore.

Between a job where he worked 0800 to 1700 for six days a week, (Thursdays being his weekly day off) and dealing with his own life, with his family and everything else that it entailed, I am grateful to my father for carving out time to help me enjoy cinema.

Our ritual, if I can now call it that, was as follows - my father would return home from work. He’d ask me to get ready. I don’t remember him giving me advance notice. He’d just tell me that we’re heading out, and I’d gleefully abandon my homework and join him.

He took me along on his motorbike, a 1975 Yezdi with a two-stroke 250CC engine to one of many movie halls in the city.

Before we picked up tickets, we’d go to a bakery nearby and buy egg puffs or something else to munch on, and then it was time for the show.

I’ve seen all sorts of movies with my father. We watched Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, and I learnt about the search for the holy grail. We saw Speed, and I remember being so mind blown all through, (and also wondering how Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock would fare as a couple).

My father took me to watch Short Circuit, Back to the Future (and I wanted a hoverboard so bad after seeing part 2), Prahaar (written and directed by and starring Nana Patekar) and a few other movies in the early 90s.

Soon after, I began going to the movies with my friends, and then, as time passed, started enjoying watching movies all by myself.

I didn’t watch Terminator 2 with my father, though he did take me to see the first Terminator movie. Which, in hindsight was surprising because the movie was rated A, and it looks like he either didn’t know or didn’t give a fuck. Regardless, I was delighted.

Terminator was originally released in 1984. It had a re-release in the 90s and was being screened in Skyline cinema in Mysore.

The first Terminator movie featured intense amounts of foul language (and if I didn’t know how to say “fuck” before the movie began, by the time it ended, I was a fucking expert) and also had partial nudity.

Naturally, we didn’t talk about any of these things when the movie was done. Post-movie debriefing wasn’t part of our ritual.

By the time the show was over, the sun had set. We’d head home to have dinner. I sat behind my father on his motorbike, my head swimming with all that I had seen on screen, feeling the cool breeze on my face as we passed along tree-lined roads adjacent to Kukkarahalli lake, with me usually sporting a huge grin on my face.

I used to be envious of Kevin Arnold from The Wonder Years, because of all the times his father Jack would sit down and talk to him, and help him navigate life.

My father and I did not have that kind of a relationship. I learnt later that most Indian fathers of that time were not programmed with this particular feature in their operating system.

His love language, I now realise, was one where he asked me to go along with him to the cinema hall, so we’d both forget about life for a while.

That made me deeply aware of how much fun I have each time I watch a movie, listen to music, go to a concert, or perform music with someone who matters to me.

I crave for more such shared experiences.

Sharing art, after all, is caring.

The Eternal Return shows up in Nietzsche’s last book, Ecce Homo (How One Becomes What One Is) as a thought experiment:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you:

“This life as you now live and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again;

and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.

If I have led a life that is the most authentic version of me, then I would be comfortable answering the demon with a resounding “fuck yeah!”.

On the one hand, there are parts of my life that I would love to live over and over again, while there are parts that I’d be more than okay skipping past.

On the other hand, if not for every thought, every circumstance, every choice, every action, every wonderful person who I have come across, my life wouldn’t have been what it is today.

So I suppose I wouldn’t want it any other way.

All this popped up in my mind thanks to a few lines in the first page of Kundera’s masterpiece.

IQ84 by Haruki Murakami has ample references to Sinfonietta, an orchestral work by the Czech composer Leos Janácek.

In IQ84, it is not possible for me listen to Janácek’s work.

Though the fact that Murakami gives so many fucks about this piece of music and refers to it multiple times made me curious enough to give it a listen.

Most recently, Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr had a throwaway paragraph on Miserere by Gregorio Allegri, and exploring that piece of music and writing about it1 helped me understand why Mozart was considered a musical genius.

My appreciations for a work of art or literature is enhanced by paying attention to the works of art or literature that they in turn make references to.

This is not an isolated phenomenon.

Every artist worth their salt whose work has stood the test of time has unabashedly admired other artists that came before.

There’s a certain sense of humility within them and appreciation they have for works that influenced them that they choose to depict in their own creations.

An acknowledgement that their work wouldn’t have been possible if not for the giants on whose shoulders they’ve stood, to get a better view of the horizon.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

I got hold of Orbital by Samantha Harvey on my library app.

Orbital won the Booker prize a couple of years ago.

The story is set in a space station orbiting our planet and a quarter of the way in, I can already see this being a beautiful book incorporating elements that make me feel in awe of human scientific progress, in love with the tenderness of human connections and inspired by human forays into arts and culture.

Just like with Kundera, Akbar, and Murakami, Harvey also makes references to works of art in her book.

Harvey introduces Shaun, an astronaut, by telling us a story of how he thought art classes futile when he was a fifteen year old school kid.

Instead of showing us how Shaun found art was bleh, Harvey chooses to spend a whole page telling us the story of Las Meninas by Diego Velasquez.

What I loved about Las Meninas

When I visited the Prado museum in Madrid, I confess I did not pay much attention to Velasquez.

I was there in 2019. I was a completely different person.

I had been so taken in by Goya that I spent a significant amount of time staring at The Second of May 1808, The Third of May 1808 and Saturn eating his son - all of which had some incredible back stories and so many other stories embedded within the paintings themselves.

I also remember losing track of space and time in front of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.

My mind becomes a garden
of earthly delights,
It’s not a cryptic tryptich
It’s clear as daylight
I put in the work
Feel delight
When I get to write
I’ll add brightness to your life
Before I fade into the night

I have no recollection of seeing Las Meninas2 during my time there, which just means that I am giving future Hari an assignment to return to the Museo Del Prado to stare at other paintings.

Now that’s the kind of good work that I like delegating to my future self.

Las Meninas (ladies-in-waiting) is supposedly one of the most studied works of art ever.

There are many things going on in this painting.

This is a gigantic work of art, more than three metres tall and almost three metres wide.

The person most prominently visible in the foreground is the five year old Infanta Margaret Theresa, who is the daughter of the King and Queen of Spain.

She is surrounded by a few people in her entourage. Maids-in-waiting. Chaperones. Two dwarves. A dog who looks bored.

There is also a person who is either entering or exiting the room through the stairs as seen in the background.

There is a mirror through which you can see King Philip and Queen Mariana. You are left wondering whether the painting is the royals’ view of the room or not.

The two details I found the most interesting were that Diego Velasquez chose to insert himself into the picture, prominently, holding an easel and painting a huge piece of canvas.

It reminds me of how rappers drop their own names in songs they write.

Or how Urdu poets such as Mirza Ghalib threw in their own names into verse.

इश्क़ पर ज़ोर नहीं है ये वो आतिश ‘ग़ालिब’,
जो लगाए न लगे और बुझाए न बने।

Ishq par zor nahi hai ye vo aatish Ghalib
ki lagaye na lage aur bujhaye na bane

My interpretation of this verse:

Passionate love is an uncontrollable flame.

As a lover, I surrender to love’s fiery intensity. Igniting the flame, or putting it out is not within my power. I have no choice but to helplessly surrender to its glory.

There are two paintings that hang in the background as seen in Las Meninas. They were put in there by Velasquez as a tribute to one of his favourite painters, Peter Paul Rubens.

These two paintings are stories of mortals challenging gods in Roman mythology and facing the consequences of their transgressions.

One painting is by Rubens himself - Minerva punishing Arachne.

This depicts a weaving contest between the Goddess Athena and the mortal Arachne. Athena challenges Arachne. Athena loses. She is unhappy so she berates Arachne for daring to do one better than the gods.

When Rubens painted Minerva punishing Arachne, he included glimpses of another painting within it, by the Italian renaissance painter Titian.

So Velasquez painted a Rubens painting within which there was a painting by Titian.

The two paintings in turn were based on stories from Roman poet Ovid’s epic poem, Metamorphoses.

Metamorphoses is a long, long, long poem that tells the story of humanity from the time of its origins (the myth of creation, Adam and Eve and all that) all the way until when Julius Caesar was elevated to the status of a god after his assassination.

Art within art within art within art.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey made a reference to Las Meninas by Diego Velasquez. Las Meninas paid tribute to works by Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens paid tribute Titian. The paintings shown in Las Meninas referred to scenes from Metamorphoses by Ovid.

All of this makes me question - how many new, original thoughts actually exist? How many stories that we’ve encountered are new stories?

Aren’t all our thoughts and emotions and ideas just born over and over again in new places, within new minds at different times?

Is everything returning eternally?

The first was Aavesham1, about three college kids whose lives get entangled with Ranga, a gangster with a heart of gold played by Fahadh Faasil.

Coincidentally, Kumbalangi Nights also stars Fahadh Faasil, and while he plays an important role in the movie, his character isn’t central to the plot.

I’m doing my best to be intentional about what I consume, and Malayalam movies, as I mentioned before, have been universally appreciated by many friends of mine - all of whom have good taste in movies, and great taste in friends.

My need to be intentional emerged from years of experiencing decision fatigue thanks to which my brain turned into lumpy gravy. I’ve since spent years unfucking my wiring to help me experience clarity and tranquillity in my mind.

A slight digression from the movie, though I’ll bring it all home eventually.

I’ve came up with the 5C approach to help my mind be at peace. Also because my MBA needs some return on investment through creating memorable frameworks.

5Cs - Create, Consume, Contemplate, Cleanse and Connect.

Creating for me is synonymous with writing or making music. The privilege of doing this, for me, is my reward.

Consumption is about the time I spend in reading, listening, or watching stuff. Once upon a time ago, I was heavily reliant on algorithms to surface long and short form content for me to consume.

One day in 2021, I spent five hours on Tiktok until my phone battery was drained. I felt intense self-loathing that I didn’t want to experience ever again, and so I took steps to change what I consume and how.

I sometimes find myself doomscrolling on instagram even now, and while you, dear reader are free to do what you choose to with your time, I’ve found reels and posts to be like potato chips for my brain.

Temporarily delightful, but otherwise unhealthy and unfulfilling.

Now my consumption is better regulated with the return of my reading habit and the joy I feel from being undistracted for long-ish periods of time.

Cleansing, which I didn’t pay attention to, and was dismissive of in my 20s and 30s, is now a daily ritual to help me keep it together. I recommend any meditative practice that can help.

Contemplation / reflection is new-ish to me. I used to be uncomfortable sitting by myself with my own thoughts. My inner voice was critical. Often unkind. That inner voice has developed a few shades of benevolence and compassion too.

Contemplation has helped me cultivate self-awareness.

As my ancient Greek friends used to say - “Γνῶθι σεαυτόν” (gnothi seauton) - know thyself. Easier said than done, and as I rediscover each day, an entire lifetime spent trying to know oneself isn’t enough.

Connection - being able to have good conversations, have shared experiences with fellow human beings, whether single-serving or long-standing, is the only aspect of my 5Cs that I can’t do in isolation.

I’ve withdrawn from people a bit more than I expected to, but I’ve begun changing, thanks to my friends Brian Molko and Stefan Olsdal (of the band Placebo) who taught me that without you, I’m nothing2.

Technically, none of the other four Cs would be possible if not for fellow human beings.

If two of them hadn’t liked each other enough in July 1982, I wouldn’t have existed nine months later.

If humans hadn’t created art and literature, equipped me with the tools to create, shown me the path to meditate or shown me the value of contemplation, I’d be up shit creek without a paddle.

Thanks to all this, and because I get by with a lot of help from my friends, I found myself watching Kumbalangi Nights.

Kumbalangi is a fishing village in Kochi. In the movie, four brothers (Saji, Bonny, Bobby and Franky) live in a half-constructed house, open to the elements.

The movie is about the way their lives overlap, about how they have conflicts amongst each other, and about how they bond under duress.

However, it is also about so much more than that.

Kumbalangi Nights is the love story of Bobby and Baby.

Baby deals with Bobby’s advances as he tries to kiss her by admonishing him and drawing clear boundaries. Bobby eventually gets his shit together to understand enthusiastic consent.

Both of them encounter situations where they feel like breaking up with each other. Tensions run high, conflicts take place - though before they split for good, one of them steps up, shows vulnerability and chooses to repair the rupture.

Bobby tells Baby a story of the Murrel fish. While it is just part of the flow of conversation between the two, it left me with plenty to think of.

Murrel fish, when alone are aggressive and difficult to catch. However, when their young ones gather around them, they let their guard down and stop fighting. Fishermen are able to capture Murrel easily in shallow waters, especially during breeding season.

Little people in one’s life can do that to some of us. Expose vulnerabilities. Make us more fragile.

I speak for myself and say I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Kumbalangi Nights is the story of toxic masculinity.

Shammi, played by Fahadh Faasil moves into a matriarchal household where his wife (Simmy) lives along with her sister (Baby) and their mother.

He assumes the de-facto role of the “man of the house”, speaks over the women and chooses to impose his perspective on them even in instances when it is uncalled for.

Not only that, he goes off the rails in the most unpredictable way, but I’d rather you watch the movie and find out for yourself.

Kumbalangi Nights is the story of masculine vulnerability.

Saji, the oldest brother has trouble managing his anger. It shows up on multiple occasions.

He has a physical conflict with Bobby early on in the movie in a single take scene where Bobby is eating lunch with his hand, and then they both fight.

I had hoped Bobby would wash his hands before they began beating each other up, because I am the kind of person that forgets it is a movie and starts thinking of all the extra work that will go into cleaning up after.

Saji gets into other conflicts, and a tragic turn of events leads him to sign up for therapy.

Without spoiling anything, I want to applaud the scene where Saji cries so much that the therapist’s light pink shirt turns dark pink from all of Saji’s tears.

Kumbalangi Nights is a well written story. I am grateful to all the people who brought it to life. It created plenty of space in my mind for contemplation.

Every person is like a book. A fictitious character, even more so, because they have been brought to life through the written word.

Getting to glimpse a few pages from the books of every character written in Kumbalangi Nights has enriched some pages in the book of my own life.

Go on, watch the movie already. You’re welcome!

More than twenty years ago, when they chose to move here and grow roots, I had been disgruntled by how far removed their home was from all the happening places in the city.

Today, as Mysore continues to grow much beyond the confines of the city’s outer ring-road, I am grateful that their home is far removed from all the happening places in the city.

There is a certain sense of tranquillity that I experience when I am here.

I sit on the floor of their terrace on most days and find myself staring up at the sky.

There’s plenty of traffic in the air and depending on the time of day, I get to see kites, eagles and buzzards circling the skies, or get to glance at a pandemonium1 of parakeets flying off noisily like a bunch of school students who’ve just been let out of class, or see large fruit bats demonstrate air superiority by gliding majestically as twilight dims to clear the way for the night.

On some evenings, I take a walk around the locality. There is a road that extends all the way from one end of the neighbourhood to the other, with a divider in between. This is the de-facto “main road”, though it seldom sees much vehicular traffic.

The road is filled with people walking along its length and doubling back up a few times over, like swimmers doing laps in a pool.

At the end of this road is a fence that was recently erected to demarcate the boundary of our locality. Just outside the fence lies an empty plot of land that I used to visit frequently in the 2010s when I came to Mysore, because my father had buried our dog there.

I wasn’t around when she died. I had just started a new role in Gurgaon right after graduating from B-school. Our dog was around for just over seven years, and left all of us better than we were before she came into our lives.

That’s something I learnt from her, to have a good purpose to strive for - without overstaying my welcome, in the time that I have left, to leave people and places better than I found them (as best as I can).

It’s all part of the masterplan.

Last evening I stepped out because I had snack cravings.

Dublin, for all the delights on offer has a food culture that’s substantially different from what exists in Indian cities.

In Dublin, snacks are available mostly at coffee shops. They tend to open early. Independent shops shut by 1600. The chain stores stay open a little later, but not by much. Most restaurants close by 2100. Most people are done with dinner before 1900, and those that can and choose to, step out for drinks in pubs in the evenings.

In India, meal times are different. There’s more food available for more time during the day. Mysore is no exception. I went out onto the “main road” hoping that the one store serving chaat2 was open.

(Main road photo from 2022, way before the streetlights had been installed)

The main road was surprisingly crowded near the shop I was planning to visit. From a distance, I could see plenty of people gathered around in conversation.

As I got closer, I noticed someone speak into a microphone and give a speech. People from the locality had come together to applaud the efforts of a few folks who had worked to get the entire road lit up with solar powered lights.

They were distributing sweets and cheering politely, while I cut through the crowd and strode purposefully, with chaat on my mind.

The chaat shop had closed for the evening, and I had to make do with some ice cream from another store nearby.

However, as I returned home along the main road, I found myself walking alongside two elderly gentlemen on bicycles who were pointing and clicking at the streetlights, which were getting lit up one by one.

The two of them cycled towards each light, stood under it, pressed something that looked like a remote control. Or like Albus Dumbledore’s luminator / deluminator.

The lights came on. They looked at each other and smiled brightly. Rinse and repeat.

By the time I walked to the end of the road, they had lit up the entire street and were cycling back towards where the crowd was, their beaming faces looking brighter in the new light.

I applauded them as they went by, promising myself that I’d do that each evening I saw them switching the lights on.

There’s plenty darkness out there. Celebrate every single person who brings glimmers into your life.

In the last few months, I’ve stumbled upon songs that turned out to be absolute anthems.

Soaring, pulsating, uplifting, inspiring pieces of music that kept my heart thumping in my chest like a metronome fully in sync with the purest parts of someone else’s heart and soul.

One such track is This Beautiful Life by Colony House1.

I don’t know where, when and how this song popped up on Spotify. I am grateful that it did.

If you look up Colony House on streaming services, This Beautiful Life isn’t in their top ten songs. It is the last track on their second studio album, Only The Lonely which came out in 2017.

What in the world are we doing here?
What is the meaning of it all?
To fall in love,
to make a life
that’s calm and stable
Or just to find a place where I belong?

There have been plenty of times when I’ve heard this song on loop, as I’ve been staring out the window on a bus on Navan Road late in the evenings after I was done performing at open mics on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and if I were lucky, on the occasional Wednesdays and Fridays too.

These bus rides have always inspired moments of reflection and quiet contemplation.

What in the world am I looking for?
What is the peace that I can find?
This longing for,
I can’t ignore
but am I able
To see the good and taste it on my tongue?

Most evenings, I’d share the bus with people who were wrapping up the late shift, their tired eyes seeking refuge in the comforting glare of their screens.

On rare occasions, I’d strike up brief, pleasant conversations with strangers next to me if they weren’t on their phone.

Such instances get rarer with each passing day.

Well I go to water to find innocence
Breathe deep the air to fill my lungs
And beauty sings his songs to me
Every note I follow
To find out where
The voice is coming from

I’ve memorised the sequence of bus stops from my home in Ashtown Grove to Bachelor’s Walk near O’Connell Bridge, much the same way as I once knew all the stations that the passenger trains stopped at between Mysore and Bangalore.

I’ve also learnt how to say the names of all the stops in Irish. The ones in Dublin, not the ones between Mysore and Bangalore. Now, that’s a bridge too far.

And I can't be satisfied
This world has long been dry
What does it cost
to find a home
For what's been lost?

Moments like these are when I’ve found my mind to be the most fucked - in those liminal spaces between the performance venue and my doorstep when I’ve been coming down from the high of being on stage.

I’m not yet ready to think of what I need to do the next time on stage, and in these moments, I find myself questioning my life choices, thinking of circumstances, of people I love as much as life itself, while I prod myself to find peace and purpose.

Well maybe I'm a part of something
that's bigger than me
Like I'm a page in a book in a library
And inside my heart
there's a dying part
that's always searching
'Cause I know that there's
a place where I belong

The disorientation through life-quakes in 2025, and the need to turn to music and writing as the most meaningful coping mechanism available to me is only possible because it didn’t feel right to curl up in a ball and lie on the floor for days on end.

That’s not what writers should do.

Sorry. I am not going to speak for any other writer.

That’s not what THIS writer will do.

All that I know
Al that I see
All that I feel
Inside of me
All that I've done
All that I've tried
There must be more
To this wonderful
Terrible
Beautiful life

As my favourite philosopher Simone Weil once wrote, “Love is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.”

For those who could do with a glimmer in the dark2, I’d like to reassure you.

There is definitely so much more to this wonderful, terrible, beautiful life.

I remember that precise moment when it hit me. I was curled up in bed in a service aparthotel in Hvalstad, a suburb on the outskirts of Oslo.

It was 2006. That was the first time ever that I had been abroad.

I didn’t go on my own dime, of course.

Back then, I was employed by a software services firm that used to get “business development” visas for engineers and expect us to go and work in client offices on short term assignments. It wasn’t “business development”, it was full fledged coding.

The company paid us a modest per diem to help us get by, while continuing to pay our Indian salaries.

Through this loophole, the company and the overseas client both evaded the hefty taxes and paperwork that came with having a full time worker on contract in their office.

I figured all this out when I was coached to say something that was different from reality to the immigration officers at passport control, but I wasn’t going to take the moral high ground if it cost me a chance to travel abroad.

My first international flight was from Bangalore to Frankfurt, and from there on, I took a flight from Frankfurt to Oslo.

Settling into a new place in a different country was funny.

I hadn’t accounted for how early the sun would rise and I had forgotten to change the timezone on my analog wrist watch.

As a result, I found myself all bright and ready, at the opposite end of the hangover spectrum at 0500 on my first day.

As the end of my trip approached, I adjusted to the timezone and to the Norwegian / European way of life. In my office in Bangalore, we were all expected to wear shirts and trousers, and look professional.

I loathed that shit.

I will forever be ready to die on a beach to fight against a mandated dress code for employees of most professions, with notable exceptions being applied to anyone who needs to wear protective clothing for their health, safety and well-being.

I stopped letting my hair behave and sit neatly in one place with copious effort. I let it be civilised-wild.

The neatly pressed formal shirts from the first week gave way to baggy pants and ill-fitting full sleeve t-shirts on top of which I wrote half-sleeve t-shirts, like I was hoping to score last-minute standing tickets to a Greenday concert.

It felt to me like the European way of working was a lot more chilled and way less uptight than what I had experienced in my early career as an IT services code monkey.

However, those few months in Norway were lonelier than I had accounted for.

That’s the thing I wasn’t made aware of when I was sent on the assignment. That the most social contact I would experience was at the workplace, and even there, once the day was done, everyone was off to their homes, doing their own things.

This was the first time in my life I came to terms with true loneliness and solitude.

Growing up in Mysore and living and working in Bangalore had meant that I was always in places with high population density. I lived by myself, but I didn’t really feel alone. There was always some sign of life near me.

Early in the mornings, it was the call to prayer by a Muezzin from a mosque nearby or a temple, playing MS Subbalakshmi’s Sri Venkateshwara Suprabhatham.

The sounds of people getting ready to go to school or to work. Monday through Friday, I joined these masses to get to my workplace.

In the evenings, though I returned home late, there were open shops, street vendors and the stray dogs who felt like some form of company.

In contrast, in the sparsely populated suburbs of Oslo, there was no one. The occasional vehicle passed by the highway next to the service apartment block I lived in, but for the most part, it was silent. Desolate.

I yearned for some form of human contact, but I also didn’t want to appear desperate.

So I began reading in earnest, and the one book that kept me company on those silent and lonely evenings and nights was “The Writerly Life” by R.K.Narayan.

R.K.Narayan’s House

Every time I go to Mysore, I make it a point to visit R.K.Narayan’s house. This photo is of me from September 2025, standing in the room where RKN used to write every day.

It is a semi-circular room with multiple windows, and the space is bathed in light no matter what time of the day one shows up there.

I am not fond of temples or places of worship that are crowded, that have loud sounds or that are excessively commercialised in the name of piety. That excludes most places of worship in India.

However, my heart and mind and soul yearn for tranquillity. For places to breathe.

I find myself getting there when I put on my headphones and step into a state of guided meditation. But when I do not want to escape the world this way, RKN’s house in Mysore offers me that space.

I don’t spend too much time there. A family takes care of the house, and the caretakers’ children play in the compound.

There is a visitors’ book on the ground floor. There are rooms in the home which house RKN’s books, his clothes, and especially the shirts, vests and coats he once wore.

The little time in RKN’s restored house is enough to restore me.

The Writerly Life

This anthology of RKN’s essays and other collected works has influenced me more than his fictional stories for which he is world renowned.

“My Dateless Diary” is a collection of essays - entries in his journal through which he documents his time in the US, and also tells the story of how he wrote The Guide.

The book contains other vignettes of his life, and through that, he provides details of what his days looked like. He painted a vivid picture of how he used to go to different parts of Mysore to conduct his business. The walks he used to take in the evenings. The places he used to meet people for coffee and chit-chat.

I don’t know what made me pick that book up all those years ago. Perhaps it was on significant discount. Perhaps I wanted to get hold of RKN’s entire bibliography.

Whatever past Hari’s reasons, I’m reaching across space and time to give him a well-deserved high five and a big hug.

On those lonely evenings in that aparthotel in Hvalstad, RKN’s words made me long for home. They made me see Mysore in a new light.

RKN made me fall in love with my city through his words.

Besides Mysore and Bangalore, I’ve lived in Hyderabad, Gurgaon, and now in Dublin. In each of these places, I’ve found parts of me that I’m slowly piecing together in the second half of my life to see myself in a new light.

I kinda get why words matter.

I’m grateful to have this writerly life.

In Season 5 of South Park, Eric Cartman’s grandma dies.

She leaves him a million dollars in inheritance money. Instead of doing something sensible with the cash, like donating funds to charity, sharing the money with relatives or investing it so it can grow, Cartman buys an amusement park.

He calls it Cartmanland.

Cartman’s reason for buying an amusement park is simple. He is solving a problem that he faced. Just like any entrepreneur / founder does.

He doesn’t like the long lines at amusement parks. He hates the wait.

So he short-circuited the process by owning the entire amusement park.

As the plot unfolds, Cartman realises that he needs to pay for the security at the park. Then he learns that he needs to pay for repairs and maintenance, refreshments, utilities, added security and for other mounting expenses.

He admits the exact number of people per day that he needs to cover his expenses, and turns everyone else away.

In his bid to make the amusement park exclusive, he begins to attract even more people who want to come and experience what this place is all about.

Without wanting to, he turns a run-down park into a profitable business. He ends up hating every second of it.

It is part of Season 5 of South Park. Do watch it on the streaming service of your choice. I love this episode.

When I wore a younger man’s clothes and watched the show, I laughed my ass off all through the episode. South Park is a comedy after all.

I also found the way Cartman did life to be absolutely ridiculous.

Who, in their right minds would want to give up on reaping profits from an amusement park because of their need to, of all things, HAVE FUN?

Plato’s Republic

I’m reading Plato’s Republic. Somebody has to.

In the book, Plato talks about utopia. He describes a simple version of it, that he says would exist if human beings were simple.

If we weren’t so messed up by default, we would’ve continued to live in small tribes, farm and raise live stock, work hard, eat, drink, make merry, make love, tend to each other in harmony with nature and rinse and repeat, generation after generation.

He says that greed and luxury fuck up our best laid plans. When there are checks and balances in place to prevent humans from being assholes to each other, systems of governance are born.

Plato says that a system founded on a certain principle results in its undoing.

An aristocracy is created to concentrate powers in the hands of a few people. Doesn’t last too long because they start being parts of the haves, and the have-nots don’t like it.

An oligarchy is created to enable the rule of few. Again, concentration of power resulting in disparity between groups of people.

A democracy is also a system where things are prone to being fucked up by design.

When a large group of humans with no specialisation are empowered to make choices that affect everyone, there are bound to be mistakes.

I wouldn’t want a random passerby to choose what books or movies or music I should, and should not listen to. However, if they elect a government that passes legislature which regulates my consumption of art / content, then technically, the random passerby is choosing on my behalf.

Same way with Cartmanland, too much of the need to sustain the park caused it to stop being fun for Cartman.

Now that I’ve grown up a little more than when I saw the episode last, I no longer think that Cartman is a fool for stopping people from entering his amusement park.

Life is like ice-cream. It is not just one flavour. Everyone is free to choose and can keep changing flavours the way they like.

While I have strong opinions about property rights and the notion of unchecked property ownership, I have stronger opinions about an individual’s need for autonomy and agency.

While I may not own an amusement park whose access I can regulate, there is a party that goes on in my head. There are worlds that I keep creating and erasing and replacing in my mind on a regular basis.

I enjoy the peace and tranquillity that allows me to do that, and I do not want to disrupt that party in my head by giving my time and headspace away to all and sundry.

I ask you once again, what would you do if you woke up to the news that you had inherited a million dollars?