Heartcrossings

Lights from the home on a hill pierce the still lake water in jeweled spears. Two stars dot the immense sky. We hold hands, talk about a sunny day behind us. Two days later the clouds lift and picks me up. I have sunk to the depths of despair, feared drowning and breathed again. You are there waiting - arms outstretched, harboring me, my spiraling hopelessness, my magnificent inertia to change. The sun warms my spirits, your smile and touch. I start to uncoil hesitantly fearing I may be visited by pain. I am learning your alphabet of love so unlike my own. In the early days we spoke the same language - the relationship argot of our time. Marriage morphs the meaning of familiar words in ways that only you and I will understand. We want to understand and be understood without effort as a measure of our love. Often we fail. Lying on the dock wrapped in your arms, silence broken by the lapping of water against smooth, shiny rocks - we learn our first words. We teach each other - meet in pu...

It was the summer vacation my last year at high school and I was in spending a few weeks at my Grandmother’s in Kolkata. On the evening which this post is about, my aunt and I were at Gariahat shopping. A young man who looked like a college student had been following us around for a while and then it happened. I was “eve-teased”. I told my aunt right away and she asked “Are you sure he did that ? He looks like a boy from a good family” and I replied “Yes. I am absolutely certain”. She suggested that we give him another opportunity to be sure that I was right in my assessment of the "incident" and give us the chance to catch him in the act if I was. A few minutes later, we had reason to accost him, beat him with our bare hands with my aunt was livid enough to go at him with her umbrella berating him as she did for being a common lecher while pretending to be a student. He kept repeating “I’m sorry. I won't do it again”. As far as I could tell, he did not appear particul...

After the marriage, a move happened. I used to think I lived simply, had very few belongings and could leave everything behind when it was time to move. In reality that is not quite how it worked out. The detritus of a decade clung to me a gooey mass of memories. The pack and move was the easier part - a couple of meltdowns notwithstanding.  It is only when I started to unpack my belongings in the new closet that I was hit by the dead-weight of the old. In an ideal world, I would throw away everything from the past in lieu of being able to undo the past itself. But doing that is like peeling an onion - the past is laid layer upon layer and if I discarded enough of it, there would be nothing left of me or my life. I experienced an enormous sense of emptiness. Shorn of the baggage, memories and experiences there was no substance to me. I would float away like an soap bubble and the dissolve into nothingness.  DB has yet to unpack his belongings but I doubt he will experience a...

Marriage after divorce and single parenthood for close to ten years is like coming out into glaring sunlight after living in permanent semi darkness.  Until recently, the need to conform to societal expectations had been minimal if at all - I could focus exclusively on a couple of things without having to worry about that taking away from other obligations that are intrinsic to a two parent household. Raising J in the way I wanted, getting better at what I do for a living and being able to take on more challenging assignments - was all I cared about. Then there was the blog that I fed  a lot of my energy into, instead of seeking out or nurturing real life social relationships. It was a very much cocoon - closed, sometimes rather suffocating but almost always safe. I did not have to compare against the standard benchmarks of relative to peer group success. They were "them" and not in my situation. What applied to "regular" people did not apply to me because I ha...

S was telling us when we were out to lunch one afternoon, how she and her boyfriend B started dating. Ordinarily, this would not be the most riveting topic of conversation - everyone has a story some less boring than others but S is outside a couple of standard deviations in personality so hers promised to be an interesting one and she had our collective attention. Instead of playing coy, calm and collected waiting for the man to make the first move, following The Rules book and not call him unless he called after the first date - generally being hard to get instead of "needy" and "clingy", S took a completely non-traditional approach. She walked up to the guy and asked him if was interested in getting some lunch. Apparently, the unexpectedness of it all nonplussed him and before he knew, they were sitting in a restaurant. The lunch went well and S kept a steady flow of emails going until the next time she asked B out for a date. She does not believe in waiting for...

I have grown into my current role of business architect following a path that has taken me to almost every role in an IT shop at least a couple of times. The perspectives I have gathered along the way have proved invaluable in doing my current job but every so often, the process of getting a team's to articulate in clear, actionable terms how they would get from their current state to the desired future state can prove to be very challenging. Every traditional method of eliciting requirements and mapping as-is or to-be process in my experience has it limitations and does not readily fit the needs of the team or project at hand. Gamestorming- A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers and Changemakers introduces the reader to some off the beaten path ideas for brainstorming, process mapping, prioritization, customer persona definition, problem scenario identification, requirement elicitation and much more. The games are uniformly interesting, well defined and easy to play. More impo...