A Bowl of Elusive

When I passed out of school in March’ 2007, I was not sure about what I wanted to do with my life. I had decided to join hotel management but I had missed the national entrance exam for the same, so I had a year free. While many of my classmates were preparing for IIT or Medical entrance tests, I was positive that those career options were not suitable for me. I did eventually join hotel management and by the time I passed out of college, I did not want to join the hotel industry. This article is not about that. You can read my article ‘ Why I Didn't Pursue a Career in Hotels... ’ to know about that story. This article is about that one year I spent in Bhubaneswar, the capital city of my home state Odisha.  Sometime during the period between the board exams and the announcement of results, one of my uncle’s acquaintances suggested that I could be a pilot. I had the height for it, standing at 185 centimeters at that point in time and great eyesight. Moreover, when I explored the req...

Every time I tell people that I have a degree in Hotel Management, they inevitably ask me why I'm working in retail and not in hotels. It's been eight long years since I made that switch and now the narrative has boiled down to simple facts like work-life balance being shitty in Indian hotels and hotels being bad paymasters. But the actual reasons, while including the aforementioned points, go beyond that. In this post, I'm gonna delve deeper into the several reasons I had not to continue in the hotel industry. To do that, I'll need to take you back to my college days and outline what the course is all about and what kind of job prospects the candidates have after passing out from a hotel management college. This might be a dreary subject for some of my readers, but I think a lot of my college peeps will actually relate to this post. So many people have this misconception that hotel management is all about the kitchen and food production. That's a rather laym...

Hiya, folks! It's 2:22 am, 27th Jan, 2017 and I am am officially 27 years and a day old now. And that got me thinking about time. Time flies and there's nothing new or note-worthy about that. The real important thing about time is it's timing. The 'right time', my friends, is what drives the whole world. I'll tell you how I get around to thinking about this topic. I was actually watching this movie "Morning Glory" just now and I couldn't help thinking that I was actually enjoying it because I was watching it now. It might have bored me earlier. It's timing was in perfect sync with my age, my mood and my situation. You know, I've been with my current employer for more than five years now. And I have never been more at ease with my job than I am at the moment. So, you can call me a loyal employee. Yet many of my colleagues keep advising me to look for growth, to make a jump. And their reasoning isn't illogical at all. Personal...

Often, what you really think is not the wisest thing to say out loud. So we end up internalizing a lot of shit. It happens to all of us. It harms us psychologically. But hey, who cares about psychology in a country where the run for basic needs is an all-consuming affair. I have no statistical data here, but I think it is safe to assume that the number of messed up psyches that we have in India is way higher than any place else. With that note, let me tell you what this article is going to be about. I am going to reveal what I really think about things, because frankly, I think keeping them inside is unhealthy. And it is gonna be fun because I have a really active mind with a whole lot of opinions which do not line up with the conventional way of thought. And I am going to be very systematic about it. I will break my opinions up into sections by topic and relevance. So here goes… POLITICS I grew up with the belief that this country was a secular one. I identify with tha...

I have spent n number of hours stressing over my career. Things were actually going well until last February. Then I got promoted. Things were still going well on paper but unfortunately, I was moved into a different job profile than the one I was after. I wasn't given a choice in the matter, so I decided to give it my best. Almost a year has gone by and I still haven't fallen in love with my new responsibility.  Lately, I have been especially tense about the state of things. So I did a lot of soul-searching. I realized that even though I crib about the pressure of my job, that's not the real issue. I would not be this stressed out by the deadlines of a job I loved. And once this was clear, I gained clarity in a lot of related issues. The future is always uncertain. But we still hold a lot of power when it comes to molding our futures. So I have decided to stop being intimidated by the intricacies of my job and start relaxing a bit. Its definitely easier said ...