Catharsis

Dec 2018 One of my fondest memories of food is Ma leafing through recipe clippings painstakingly collected from newspapers & magazines; and whipping up mouth watering delicacies. Sunday lunches were a much awaited affair, with varying degrees of contribution from all of us - home grown vegetables from Dad's garden, me sitting on the kitchen table and regaling everyone with entertaining stories, and Aaru lending a supporting hand ;) While I would love to say that I was the most well behaved kid (ahem!), looking back I must accept that I was actually one of the fussiest eaters around. If the food had something green, was not deep fried, didn't have potatoes as one of the components, my first answer would be naaaahhhhh! It's amazing that my mom found solutions for all my food tantrums and full credits to her on making mealtimes something to look forward to. Moving away from home and staying alone in Chennai made me realise that I was definitely not a fan of

October 2018 I recently elected to read ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ as part of a self-study program. At the outset, I would like to answer the first question that is possibly on everyone’s mind, “Why choose a book that’s originally published in 1989?” Even today, this book remains one of the best-selling nonfiction business & self-help books in history, a testament to the fact that these habits & principles are valid irrespective of the time elapsed since publication. In addition, like most people I know, I am aware of key insights from this book through management literature & workshops. Hence, I thought this would be the best opportunity to read the book and understand the concepts in detail. Potential second question, “In this digital era of Google Talli (mother in Telugu), how useful is a book review when all information is available at the click of a button or by saying ‘ Ok Alexa/ Ok Google’ ;)”? Here I would like to mention that more than a