Wokay!

FDI in everything. 100% FDI. In all sectors. With no voting right caps. In fact insist that foreign investors have more voting rights than Indian ones. The CEO should be a foreigner too.

These Western buggers are mad about diversity and inclusion. They’ll put special hiring schemes for all minorities, downtrodden or not, without Parliament ever having to make it compulsory.

Sometimes I am overawed at my own intelligence.

The Times of India’s circulation will plummet this year, once people begin to realise that they can get better quality of news  and editorial, and as many scantily clad chicks in Maxim.

A friend was in town this weekend to quit his job (he was based out of Bangalore, but had to give his exit interview and return his laptop in Mumbai). Over dinner, we came up with the following insight:

CEOs will want to live luxuriously and have a minimal commute everwhere they are, but only in Bombay will it end up screwing other employees. In Bangalore, the CEO will buy a 5 bedroom luxury flat in Indiranagar, and the employees will have 1 or 2 BHKs in JP Nagar. The CEO will have a ten minute commute to MG Road, and the employees will have half hour commutes or so.

But in Bombay, the really successful CEO will demonstrate his success by living on Marine Drive and Cuffe Parade with a ten minute commute to his Fort office. And since all the employees can afford is Andheri, they’ll get buttfucked in the locals.

(Ed: This was written back in October when I was still based in Mumbai. It’s made it’s way out of the backlog only now.)

Thank you so much. If it hadn’t been for your money and support, I wouldn’t be getting to learn Kannada at three hundred rupees for the course. Instead, I would have had to shell out an extra four or five thousand rupees on a private tutor. Five thousand rupees less to spend on alcohol and meat. That would have sucked.

Would you be awesome and subsidise my Mandarin lessons as well?

Warm Regards,

Aadisht

Being at office without any actual work to do is like being sleisha drunk. The brain comes up with hajaar arbit fundaes.

(Incidentally, this is one of them.)

Time zone risk can be mitigated through working hours arbitrage.

Working hours risk can be mitigated through time zone arbitrage.

Photography is creative art, not performing art. The emphasis is not on how well the photograph conforms to standards of light, or composition, or distance or perspective, but on the story it tells.

Photos in which your friends or family sit around and smile at the camera are stories as well, but they are limited. A few people will want to know the story, hear it again and again, but it is a story that is very old and oft-repeated: people sitting around and smiling. People who aren’t in the photo will be more interested in a story with drama.

But all portraits aren’t that limited. Some, taken candidly, or at the other extreme, in extremely contrived poses and compositions, can tell a story that people will want to hear- and if it’s a great photograph, a story that they will want to hear again and again.

The storyteller must realise this, and decide which stories he wants to tell.

To be a great storyteller, you need to be detached. The trick is that you have to be detached without being dispassionate.

You have to be detached enough from the world around you to see everything as new and fresh. You’ll never be able to see the potential for a story in something if it doesn’t surprise you. Having said that, you also need to be passionate enough to turn it into a story and share your surprise with everyone else.

Of course, detachment and passion aren’t enough by themselves. You need to be superb in your medium of expression too- whether it’s the written word, or photography, or cinema, or music. But technique can be learnt with practice. Detachment and passion won’t come unless your personality is built that way.