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“I just want to this about that.”
― Steven C. Smith

A collage of traditional Ramayana masks mounted on a wall, including characters Anchara, Surpanakha, Lava, Sita, Lakshmana, Bali and Bishamitra, painted in vivid reds, blues, yellows and gold.

When the Mask Comes Off

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Batman is, in real life, a sad billionaire named Bruce Wayne. Spider-Man is a teenager named Peter Parker who really should see a doctor about his wrists. And Superman — the most powerful being on the planet — goes to work every day as Clark Kent, a journalist who cannot spot an alien standing right next to him. The disguise is glasses, Clark. Just glasses.

But here is what we always get wrong about superheroes. The mask is not what hides them. The mask is what makes them. Take it away and Bruce Wayne is just a rich man with too many gadgets. Peter Parker is just a kid with a problem. Clark Kent is just a man who needs better glasses.

The mask is not hiding the power. The mask is where the power comes from.

Masks are not a new idea. The Ramayana worked this out a few thousand years before Bruce Wayne did. Those masks on the cover were spotted at the Kautilya Leadership Centre in Khalapur a while ago. They have been on my mind ever since.

Two real people understood this. One painted walls. The other wrote code.

The man who owned every wall

For thirty years, a person called Banksy put art on walls all over the world. Without asking. Without signing his name. Without telling anyone who he was.

Alt text (for SEO and accessibility): Banksy's Girl with Balloon on a wall in London. A girl in silhouette reaches toward a red heart-shaped balloon. The words There Is Always Hope are written on the wall beside her.
Banksy, Girl with Balloon, London. Photo by Dominic Robinson. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

A while ago, on a street in Marseille in the south of France, he painted a bollard casting the shadow of a lighthouse it could never be. The bollard’s own shadow stretches across the pavement for real. The lighthouse shadow stretches up the wall in paint. One shadow is true. The other is a wish. Across it, these words: I WANT TO BE WHAT YOU SAW IN ME.

Alt text (for SEO and accessibility): Banksy's I Want To Be What You Saw In Me, Marseille 2025. A metal bollard on a pavement casts a painted shadow of a lighthouse on a beige wall, with the words I Want To Be What You Saw In Me stencilled across it.
Banksy, I Want To Be What You Saw In Me, Marseille, 2025. Image via @banksy

I came across it on my phone a few months ago and stopped scrolling.

The bollard is nothing special. The kind of thing you walk past every day without noticing. But in the painting it becomes something. A beacon. And the sentence makes it personal. Not I am great. Just I want to be what you once thought I could be. There is a lot of feeling in that gap.

It hit me the way it did because I did not know who made it. No name, no story, no interview. Just the image and whatever I happened to be feeling that day.

That is not a coincidence. That is the whole plan. The missing name was the point. The anonymity was not modesty. It was the message.

The man who broke money

In 2008, the world’s banks were falling apart. Into this mess, a person using the name Satoshi Nakamoto put out a nine-page document. It described a new kind of money. No bank needed. No government involved. No single person in charge. Just a system that anyone could use and no one could own.

Then Satoshi disappeared. On purpose.

Because a name is a door. And governments are very good at finding doors. Satoshi left no door. You cannot arrest an idea. You cannot freeze a network. But you can absolutely freeze the bank account of the person who built it, if you can find them.

Both Banksy and Satoshi did what Bruce Wayne does every morning. They put the mask on and became something their real names could never have been.

The masks came off

Reuters published a story naming Banksy. His real name, his real face, his real life in Bristol.

The New York Times went further. A reporter spent a full year trying to find out who Satoshi really is. He hired a language expert. He flew to El Salvador to meet his main suspect. He built a database of over a hundred thousand old internet posts and ran them through an artificial intelligence programme. His conclusion: Satoshi is most likely Adam Back, a 55-year-old British cryptographer who has been a well known figure in the Bitcoin world for years.

Both denied everything. Both denials had the sound of something that had been practised many times before.

I read both stories and felt something drop in my chest.

The journalism was not the problem. The NYT piece is serious, careful work. There is one moment I keep coming back to. The reporter is sitting with Back in a hotel room in El Salvador and reads out something Satoshi once wrote: “I’m better with code than with words.”

Before he can finish, Back jumps in. “I did a lot of talking though for somebody,” he says. “I mean…” And then he stops. Goes quiet.

Three seconds. But in those three seconds he spoke like someone who had written that line himself. Like he knew exactly what it felt like from the inside. Then he caught himself. And the door closed again.

The drop in my chest had nothing to do with the journalism. It was about what the journalism did.

What the bollard knew

A named Banksy is just a man from Bristol. A named Satoshi is just a person a government can drag into a court. The Bitcoin crowd is not buying it anyway. They are not being difficult. They just know that once you name the magic, the magic leaves the room. Some things work better as mysteries.

Superman is Superman because you never see him burning toast in the morning. I want my superheroes to stay masked, thank you very much. Whatever form they come in. Some shadows are better left where they are.

A street dog sleeping on a sandy beach, curled into the sand, eyes closed, entirely unbothered.

Why Did We Believe the Story of the Seven Dogs?

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There is a corgi at the front.

Small, determined, walking with the quiet authority of someone who did not ask to be in charge but has decided, since nobody else is stepping up, to get on with it. Behind him, six other dogs move along a highway in Jilin province, northeastern China. One is a German shepherd, walking slightly stiffly. The others stay close, turning back every few steps, as if checking.

A man driving through spotted them, pulled over, filmed forty seconds from his car window, and posted it with a guess that they might have escaped from a transport vehicle. He had not seen any escape. He was simply guessing, the way you do when you have filmed something odd and need to say something about it.

Ninety million views on Douyin and Weibo within days. Douyin is China’s TikTok. Weibo is its Twitter. Then it went global. By the time the internet finished with it, the dogs had escaped a meat truck, protected an injured companion across hundreds of kilometres, and were nearly home. AI-generated movie posters followed. A trailer. Reunion scenes.

None of it was true.

The German shepherd was in heat. The other dogs were following their instincts, which are considerably less poetic than loyalty but considerably more reliable. Everyone lived a few kilometres away and had gone home long before the world finished weeping for them.

The story that wasn’t

Which raises the obvious question. Ninety million people watched forty seconds of dogs on a road and decided, collectively, that what they were seeing was an escape narrative. Not because anyone told them so. Because that is what they needed it to be.

Think about what was on the rest of the feed. Bombs. Borders. Bombasts. Cruelty delivered from respectable positions with great confidence. In that context, a corgi leading a wounded companion home is not a distraction from the news. It is a rebuttal to it.

The brain turns footage into story faster than the critical mind can intervene. This is not stupidity. It is the part of us that still believes things should work out.

The fact-check travels slower. By the time anyone found the German shepherd’s owner in Jilin, the story was already somewhere people needed it to be.

The dogs went home three days later. The corgi went back to being a corgi: walking around as if it owns the street, leading no one in particular, meaning nothing at all.

The story did not need the dogs anymore. It never really did.

_____________________

If you are wondering why we keep reaching for these moments, this piece has some thoughts: Are You Happy Yet?

Coffee in a grey ceramic cup beside an iPad showing a draft in progress, on a wooden café table

A Short Education in Coffee (Or: How a Simple Drink Taught Me I Knew Nothing)

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I grew up believing coffee came in precisely one legitimate form.

It arrived in a steel tumbler. Poured with mild theatrical flourish from one vessel to another. It possessed the authority of habit and the fragrance of morning. It was called filter kaapi. My mother makes it. There is, and remains, no higher benchmark.

Then, decades ago, a young man at a Café Coffee Day counter in Bangalore looked at me with professional patience and said, “Cappuccino?”

I had grown up in Madurai. Outside my mother’s kitchen, the only other coffee I had considered was at a small roadside coffee place called Visalam in Goripalayam. My mother gave hers in a tumbler and davara. Visalam served it in a glass tumbler. That, I had assumed, was the full range of possibility. Cappuccino was not a category I had prepared for.

What Avvaiyar Knew About Coffee (And Everything Else)

There is a line by Avvaiyar, the ancient Tamil poetess, that I have known since childhood.

கற்றது கை மண் அளவு; கல்லாதது உலகளவு

Katrathu kai mann alavu; kallathathu ulagalavu.

What you have learned is a handful of sand. What you have not yet learned is the size of the world.

I had known this line for years. I had also attributed it, confidently and wrongly, to Thiruvalluvar. The irony of misattributing a quote about the limits of one’s knowledge is, I think, what philosophers call “a bit much.”

In popular Tamil online folklore, the line hangs on a wall at NASA. I cannot verify this. But for rocket scientists to keep this in mind, however remote, is comforting anyway.

Going Down the Coffee Rabbit Hole

I came to coffee late. But when I did, I came properly. I ground my own beans. Chose them carefully. Waded in. And at each stage arrived confident I had figured it out, only to be shown, cheerfully, the next wall of ignorance waiting just ahead.

The world is not content with “coffee.” It insists on thirty-odd variations before you reach the door: espresso, ristretto, lungo, flat white, cortado, affogato, cold brew, nitro. And that is just the front end. Behind the counter lurk Arabica and Robusta, spoken of as rival football teams. There are tasting notes. Chocolate. Citrus. Stone fruit. Hints of regret.

And just when you think you have grasped the situation, someone whispers: there are beans that have passed through a cat.

Kopi Luwak. The Asian palm civet eats the coffee cherries, digests the fruit, and passes the beans. They are then collected, washed, roasted, and served to people like me. I first had it in Bali, sceptical and mildly horrified. It was extraordinary. Smooth, almost syrupy, with none of the bitterness I deserved. I have sourced it wherever possible since. Make of that what you will.

Couple from Kopi Langit Bali with their coffee range, Bali — where the Kopi Luwak education
Kopi Langit Bali. The beans were extraordinary. The education was free.

My first purchase was from a couple in Bali. They sold me the beans and threw in an education I had not budgeted for. They explained processing methods, drying times, and the difference between wild-harvested and farmed civet with the patience of people who genuinely loved what they were doing. I left with more coffee than I could carry and significantly less confidence than I had arrived with.

Then I wandered into a specialty café. It was not merely a place that served coffee. It was a temple. Baristas moved with the quiet assurance of neurosurgeons. There were championships. Yes, championships. People compete at making coffee. There are judges, points awarded for crema, and somewhere, I suspect, slow-motion replay.

Coffee, I discovered, is not a beverage. It is a civilisation.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect in a Tumbler

The less you know about something, the more qualified you feel. Beginners are condemned to confidence. I had consumed coffee daily for decades before I understood I knew nothing about it. The peak of Mount Stupid, as psychologists call it, has a magnificent view.

Coffee crossed continents before it reached your cup — from an Ethiopian goat herder through Yemen and the Ottoman Empire to the coffee houses of London, where one cup bought you a chair and the right to argue with strangers about everything.

Today, for the exorbitant price of an Americano in Mumbai, you get poor coffee, the Wi-Fi password, and access to the toilet.

The people who know coffee best are uniformly humble. Coffee taught me why. Every door you open reveals three more. The domain you think you have mastered is merely the room you are standing in. I once watched a man at a roadside kaapi kadai in Tamil Nadu who had clearly stopped thinking about coffee altogether. That is what mastery looks like from the outside.

Back to the Tumbler

My mother still pours her kaapi from height, cooling it with a practised hand. Smooth arc. No tasting notes. No championship ambitions.

I still think it is unbeatable.

But now, when a barista reels off a menu of ristretto, lungo, flat white, cortado, cold brew, and something called a nitro coffee, I do not panic. I nod gravely, as though I have always known.

Then I look it up, quietly, before anyone notices.

Avvaiyar would understand. I suspect she would also help herself to the coffee.

Abstract patterns in wet beach sand at Alibaug, Maharashtra, photographed from above.

The Man Who Planned His Own Ending

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On 26 March 2024, Daniel Kahneman sent an email to his closest friends. It was, by all accounts, a very Kahneman sort of email: precise, warm, entirely devoid of self-pity, and probably the most carefully considered goodbye letter in the history of modern psychology.

He told them he was on his way to Switzerland. He would not be coming back. He was ninety, his kidneys were failing, the mental lapses were increasing. “It is time to go,” he wrote. The next day, he died by assisted suicide in Zurich.

The week before, he had been in Paris with his family. They walked for hours, went to museums, ate soufflés and chocolate mousse. He wrote in the mornings. The evenings were for people he loved.

Philip Tetlock, a psychologist and old friend, said afterward: “I have never seen a better-planned death than the one Danny designed.”

If you have not heard of Kahneman, here is the short version. He was a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, which is either a comment on the breadth of his thinking or on the narrowness of economics, possibly both.

His book Thinking, Fast and Slow, published in 2011, became one of those rare works that quietly rearranges how you see yourself. It sold millions. It deserved to. For me, he has been a north star. how we misread our own experience, how we are wrong in entirely predictable ways, has shaped how I think about almost everything. Losing him felt, in a way that is difficult to explain, like losing a teacher I never met.

The Man Who Understood How Memory Works

Kahneman spent his career proving that humans are bad at understanding their own experience. His most important finding was the distinction between the experiencing self, the one living through each moment, and the remembering self, the one who files the story away afterward. They are not the same person and they want different things.

Duration barely registers in memory. We judge an experience by its peak intensity and its ending. A holiday that ends with lost luggage is a bad holiday, regardless of the ten days of sunshine before it. A painful medical procedure that ends gently is remembered as less bad than a shorter one that ends badly. Kahneman called this the peak-end rule. He found it held not just for holidays but for entire lifetimes.

He had watched his mother decline into cognitive deterioration. He had watched his wife, Anne Treisman, die after years of vascular dementia. He had spent decades, in other words, studying the ending he did not want. So he did not wait for it. He applied his own research to his own life and, as one friend noted, “created a happy ending to a ninety-year life, in keeping with his peak-end rule.”

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley

While Kahneman was eating soufflés in Paris, Bryan Johnson was monitoring his nighttime erections.

Johnson, 48, spends $2 million a year to reverse his biological age. He tracks over a hundred biomarkers, follows a strict vegan diet, sleeps at the same time every night, and has recently launched a programme called Immortals, offering three clients his exact anti-ageing protocol for $1 million a year each. His movement is called Don’t Die. He means it.

The longevity industry attracted nearly $8.5 billion in investment in 2024. Some of that money is funding genuinely interesting science. Some of it is funding Bryan Johnson, who spent a period receiving blood transfusions from his teenage son. If kids I know were his son, he would have some difficult questions.

One Species, Doing the Maths

Sometime ago, as strong black coffee woke me up, I read a mind-numbing statistic. One in five butterflies across the US has vanished since 2000. Insects vanish globally at one per cent every year.

From ten thousand kilometres away, the picture assembles itself without much effort. One species is spending billions to extend its tenure on earth indefinitely. Every other species is spending its last reserves simply trying to survive that one.

But I digress.

A Happy Ending

In his final letter, Kahneman wrote: “I discovered after making the decision that I am not afraid of not existing, and that I think of death as going to sleep and not waking up. So if you were inclined to be sorry for me, don’t be.”

He had been working on research papers the week he died. When asked what he would most like to do, near the end, he said he would like to learn something.

In the end, he did not ask for more time. He asked for a good ending. Soufflés in Paris, the childhood playground, the people he loved in the evenings. Then he left, on his own terms, while he still could.

Two years since he left, that was the clearest thinking he ever did.

Raked sand bunker with concentric circles, a visual metaphor for attention and focus.

Pay Attention

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A teacher I had in Madurai had one instruction. Delivered daily. With the confidence of someone announcing a natural law.

Pay attention.

I paid. Mostly because she was terrifying.

It took forty years to notice the instruction was strange. You pay taxes. You pay rent. You pay for mistakes you didn’t entirely make. Attention, apparently, belongs in that list.

Seventeen browser tabs later

A few months ago, I was reading Steven Pinker. Something about language and how it shapes thought. A small question snagged. Why pay? I looked it up. Then something else. Then it was an hour later and I had seventeen browser tabs open and a strong opinion about German.

Here is what I found.

English is the only major language that treats attention as a transaction.

In German, you gift it. Freely. No invoice.

In Irish, you bring it somewhere, like a person arriving with something tucked under their arm.

In Japanese and Chinese, you pour your mind into something. Slow, deliberate.

In Arabic, the root of the word means to wake up. To attend to something is to be alive to it.

And then there is English. Where attention is currency, the mind is a wallet, and a classroom in Madurai is apparently a debt collection agency.

Lakoff and Johnson wrote a book called Metaphors We Live By. The argument, simplified badly, is that metaphors are not decoration. They are the architecture. The way you phrase something tells you what the thing actually is, in the mind of the person speaking.

Which is worth sitting with for a moment

The bill, and what it assumes

If attention is something you pay, it can be paid reluctantly. Dutifully. Resentfully. You can pay attention to a meeting you hate, a speech going nowhere, a relative explaining their knee surgery in considerable detail. Obligation discharged. Ledger balanced.

If attention is something you bring, that changes. You had to decide to carry it.

If attention is waking up, reluctant attention barely makes sense. Either you’re awake or you’re not.

In Tamil, the word is kavanam. From a root meaning to watch over something carefully. Almost protectively. Less a school instruction, more something you’d say to someone you trusted with something precious.

My teacher never said it that way. She had twenty three children and a chalk duster she was not afraid to use.

But I have been thinking about her instruction ever since. About what it asked for, and what it quietly assumed. That attention was a cost. That a child in a classroom in Madurai had a payment to make.

The metaphor you grow up with becomes the instruction you carry. It tells you what you owe, and to whom, before you are old enough to question it.

Decades later, I am still paying.

Though I’m no longer entirely sure to whom.

Two parasailers over a blue lake with snow-capped mountains in the background, towed by a speedboat

Are you happy yet?

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They gave happiness a day. Not a month. Not a year. A day. Yesterday, to be precise. Whoever decided this was being more honest than they perhaps intended. Today is a different problem.

I have spent a considerable part of my adult life trying to attain happiness. I approached it the way most of us do.

First, through acquisition.

Better job. Better city. Better car. The list goes on. Phone. Bag. Shoe. And so on. Nothing explains it better than my shaving razor. My dad got me started with his single blade Wilkinson Sword. I have lived to see it progress steadily, and the one I have now has six blades. My dad would have laughed. I am not sure my face is better off for it.

Each upgrade arrived with the quiet promise that this was the one. Happiness showed up, signed the register, and left before breakfast. So I upgraded again. Happiness came back, stayed a little longer, left anyway. Buying my way to happiness has not helped.

I have tried the other route as well.

When I become a manager, I will be happy. Once the housewarming is done. When the home loan is repaid. When I get married. When the kid gets into a good college.

And so on, in perpetual deferral, each destination promising to be the one where happiness finally unpacks and stays. It doesn’t. It was always just passing through. I kept buying the ticket anyway, earning the loyalty points, and using them to fly back and do it all again.

Psychologists call this the arrival fallacy. It is not a flattering name.

The World Happiness Report

The World Happiness Report arrived, as it does every year on World Happiness Day, with the usual suspects at the top. Finland, for the eighth consecutive year. Denmark. Iceland.

The Scandinavians, doing whatever it is they do in the dark and the cold that the rest of us cannot manage in the sun. India came in at 118th out of 147 countries. We have moved up from 126th last year, which is progress, and I am sure someone has already denounced the report and submitted real data, or quoted the Rig Veda, or both.

This year the report looked at social media. The conclusions were not cheerful. The more we scroll, the worse we feel. Somewhere between the highlight reels and the carefully filtered holidays, we have decided that everyone else is living better. They are not. They are just better at cropping.

Here is what the science says

And it has been saying this for a while, quietly, in journals nobody reads. Happiness lives in real experience. In wonder. In curiosity. Relationships. In conversations that go longer than planned. In the wrestling match with a hard problem and the particular satisfaction when something finally gives. In the state where you are working on something and before you know it an hour has gone.

In a filter kaapi that arrives at exactly the right temperature. In conversations with strangers. In kindness. In generosity. In gratitude. In ordinary moments that ask nothing of you except to be present for them.

Not in the object. In the moment around the object, before it arrived and the wanting stopped. We know this, most of us, somewhere in the back of the mind where inconvenient truths are stored alongside gym membership intentions and unread books about living better.

Go back to being a child

This year I have been trying. Refresh. Slower. More deliberate. Renewing myself to what actually matters. It is harder than it sounds. But I am on it.

Phone less. Wonder more. Laugh at things that are not that funny. Talk to somebody, not at them. Ask a stranger how they are and wait for the actual answer. Be curious about things with no return on investment. Be generous without calculating the exchange rate.

A hundred studies. A dozen reports. Several thousand years of philosophy. All pointing to the same postcode. It is not complicated. It is just inconvenient. A soulful tune nobody can hear over the sale notifications.

As I write this, a friend texts asking if I know when the iPhone flip is coming. Does anyone have a kidney to spare?

This Moment That Is Slipping Away

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Some lines stay. Some lines stir. A few quietly rearrange the furniture of the soul.

This one does not shake the house. It simply opens a window.

“The melody, a familiar current, pulled me instantly into the salt spray of a past self, revealing the sharp, inexplicable distance between who I was then and the present silence.” — Albert Camus

Songs from your wonder years always do this. They sneak up on you. No warning. One bar, and you are no longer here.

You are back in a room with an old 2-in-1 Panasonic tape recorder. Slightly temperamental. The eject button needed persuasion. The shelf above it carried a mélange of cassettes — handwritten labels, some spelling errors, all confidence. There was a particular smell in those rooms. Spices. Paper. A hint of ambition. Friends leaning in. Someone always claiming superior taste in music. Windows open to a world that felt large and somehow still manageable.

You remember the small-town ease of it. The presence.

And then you look around now. The devices are thinner. The music is cleaner. The storage is infinite. The shelf is gone. The room has changed. So have you. Scrolling, infinitely.

Nostalgia is a peculiar accountant. It tallies what was gained. It also, without fanfare, tallies what slipped away while you were busy refreshing screens.

A song does not merely remind you of who you were. It introduces you to the distance travelled.

The Thief in the Room and the Myth We Bought

There is, of course, a small device-shaped problem.

The phone. Eternally present. Faintly glowing. Always with something more urgent to offer than the room you are actually in. I have, on more than one occasion, reached for mine mid-conversation — not because anything important was arriving, but simply because the hand has developed its own ambitions.

It has successfully convinced an entire civilisation that the present moment is somehow insufficient. That whatever is happening here needs to be supplemented, checked, or at minimum photographed for later.

The other great lie, sold with equal confidence, is multitasking. The brain can hold one thing at a time — what we call multitasking is simply rapid switching between tasks, getting slightly worse at each of them, while feeling impressively busy throughout.

I have attended meetings in my head while being physically present in other meetings. The results were about what you would expect.

Neither of these revelations is new. What is mildly embarrassing is how consistently surprising they remain.

The Archivist Is Already at Work

Right now, something ordinary is happening around you. A voice in the next room. A cup placed on a table. A small irritation. A smaller delight. It feels entirely forgettable. It is not.

This, too, will one day be a melody. It will carry some future version of you back to a self you cannot yet imagine missing.

Bryson would probably note that memory is a slightly unreliable archivist with a fondness for soft lighting and selective omission. He would be right. But even unreliable archivists preserve something true. Something with weight.

So perhaps the only sensible response is to live this moment fully enough that it has something to give back later. Not as a performance. Not arranged for a photograph. Not in pursuit of the brief dopamine flicker of approval.

In the texture, instead. The awkwardness. The unfinished conversations. The imperfect furniture of today. The neighbour who burnt his bread and somehow let the whole floor know without making a sound.

You never know what the archivist will choose to keep. Or when a stray tune will pull it back out into the light.

Let it have something rich to retrieve.

A few days after these thoughts had been circling, Haresh Chawla wrote something on Founding Fuel that arrived like a companion piece. He approaches it from the other direction — not what memory retrieves, but what we keep deferring. The two ideas sit in quiet tension: anticipated memories pulling us forward, selective nostalgia pulling us back. Both, in their own way, are exits from the present. The destination, though, is the same.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

On a related thought — The Leisure We Forgot

Earn a Living. Keep a Life.

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Every time I go to Australia, I notice the same thing.

People move.

Mooloolaba on a weekday evening is not quiet. It is busy in the best possible way. Surfboards tucked under arms. Teenagers charging into waves with heroic optimism. Parents wading in while pretending to supervise. Retirees walking briskly along the promenade as if the sunset has an appointment with them.

One of the harder tasks that evening would have been to locate someone unused to movement. I am sure they exist. I simply could not find one without squinting.

No one looked sculpted. No one looked staged. They just looked comfortable in their bodies.

The Bike That Assists


In Brisbane, I rode an electric motor assisted bike along well-established cycling pathways that ran confidently through the city. Wide. Smooth. Built for use, not decoration. The motor gave a gentle nudge. My legs still had to negotiate with gravity. It was tremendous fun.

Researchers call this “green exercise”. Even five minutes outdoors measurably improves mood. Add water and the effect deepens. Some cultures read that research and nod. Others quietly build cities around it.

“But I Don’t Have Time.”

This is the most honest objection. I have used it myself.

Work expands. Responsibilities multiply. Time shrinks. The calendar fills before breakfast.

I have run alongside N. Chandrasekaran when he was leading TCS. Early mornings. No audience. No commentary. If anyone could claim a shortage of time, it would have been him.

Barack Obama kept basketball in his routine while running the United States. Once requiring 12 stitches on his lips after getting injured. The republic survived.

I know numerous CXOs, heads of government bodies, social sector leaders, entrepreneurs who are busy as hell. Flights. Board packs. Investor calls. Policy crises. Yet they paddle. They walk. They play racquet sport. They run. They jog. They lift. They take the stairs.

Not because they have spare time.

Because they decided movement was not optional.

Time is rarely found. It is allocated.

Movement is maintenance of the machine that earns the living. If we neglect the machine long enough, it negotiates back.

“But Those Are Developed Countries.”

That is the other line I hear. And it is partly true.

Yes, Denmark has cycle lanes drawn with engineering pride. Sweden has the sommarstuga, small summer houses by lakes and forests where families retreat and reset. Ministers pedal home. Children cycle to school.

But this is as much about habit as it is about GDP.

One of the most inspiring sights in India is not a luxury gym. It is the open gym in a roadside park in a small town. Bright blue metal machines. Men rotating shoulders at dawn. Women walking in determined groups of three. Elderly gentlemen comparing blood pressure readings between stretches. Children hanging upside down for no reason at all.

No membership fee. No mirrors. No curated playlist.

Just bodies in motion.

We may not have surf breaks or flawless pathways. We have streets. Parks. Stairs. Terraces. Even uneven pavements that double as balance training.

We also have carb-rich festivals and, I am told, a South Asian genetic tendency to store weight enthusiastically around the belly. It was oddly comforting to read that. The gene did it. Not the second helping of dessert.

Genes, though, are tendencies. Not verdicts.

What Movement Really Buys You

Physical routines are often reduced to athletic ambition. They are something quieter and more durable. They are social glue.

A walk becomes conversation. A racquet game becomes laughter. A morning jog becomes a circle of familiar faces who nod at each other without introductions.

Compare that with the modern alternative. The thumb now does heroic labour. What once required forearms and shoulders is handled by a finger and a screen. Groceries arrive because someone races through traffic to ensure the curd reaches us in ten minutes.

We scroll. We argue energetically with strangers about distant political theatre. We accumulate opinions. We lose posture.

We have built lives that demand enormous mental output to earn a livelihood. That is fair. That is ambition.

But the answer cannot be to give up life in order to make a living.

Muscles need stretch. Lungs need demand. Eyes need horizons that are not backlit.

Push, yes. But push under the sky sometimes.

We have what we have. Whatever your shape. Wherever you are. We can do a little more.

I resolve to walk more. To ride when I can. To stretch before scrolling. To argue less and move more.

Earn a living.

Keep a life.

The belly gene may still visit.

But so will the wind.

How to Say a Lot Without Saying Much

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The Backstreet Boys once sang, “It’s only words.”

Which, at the time, felt like a tragic discovery. A young man realising that “I love you” had begun to sound like “please pass the salt”. The words were still there. The meaning had quietly packed its bags and left.

I thought of that line again when I heard Mark Carney at Davos say, “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.”

It is only words. Fourteen of them. But suddenly you can see the situation. A table. A menu. A future you would rather not be part of. No charts. No jargon. Just a mental picture and a mild sense of doom.

This is not about politics or ideology.

It is about language. About how some sentences do more work than entire policy documents.
“Fear itself.” “You can’t eat ideology.” “No one left behind.” “Kindness is not a weakness.”

These are not explanations. They are handles. You can pick them up and carry them around. They survive translation. They survive headlines. And the passage of time.

I remember the original Tata Indica tagline. “More car per car.”
Not mileage.
Not torque.
Just an idea small enough to fit in your pocket.

These lines do the same thing.
More meaning per word.

Which brings us back to the Backstreet Boys. They were right, in a strange way.

It is only words. But that is exactly why it matters. When words are simple, visual and human, they stop being decoration and start becoming containers. They hold fear. Or dignity. Or hope. Or threat. Or belonging.

So a boy band lyric and a Davos soundbite end up doing the same job: reminding us that language, when it works, doesn’t shout.
It packs.
And once it packs well enough, it travels further than speeches ever will.

Only words.
But very well packed ones.

What follows is a small curation of 20 of my favourite “more meaning per word” lines — from leaders and thinkers.

Not for their politics, but for how neatly they pack a worldview into a sentence.

If you have a line like this — one that stuck with you long after the speech was forgotten — I’d love to add it to the collection.

My List

“We will not beg.” — Paul Kagame

“Peace is made with enemies, not with friends.” — Yitzhak Rabin

“You can’t eat ideology.” — Mahathir Mohamad

“No one left behind.” — Anthony Albanese

“It does not matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” — Deng Xiaoping

“Kindness is not a weakness.” — Julia Gillard

“You Are Either With Us, Or With the Terrorists.” — George W. Bush

“Development is about people, not things.” — Julius Nyerere

“Speak softly and carry a big stick.” — Theodore Roosevelt

“We want life like other peoples want life.” — Mahmoud Darwish

“The world is bigger than five.” — Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

“Real power is… when you have nothing, you still have dignity.” — Nelson Mandela

“Hide your strength, bide your time.” — Deng Xiaoping

“If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.” — Mark Carney

“Minimum government, maximum governance.” — Narendra Modi

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” — Mahatma Gandhi

“A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” — Nelson Mandela

“We will make Singapore a first-world oasis in a third-world region.” — Lee Kuan Yew

“The only thing we have to fear is… fear itself.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently.” — Shimon Peres

Your turn. What are lines that have stayed with you?

A Small Defence Of Thinking

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There is a newsreader on television. Serious desk. Serious lighting. Serious voice.

A small slip of paper is placed on his desk, marked as a bulletin, the kind that usually signals something important.

He does not read it privately.
He does not check what it says. Or whether it makes sense.

He looks into the camera and announces, with grave authority:

“I have just been handed a bulletin. It says… I have spinach in my teeth.”

He reads this with the same tone he would use for an earthquake or a national election.

No pause.
No flicker of self-awareness.
No sense that this is private, trivial, or frankly not news.

A bulletin arrived. Therefore it must be read.

The process has been followed perfectly. The thinking has been politely excused from the building.
It is a neat little example of what happens when process runs without the application of mind.

That was Ted Baxter, a character from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a popular American sitcom from the 1970s. He was written as vain, sincere, and spectacularly literal. The joke worked because the world recognised him. He felt familiar.

When the World Starts Acting Like Ted Baxter

Once you notice this, you see it everywhere.

There is the automated apology email that arrives instantly and means nothing, like a sympathy card signed by a printer. There is the birthday reminder that replaces memory with a balloon emoji and a sentence that could be sent to your plumber. There is the form that listens very attentively and then explains that your problem does not exist in any of its drop-down menus. And there is the student who becomes excellent at passing exams without ever becoming particularly good at understanding anything.

In each case, the ritual is intact. The motion is correct. The meaning has quietly slipped out through a side door.

And then we scale this up and call it management.

The engagement survey is launched with much ceremony. People answer honestly. The dashboard is generated. Colours are admired. A number is announced. Everyone nods. Nothing changes. The organisation did not want insight. It wanted a temperature reading — preferably one that does not require treatment.

Organisational and Individual Goals behave in a similar way. What can be counted slowly begins to matter more than what counts. People learn how to hit the metric rather than improve the work. Throughput goes up. Quality goes sideways. Edge cases fall off the map. The system congratulates itself for success and sends an automated thank-you note.

The bulletin has been read. The spinach remains.

A Small Defence of Thinking

Systems are very good at repeating things. They like things neat. They like things predictable. They do what they are built to do, and they do it reliably. Over time this gives us tidy processes, friendly scripts, clean dashboards, and a lot of activity.

Meaning needs something else. It needs attention. It needs someone to notice what is actually going on and respond to that rather than to the checklist. It needs a small pause before the next step.

You can see the difference in people. Some are fully in what they are doing. If they are cooking, they are cooking. If they are listening, they are listening. If they are working, they are actually at work. Being around them feels steady. The moment feels real.

Others are doing one thing while drifting through another. Replying while half replying. Listening while half listening. Living while half being there. Attention gets spread thin across too many places and leaves very little behind anywhere.

The application of mind is simply paying attention before acting. It is the moment where you ask, “What is really going on here?” It slows things down a bit. It also saves you from doing the wrong thing very well. Application of mind while reading the bulletin turns out to be a good place to begin. In a world full of scripts, the application of mind feels like a small, quietly brave act.