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Showing posts from October, 2014

Freeze your eggs for your company ?

A couple of days ago in the morning news I picked up that Facebook (and soon Apple) provide a core benefit that allows you to freeze your eggs for free. I think the article was called freeze your eggs free your career, or something catchy like that. Of course, there was some outrage around this. My Facebook feed is full of outrage and re-sharing of this news. Well at least some good news that we now know Facebook is not reading our posts then.  Now my knowledge is only as good as what's reported and we all know news is always sensationalised. Any how here is what I think:  The issue is that it's a core benefit. If you have a core benefit it implies that it's something you need for a comfortable life. For example, medical cover is needed for you in case you fall sick and you of course want to get better. On the other hand, it's in your company's best interests  to make sure you get better soon and get back to work. But at the same time, you are not expected t

Anne Frank's Diary

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I'm disappointed with myself for not having read this before and I believe I should have read it at school. It should be part of school syllabus or at least flagged and encouraged at school to young teens and preteens. It is across Europe and even in India, it was in school curriculum for my mother. I wonder what happened in my case. Anyhow I began reading it upon my return from Berlin. While I'm in no way qualified to review this book, neither it's contents nor its author, I can talk about how it made me feel. Like a million others, for all these decades, at the end of it, I wanted to hug myself and cry. That was the effect mostly of the epilogue rather than her diary. The epilogue tells you that this energetic optimistic opinionated teenager that you spent days with, discussing her innermost thoughts including her plans for the future, had had that future snatched from her and from you. You, Kitty, lost your dearest friend. She is smart, funny, intelligent a

The Heathrow Minute

In love with airports I must be. But not usually. They are not destinations and they are not places where you want to spend time, unless I hear of it's the Dubai airport. Killing time doesn't put me off, but people watching is certainly boring at airports unlike railway stations. Railway stations, I love! Heathrow airport is a beauty and I didn't know it till today. Till today I thought it was a chaotic mass of people and flights. Today I witnessed the Heathrow Minute! While an aeroplane is evidence of amazing engineering, Heathrow is evidence of incredible logistics. And today I think I witnessed it. My flight was in queue and I could see flights in front of it, and flights cutting the queue from other fringes of the fishbone sort of network this was, and the flights in front of us were cutting others in other fringes. They all went one by one on to this long long runway. And when one flight starts moving very quickly on the runway, another already takes its place so

Ten Days of Travel: Venice

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Pretty and pretty busy. As I mentioned earlier K and I ended up in Venice on a weekend. At least thankfully it was two weekends before Clooney and Amal decided to get married. (I heard they shut the grand canal for their wedding, I would have been royally photography hollywoodly pissed with them. Imagine planning ahead and spending so much money just to know that the biggest attraction in Venice is closed.) We reached Venice late evening on Friday but by the time we stood in the queue and another and got waterbus tickets, it was an hour and the water bus itself took an hour to take us to our bnb because we stayed in Lido, an island off the Venice islands at we reached there at 10pm. We took a Rolling Venice card by the way. It's an under-29 card that gives you discounts etc. The one hour water bus journey from the train station through the Grand Canal under the Rialto bridge and the Bridge of Sighs, out into the sea near San Marco and stopping every 3 minutes,