Krakow to Wroclaw is just over three hours by train. You must absolutely book your tickets in advance. You get about 5 minutes to find your wagon on the platform, but barring that little adventure, the ride was smooth, passing by white landscapes and small towns.
The stay was at Radisson Blu again. This one was older than the one in Krakow, and the staff were a little less helpful. It is a 10 minute walk from the Main Square.
Compared to the last couple of years, I read fewer books in 2025, but I think the variety was higher. That probably explains the highest number of fiction books in a long time.
And so, once again, like 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 , and 2024, presenting #Bibliofiles 2025’s list of ten (plus the long list). From the 58 books I read this year…
(more…)I read something beautiful on a LinkedIn post sometime back. Yes, miracles do happen.
उन्हें कामयाबी में सुकून नजर आया तो वो दौड़ते गए,
हमें सुकून में कामयाबी दिखी तो हम ठहर गए !
Not that I had scaled some Himalayan peak of success, but the first line fits my 30s, and the second, my 40s. The underlying mindsets are different, and so are the journeys that give me joy. But it took the larger life journey and the choices of my past self to get here.
(more…)You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue (via James Clear)
Some would say kids are spoilt these days. I’m not going there, but kids are definitely spoilt for choice when it comes to chasing their interests, academic pressures notwithstanding. But what’s a deep interest and what’s a fad? What’s a passion and what is a routine that has overstayed its welcome?
I thought it was an excellent reminder that not all childhood interests need to become lifelong pursuits. Maybe a reminder for adults too – both influencers suffering burnouts as well as us standard mortals. For those interests that are staying beyond their shelf lives, and for those that haven’t seen the light of day, because they are dictated by habit/self image/identity?
I wrote this on LinkedIn in the context of a Hyundai ad that ended with “Never give up on finding what you love. There’s joy in every journey.”
(more…)Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Intelligent people know how to get what they want. Wise people know what’s worth wanting.
Shane Parrish
My typical simplistic approach to problem solving is why, what, and how. So here we go:
(more…)A recent event reminded me of a post about karma I had written half a dozen years ago. The idea of the post was thanks to Umair Haque, who had a definition of karma that was different from the garden variety ‘consequences of your actions’.
(more…)Karma isn’t what you “have” or something you “do”. It’s what you are….. Karma is all the concepts and notions you hold in that tiny little head. All those concepts are stitched together by the idea of “you”, right? So karma is all those concepts, together, which determine your intentions, actions, behavior, all of it.
Umair Haque
Japan was always the plan, it was only a matter of when. 🙂 We planned well in advance, but even then, thanks to it being Sakura season, a lot of hotels were sold out. The visa took less than a week to get processed. Bangalore has a direct flight to Tokyo. So all you have to do is, to quote Amrita Rao, ‘JAL lijiye’. Interestingly, the pilot took off immediately after we landed, confusing all of us! We finally landed again after about 20 minutes. Tokyo was our first stop. We began, and ended, our 11-day Japan trip in Tokyo. This is our list of where to stay, what to see, and where and what to eat.
What’s a visit to Scotland without a trip to the Highlands! Thanks to the Rabbie’s Tours itinerary, we were able to cover a decent bit of ground in 3 days.
Our base technically was Portree, where we stayed for two nights at the Pier Hotel, run by a very homely Effie and family. The place is right next to the water, and less than 5 minutes walk from the town square. The building, Effie told us while making us breakfast, was more than 200 years old. But for a small stay, it’ll do just fine.
An excellent coincidence that I finished reading James P Carse’ “Finite and Infinite Games” the same day I wrote this post. The book helped me frame thoughts to my satisfaction.
There was an age when accumulating possessions – from apparel brands to places visited to career designations to property ownership and anything that signals prosperity – was the game I played. Or games, because a milestone was a victory in that finite game, and I quickly moved on to another. Trophies that the world dictated. (more…)
Warsaw happened only because the second reason to visit Poland was most easily accessible from here. Well, Gdansk more so, but we didn’t fancy a seaside town in winter and the logistics were easier. Wroclaw to Warsaw is a 4 hr + journey by train.
For a change, we stayed at an Accor hotel. The best thing about the Mercure Warszawa Centrum is that it is located very near to the central railway station, and a mall, which turned out to be very useful, because the sole of D’s winter shoe departed!
Poland is what is called ‘Bloodlands’, the part of Europe caught between Hitler and Stalin. History. That, and it had been a while since we had a proper wintery Christmas, and seen Christmas markets.
Our first stop was Krakow because a day trip from there was reason #1 for our visit to this part of the world. But before that, I finally found out the reason for my Eastern Europe fixation, thanks to Anna Funder’s Stasiland. She calls it horror-romance.
The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name.
Except for a two-hour delay in our return flight, which we spent parked in a Munich runway as snow fell around us, it all worked out very well!
(more…)We’re nearing the day since the last time I stared at mortality – 3 years ago. And almost 5 years since I faced my own. To be honest, while I was going through it, I really didn’t think of it that way. From advising D on picking cabs from a certain direction (because of roadwork) to calming down the cab driver when he realised what was happening, to ‘checking in’ on Foursquare before the procedure, I still felt it wasn’t time. I think only idiocy or youth makes one capable of that, and given my age, it was clearly the former.
Cut to today. As if the daily exercise regimen wasn’t reminder enough, the quarterly medical checks drive home the point of how much extra work one needs to do to live even a semblance of life as one wants it. It’s not much really – a little bit of red meat, a little bit of alcohol, dessert once in a while. It shouldn’t be this difficult before hitting 50!
(more…)