With so many quarantine weddings happening left, right and center, I couldn’t help but reflect on what I missed most about weddings.

Was it the gathering of relatives?

Or was it identifying which dupatta goes with the salwar kameez for that micro-event (and horror of horrors, does it even match my potli and shoes!?)

Maybe it was (begrudgingly) figuring out the jewellery I had to wear.

Or was it the fact that we didn’t have to cook all day and could feast upon the choicest food of our people?

The answer turned out to be something completely different.

While I can happily declare that I take no joy in dressing up for weddings (it stresses me out, if anything), I do enjoy a good getting together of dear ones (although I’d need to mute out/dodge with humour, all the inappropriate questions).

The thing that actually lured me to any wedding was not even the bride and the groom (sorry y’all!).

It was, after all, the humble filter kaapi stand.

I have nothing against the endless booze served in style at all the weddings to the north, east and west of the Vindhyas. And despite horrible vodka-infused gummy bear experiences, I love you all. But can anything draw me like a magnet like that filter kaapi stand? Hell no!

That bare-chested maama (or, if you are lucky enough, one wearing a loose cotton shirt) who knows the exact proportion of decoction to milk and sugar would hold all my attention. Even if Mark Ruffalo was to make a guest appearance, I wouldn’t probably move away from the aforementioned ‘king of kaapis’.

This maama mixes like a snazzy bartender from the most upscale bar you can imagine; only his preferred mixers are brown liquid gold (decoction) and a dash of milk (should we name this the Brown Russian?!).

He’d then pour it into the davara tumbler (the apparatus you drink South Indian filter coffee from) from a great height frothing the coffee without spilling it. You milk frothers can go take a hike. I want this kaapi maama to brew me some.

The smell of coffee from the lone stall at the entrance has every single time lured me aside, stopping me in my tracks from entering the actual wedding locations. I would have two full cups, grin at the dude like he was heaven-sent and only then head in to greet the groom, bride and their entourage. There was even an occasion when a kaapi maama began to flirt with me, pumping me up with endless cuppas. I must guiltily concede that I capitalised on the situation, loaded him with praise for his art to get more cups of kaapi before bolting out.

At a cousin’s wedding a couple of years back, I parked myself near the kaapi stand and probably had about 8 cups of filter coffee in a meager span of four hours. I’d have had more, but I was being judged by the kaapi maama for being a boozard of the kaapi kind. Talk of a man who doesn’t know how to run a business!

To give a disclaimer, I do not get high on caffeine in the traditional way people do. I began to drink coffee when I was around five, and my near and dear ones suspect that it runs in my veins.

But the high from the happiness I get slurping on endless cups of coffee is another thing altogether. As the hot liquid hits my lips and flows into my mouth, I feel my life realign to slip into a calm state. Stress dissipates, muscles relax, and a smile gets plastered on my face. Even the migraine tablet that works for me ended up having caffeine in it!

And so, you can understand why I gravitate towards kaapi, that offers me an oasis of calm amidst the chaos that a wedding is. As long as I am sipping on a cup, I am okay with dressing up and getting ready and greeting a million people. Call me to attend a wedding with no kaapi, and I can get surly. It is a fact, my friends. I refused to hold my reception without a live coffee counter for authentic South Indian filter kaapi. And yes, it was my preferred drink of choice the whole evening.

Interestingly I have never encountered kaapi maamis. After all, women have brewed kaapis in our sexist kitchens for aeons. Are they a rare breed? Or has there been no representation of the womenfolk in this prized occupation? Maybe, this is exactly the glass ceiling I should break post-retirement.

To the many kaapi stand maamas (and invisible maamis) who expertly concoct those delicious brews of brown. Thank you, for tirelessly feeding my passion for kaapi, for successfully beating all the garlands and bouquets of flowers with a superior headier fragrance, and for making every wedding-associated stress bearable, even my own! May our paths always cross!

I have been having a lot of back-to-college dreams where I am happily walking through the paths of NID. I still long for the lush greenery, open spaces and large campus in my non-lockdown life, especially being in crowded Bombay. And somewhere in my dreams, to break away from this claustrophobic existence, I crawl back into those memories of the past and walk through the beautiful expanse of the campus.

But I think this doesn’t stop with dreams. In my waking life, I retreat to known flavours of childhood in my cooking. Pavakka pitla, vengaya sambar, malabar parotta-kurma resurface. And the smells have a calming effect on me, reassuring me with the memories of carefree times.

And when I cook, I keep listening to mostly Ilayaraja (and sometimes, A.R. Rahman) on repeat. Music has been a huge part of my childhood. I grew up with the sounds of Indian music — predominantly listening to Tamil film and learning carnatic music. However, in recent years, I have been so busy that any music is heard in the passing or only on an occasional rainy evening. Now that time and thoughts are at my disposal, I yearn for the familiar sounds of childhood.

Is my soul crawling back to the familiar sounds, flavours and spaces that feel like a cocoon? I think so! This is my defence mechanism against the strangeness of the now. If you are experiencing a sudden pang for the sights, sounds and smells of the past, don’t fight it. This is the time to just be and go with the flow.

Originally published at http://www.thedreamydryad.com.

Happy birthday, thatha :’) I still miss you oh-so-much that it hurts!

You were the magical presence in the lives of your three granddaughters, transforming every second into a learning experience, taking us to museums and book stores and showering us with knowledge in every form and kind.

I aspire to be as inspiring as you were to us, to at least one another person in life. You were a self-made man always finding the next-best thing to make your family’s life better. You made such a difference to each one of us! We have in us your quest for knowledge, your passion for travel and your insatiable love for life. In many ways, you live on through the three of us. But sometimes, it’s just not enough. I wish we could see you, that you could see us and how our lives have unfolded. But that’s just me being selfish, I suppose. You were in way too much pain and it was time. But the truth is — it is never possible to let you go!

Thank you for elevating our humble existence into that of superstars. We always knew how cherished we were thanks to your abundant love. You always had our back and that was precious to our growing selves.

I sorely miss all the silly games, the countless talks, the way you wanted me to pat your head so you could fall asleep. A day doesn’t go by without me thinking of you with a pang. Why isn’t science advancing fast enough to find a way to communicate with those who have moved on?

I still remember how I wept and wept and couldn’t stop crying when I watched Cosmos and Interstellar. Movies for some, but meaning-making gospels for me! Finally, through these films, I could be at peace with the fact that people don’t die and disappear. And that there was always the hope that they’d end up on a parallel plane of existence. Someday, I hope to find you there :’)

Why am I writing into some internet void which you may/may not have access to? Maybe I want to shout out from the rooftops that I have (you still are and always will be!) the best grandfather in the world! Or maybe it is a desperation to immortalize you; if not on earth, then in an over saturated world wide web. Or probably it is a silly hope that you can access anything on that parallel plane of existence, who knows?!

Wherever you are, I hope there are plenty of newspapers and books to read, delightful “titbits” of information to cut out from those papers and share with us, lots of fascinating things to discover and make you shed your happy tears/aananda kanneer. On some level, I also wish there were annoying sitcoms playing in some heavenly TV that will prompt you to do your impromptu dance. I miss even your mockery!

Thank you, thatha, for being you. You’ll always be my inspiration for life! :’)

I hope you always watch over your three Tirupathi laddoos! ❤

Originally published at http://www.thedreamydryad.com.

If Karma* is real, then I am God.

Or at least, her left-hand neighbour.

Once in a while, during Deepavali or Pongal, we exchange sweets. And I feel all-powerful to have consumed that 2 cm X 2 cm of kaju katli* God-ness (terrible pun, intended!) But then again, its effects wear off with all the Tums/Digenes/Pudin haras*/Deepavali legiyams* I am forced to take after all the hogging.

Karma never favours me. She hoodwinks me, eludes me and hatches all kinds of adverbial getaway plots from me. Last I heard, the city of Mumbai is planning on creating a new escape room on this theme and hopes for big bucks.

This relationship with Karma began way back when I was a kid. I would get caught the one time I stole a sharpener from a friend’s house while all my friends flicked things left right and centre without anyone even throwing them a sideways glance. After being made to stand in front of the 3681 idols in the house and “God-promising” never to do it again, I resigned to the fact that this was life moulding me to be good.

Throughout childhood all my crimes and misdemeanours got caught by the radars and somewhere Woody Allen must have been a happy man at all the free publicity I offered in the Indian region (of course with the Cigarette smoking is injurious to health warning!)

And so I grew up as an awkward straight-shooter who only attempts balloon shooting at fairs and the Marina beach. Also, to further underline what a seedhi-saadhi ladki* I was, I absolved myself of all sense of style and always chose to wear clothes that drove the attention away from me.

I worked really hard at everything I did, from love (burnt my hands) to make a toast (burnt it) to my career (often prone to spontaneous combustion). And all along Karma decided to be a mean girl and go all “Oh-em-gee! SHE will never be in our gang!”

But as Anderson had us believe, many of the ugly ducklings do grow up into swans. And by some miraculous miscalculation of the aforementioned Karma, I turned out just fine in the looks and love department. Word is out that she still regrets that drunken lapse.

But time and again, to overcompensate for that misjudgement, she often drops awkward situations, complicated plot twists and impossible realities on my lap. These are often a career, scheduling, maid, career, travel, career, customer care, career-related issue. How do I know that this is her doing? She never forgets to add a menacing laugh track as the background music to these occurrences.

People call her many names, but there is also a whole clan who believes in her goodness. They often tut-tut and tell me she’ll come around and shower me with everything I ever wanted. But we all know how high school bullies turned out!

Being the South Indian that I am, I continue to believe what Rajnikanth once said in his gorgeously thick Tamil accent — “the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.”

And so, I have forever given up on Karma, blocking her from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, WhatsApp… you get the drift! Even if she tries to reach out to me, landing on my doorstep, I am pretty sure my Google Home would warn me of her arrival and I don’t have to exchange pretend pleasantries.

*Karma: fate

*kaju katli: A sweet made out of cashews

*Pudin haras: A tablet for digestion

*Deepavali legiyams: A homemade digestive paste often made around Deepavali

*seedhi-saadhi ladki: simple straightforward girl

Originally published at http://www.thedreamydryad.com.

To whomsoever it may concern,

I am not a label you can stick to your box file.

I am not an acrobat walking a tightrope.

Meandering, unusual and uncategorised,

I am that candidate you dislike,

Who doesn’t tick your boxes,

The outlier who scares your system,

An enigma you question the sanity of.

For I am not a straight path;

I am but the ebb and flow of life

Walking lanes none else dared

Trying things out for just a lark.

For sometimes it is in those gap months,

In those miserable failures of side projects and attempted glories

That you learn that a career is not something you can craft.

That learning and experience comes in more ways than one

And that two months or two years at a job is not the criteria

But how much you gave and created

And how much you evolved in all that, that matters.

And sometimes life catches up with problems and pressures,

And yes, you buckle to balance, support, reconfigure, sustain;

Sometimes you stay still to simply survive, not thrive.

Don’t look at my two-pager with scepticism!

It hardly tells you the tumultuous tales

Of eating or watching films for a living

Defining the future of work, life or learning.

Cruising lives with fictional characters

And willing designs to manifest on paper,

Or how I gathered stories like flowers

from the thousand dreamers I met.

Talk to me about my life.

Don’t force fit my journey into 500-word cover letters

Of repeated same-olds

But ask me to brew you some magic

Put me to work and test my mettle.

Let not my growth be defined

by little check boxes of closeted thought

Let not my life and future be determined

by myopic visions and words like compliance and certifications.

And not just me,

But look at people as people, not job-fulfillers.

Jump into their shoes and grow up with them

Through careers that spanned

many hats, many places, many masters.

Forget the format

And understand that it is the journey that matters

And never a piece of paper.

A career is what a person shapes out of a potter’s wheel

And before you master a piece of art,

There will always be plenty of broken clay.

But oh what a fascinating collage even they make!

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.

When I conceived this project, I was still not sure what form the stories of all the interesting people I’d meet was going to take.

Was it going to be on video since I was a film maker?

Was it going to be long-form pieces just because I loved to write?

Or should I be experimenting with a podcast?

I had no idea!

And algorithms of every digital medium kept changing so much, it didn’t help make a decision.

Then I decided that it would be whatever it wanted to be. I couldn’t postpone the idea any longer. So, Akin became a shape-shifting, multimedia entity that would use anything and everything to tell its stories. And so, just-plain Akin transformed into The Akin Project. Akin will begin with interviews in long-form and move over to a podcast and maybe even graduate with full honours in the form of videos.

The Akin Questionnaire

I’m launching The Akin Project with the questionnaire that is emailed to all the interviewees. Yes! It is a long list of questions :) However, that’s the point: to stop and reflect. To share and influence.

They can answer the questions in any format they want: write, draw, send voice notes, sing out an answer, use a GIF: this is one of those questionnaires where the interviewee decides how to express. But more than anything else, Akin values good old-fashioned writing so there is no pressure of creativity.

Each questionnaire is divided into two parts:

Deep-dive

This section requires time and thought. The more honest and well-articulated the answers are, the more it might inspire someone to plough on. So, interviewees are encouraged to mull over this section. They are free to answer as many questions from the list as they wish to, with a mandatory minimum of 10 questions.

Quick fix

This is a rapid-fire round in writing where each question should simply take a few seconds to answer. Once again, the interviewee is free to answer as many questions as they want with a minimum requirement of 10 questions.

What’s next for Akin?

Akin is a side-project and a very dear one at that. I am presently working on a podcast format for Akin although I have NO CLUE how to record a podcast. But what the heck, Akin is all about discovering and trying things out. So, keep watching this space for more.

The Akin Project was originally published in The Akin Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nivin Joseph (CEO at TutuOwl and Community Manager at Tribe Theory-Bangalore) and Aashish Ramamurthy (Business Development Manager at Campmonk) are full of stories about Bangalore’s startup ecosystem. Nivin fondly recollects the impact of the TIE community in Bangalore and the Construkt festival. Aashish talks about how the Nasscom Initiative and the Under-25 summit inspiring him to join a startup. But both of them agree that the Bangalore startup ecosystem was not always booming like this. We caught up with them over a chat to dive deep into understanding the Silicon Valley of India.

“In 2012 or 2013, most people were very sceptical about joining startups. You couldn’t tell your own parents that you were joining a startup. They’d freak out and ask you for a good reason why despite being qualified, you are joining a startup instead of a Bosch, Philips or Microsoft,” explains Nivin.

But, today things have changed. Bangalore has grown from being just a corporate hub to a startup hub. Aashish believes that this was because of the startup trend of giving over taking. “It happened because of the ecosystem that was built around conferences and networking events. People were ready to help. Even if you’re young and new, you could reach out to mentors and incubators to grow. So, that simple thought of joining a startup became a virus in everybody’s mind. And today, it has become so easy to start building networks and gaining momentum like never before.”

Aashish believes that the abundant freelance talent and ease of availability of mentorship in Bangalore makes the city’s biggest attraction. And Nivin agrees– “How many people come from all around India to start something in Mumbai? Not many. But people come to Bangalore all the time to try to validate and execute their ideas. There are a lot of communities, ecosystems, coworking spaces, etc., built here. It is very easy to network and the resources are easy to find. Flipkart, Paytm, all these startups started out in Bangalore. Now they are all like the kings of Silicon Valley in India.”

Bangalore’s startup economy has grown in stages. It began with the e-commerce boom. It slowly paved way to food tech, fitness and outdoor sports. And today, the shared model is ruling the roost. “We have amazing traction for coliving, coworking and cloud kitchens,” Nivin shares.

“It is the time for consumer convenience startups,” explains Aashish. “Earlier, we used to go to a nearby restaurant and order. Today, the food comes to us because we have the convenience of sitting and ordering from wherever we are. All the brands have made convenience a product. A one-button-click-and-I-can-get-things-done model. People are paying for time and productivity and Bangalore has become a hub for these products. We even have a service to drop people from the metro station to within two kilometres’ distance.”

College entrepreneurship is yet another thriving feature in the Bangalore startup scene. The top engineering colleges boast of entrepreneurship cells fostering a lot of innovation in the college and connecting students to the startup ecosystem. Apart from conferences and meetups on the leadership level, Bangalore has opened up the ecosystem to have different levels of communities today. Some of these are extremely niche, catering only to growth hackers, program and product managers. Aashish feels that the Meetup platform has facilitated the building of these micro-communities in the last one year or so.

Nivin thinks startup events are invaluable to learn about pitching ideas, finding mentorship and building a network. However, he finds it laborious that one needs to attend multiple events discovered through a variety of platforms like BookMyShow, Events high, WhatsApp groups and Facebook Groups to even build a network. He laments the lack of a centralized startup ecosystem. “Unless you have the bargaining and negotiating power, like a WeWork, it is very hard to establish a central startup ecosystem. Hopefully this changes in the coming years,” he adds.

There is a strong need for structured entrepreneurial training in the country. “The legalities, building a viable product, validating one’s idea, understanding customer acquisition cost– these are the few things you need to know as an entrepreneur. This “improv” part of entrepreneurship is what we need more training on,” Nivin shares. He has the highest praise for Startup India x Upgrad’s online course on Entrepreneurship. But his personal mantra, he jokes, is “try, do, fail.”

But the Bangalore Government has been taking some initiatives. It works closely with the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), a trade association of Indian Information Technology and Business Process Outsourcing industry known for their program to impact ‘10000 Startups’ in India by 2023. Through this initiative, the Bangalore Government is aiding thousands of local startups, ensuring money flow into entrepreneurship via incubators and grants. These government-funded grants have great brand partners that further foster startups.

Nivin feels there is plenty of scope for improvement. As a CEO and startup founder himself, he feels the Government does not provide inclusive GST waivers, has an unfair Angel tax (the Government takes a portion of the seed money received as tax) and does not offer enough infrastructural support. “If these things continue, what would happen is that people would move to Estonia if it gives better benefits or Singapore if it does not charge a tax. And the country loses amazing talents. It is, after all, a small retaining cost for the Government to pay.”

Be it Bangalore or elsewhere, building a startup is tough and like Aashish shares “only 20 per cent of the whole entrepreneur ecosystem have some sort of financial backing. The other 80 per cent are trying out their ideas to see if they can build a brand for themselves.” This shot in the dark makes it risky to tread the entrepreneurial path. Nivin feels that a balanced perspective is the need of the hour. “The biggest problem nowadays is that publications are portraying only the success stories about who got acquired and funded. Someone needs to talk about what you are signing up when you become an entrepreneur. For that, you need to share the flip side of entrepreneurship. Ask the successful entrepreneurs to talk about their failed ideas,” he suggests.

Having said that, both Nivin and Aashish strongly support working in the startup industry. Just that they want to draw the right picture that one learns and grows every day, but the finances maybe unsteady. “If you are able to sacrifice your earnings for a better future then differently go for it. The financial issues are only temporary,” Aashish advises, once again rating Bangalore as the right place to launch.

“Learning and networking have been the whole core of how Bangalore has given back to the ecosystem. It has provided a great platform for people to help each other. That belief that if you grow somebody, you also grow is what drives the city,” he adds as a concluding note.

Nivin and Aashish both work at Tribe Theory Bangalore.

Bangalore Dreams: talking entrepreneurship with Nivin and Aashish was originally published in Draper Startup House on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.