Posted on

Being Alone

Last month, I wondered how to make my 50th birthday special. And after a lot of thought and back and forth, I decided to do a solo trip. I have never done it. A couple of months ago, it may have even been unthinkable for me. I still ended up choosing the safest places to be, but I did it.

So from the outside it looks like I took a holiday. Umm…I was working on most days, even on a Sunday for an hour or two. But there was no expectation from anyone that I had to. But I was just doing the bare minimum to keep things going, so it wasn’t stalling anything. So yeah, it was a holiday.

From the inside, was it a holiday? Yes, sure. But it was more than that.

Holidays are for the privileged, right? Yes. But as soon as I reached Goa, I realized that there is a whole new level of privilege, holidays or not.

That is the privilege of being alone. Because most Indian women can’t possibly get their head around this. We are so defined by our families and extended families, so stepping out of the city by yourself is met with a lot of questions: We can do a family trip, can’t we? Why don’t you ask our friends to join you? Are you going for work? Won’t you get bored?

I went alone. I sat in restaurants and watched the people on the other tables. A North Indian family, out on a holiday, but it sounded like they carried their morning breakfast table conversation to Goa: how bad the tea is, how thick the alu paranthas, and so on. I could talk about the whiny attitude, but that’s not what this post is about. It is about them not knowing that we carry our group dynamics wherever we go, so we will never get to see ourselves, truly. What we could be if we had no one around. And it’s not a sorry state at all. It’s of exuberance and pause and gentleness and joy for no reason. And also your ups and downs, and the space to have them.

What a privilege.

And why women? I saw men who looked like they didn’t want to be on this holiday. I saw men giving their wives the break they needed from the kids. Wouldn’t they like to have this privilege too? I have a few guy friends who know this: some go for their yearly solo trips, some gave up after they got married, some have restarted after their divorce. But they know the thing about being alone. For that time, to not be defined by their work or wives or kids or parents.

What a privilege. To know that you are all that, and more. Or less, as the layers peel off, even if temporarily.

What a privilege, to sit quietly and have a drink and a bite of your choice. That doesn’t need to be dependent on what the others are having.

What a privilege, to not have to do anything, and just be. To not be caught up in chores or see if everyone is comfortable. Or if the meal is balanced and to everyone’s liking. Or that the clothes are washed and everyone has clothes for the week. Or that you have to leave the phone on at night, because your elderly parents might need help (mine are gone, so I can now switch it off at night). Or that there is no shrieking dementia person or post-chemo patient in the other room who needs your attention. Or not feel guilty about not putting in your volunteering hours.

What a privilege that you have a team that can step in to do your work. Or that you don’t have to be in the day-to-day things that keep the revenue coming in.

Do I sound uncaring? As if being alone means running away from responsibilities. It could but it isn’t. That’s one’s choice really. 

The point is to give yourself the space to be yourself. I do that all the time at home as well. But it’s still a physical space that needs attention. It’s an emotional space where others need attention. 

Consider taking this privilege, of being alone. Because you need your own attention.

Posted on

10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Get the Jab

Yesterday I was speaking to my friend who lives abroad. He described how he was just waiting for his turn to get his jab. I asked about the options his country was offering him by way of Covid jabs. He said, “There’s the Oxford one, the Pfizer one, the one by AstraZeneca, and now we will be getting Covishield from India.”

I was taken aback by my friend’s lack of knowledge about this: three of the four jabs he named are the same, and he obviously hadn’t bothered to do any research of his own. Then when he said they were debating which one was a better va$$ine, he only sounded vacuous. No research, no idea of his options, but he was debating which was a better jab?

I shook my head in disbelief. He had been a close friend of mine, and how did he devalue himself to this?

A month and a half ago, I had a similar discussion with a group of media friends. We all had spent some time on copydesks of magazines and understood the value of research before jumping to conclusions.

I am the only one in that group unva$$inated. The group outright rejected any alternative options of treatment, saying that there is no data to support it. And that they were basing their decision to get jabbed on what reputable, knowledgeable doctors were saying.

Since then, one of the friends in the group has had a long and harrowing case of Covid, and her mother, also jabbed, had to spend a long time at a hospital, even undergoing plasma treatment. At the same time, my jabbed friend in Bangalore also spent over 10 days in the hospital and her SpO2 levels still fall off to mid 80s, two weeks post hospitalization.

And then Covid came home. My jabbed husband got it first and then my daughter and I got it, though we tested negative. Three weeks later, we are all recovered. He went through 14 days of high fever along with taking paracetamol, steroids and a host of allopathic drugs, had his SpO2 levels drop to 85, while my daughter and I had fever for 2-3 days, and we went without any medication. We all have some lingering cough and fatigue.

You know, it takes all kinds to make a pandemic.

It is very hard to find information that is not propaganda or agenda driven anymore. Have you come across any media report that doesn’t call RTPCR a gold standard test? When in reality, the inventor of the test, Kary Mullis, said the test couldn’t be used to detect any meaningful presence of a virus?

All the information out there presupposes that injections and jabs are the answer to this pandemic, and that RTPCR is the test to prove the existence of the virus (which according to many doctors, hasn’t even been properly isolated yet!). So if you are continuously bombarded with information that has pre-concluded that everyone must get jabbed, one has to stop and ask, “What’s going on?”

I watched a Brut India video of Dr Rajesh Parikh, who has co-authored a book on Covid va$$ines (that was fast), speaking eloquently about how va$$ines are required, and jabbed people will only get mild cases of Covid, and how effective they are against variants (he didn’t mention any data to support this, when worldwide there is skepticism about jabs not being able to handle new variants. But you know he wrote a book, so he must be an expert!)

When the first news about jabs started coming out last year, I was among the minority that was questioning the safety of bringing out these products in under three months of trials. But the frenzy to have a va$$ine out, drowned out all debates on this. Anyway, what was there to debate, when there was no data out there to work with? But the historic data did show that all efforts to make va$$ines against other versions of coronaviruses had spectacularly failed, always failing at the animal stage trials.  

But by now millions are jabbed, and they haven’t all died. But is it just coincidence that the second wave and immunization ramp up are very closely aligned? 

Thousands have died, going by VAERS data. EudraVigilance reports over 200,000 adverse effects instances after AstraZeneca vaccine administration. India reported 180 deaths till March 31, post vaccinations.

We still don’t know the long-term effects of the jabs, or the drugs that have been rampantly prescribed. And now black fungus has made a solid emergence, and what are we to do with that? Perhaps another jab would help?

My point in writing this is to ask you to take a pause and wonder if this va$$ine story hasn’t been blown out of proportion? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But have you stopped and questioned any aspect of it? Or did you outsource your questioning to the media, your friends, family or doctor? Do you have informed consent? Or do you just believe you do?

Here are some questions you should ask yourself before you take the jab. And if you don’t know the answers, look for it in medical journals and from doctors who are sharing information that is being actively censored online. I have left some links here, but use them only to start off your research. Go deep and find your own answers.

  1. Are you aware that all Covid jabs are under emergency use authorisation? Do you have a complete understanding of what that means? 
  2. Are you fully aware of what the jab will do once inside your body? How long will it stay? And what will it continue to do? And how does one know that it will continue to behave as it is supposed to?
  3. Do you know the contents/ingredients of the va$$ine?
  4. Are you aware that you can still get Covid-19, as well as infect others even after getting the jab?
  5. Do you believe when doctors say that after va$$ination even if you do get Covid, it will be a mild case? Do you have anecdotal evidence that suggests otherwise?
  6. Have you reviewed any or all of the AEFI (adverse effects following immunization) data being shared in the media? Are you satisfied with the process followed for AEFI?
  7. Have you looked at the adverse effects being reported across Europe for AstraZeneca’s va$$ine? 
    1. There are over 200,000 instances of people reporting adverse effects (https://www.adrreports.eu/en/search_subst.html#)
    2. From 4th Jan to 12th May 2021:

8 deaths from Blood disorders

100 deaths from cardiac disorders

11 deaths from GI disorders

277 deaths from General disorders

7 deaths from hepatic disorders

67 deaths from infections

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/987644/AstraZeneca_analysis_print_12052021.pdf

  1. What are the long-term effects of the jab? Can you get cancer? Or become impotent? Or have issues with periods?
  2. In more than 1 year, we still don’t have clarity on the pandemic or the second and third waves. Do you believe that we are so technologically backward that we haven’t been able to solve this yet? Why have we not solved this yet?
  3. There is no real treatment for Covid, we have been told. Yet millions of people have stayed home and recovered with major, minor or no medication. There are treatments in homeopathy, ayurveda, traditional chinese medicine, that I personally know of, by which people have recovered. Do you find that normal, abnormal, irrelevant? Why?

From where I see, all those getting jabbed are part of a large worldwide clinical trial, for which they are willingly signing up for, by paying money to buy the doses. And when the trials come to a close in 2023, there’d be enough data to see if this was successful or if it wreaked any kind of devastation, as time went by.

If you did some of this research yourself, and went down some rabbit holes of censored material, “conspiracy theories”, and followed the Disinformation Dozen, you will soon hit the very edges of your belief systems. And that would be very, very uncomfortable. And many of you will simply go back to the mainstream narrative and Netflixing. But a few among you, will step outside your comfort zones and start seeing things for what they are, and not what you have been led to believe. To those ones, I say, welcome home!

Posted on

Comfort Zone Musings

A lot happened this week, personally, professionally. Nothing new in the life of an entrepreneur (or anyone, really!). And as I find a quiet moment on a Saturday, the thought that bubbles up from the past week melee is about comfort zones. Different incidents, different people, different settings—but the common thread is that.

I had been in touch with some people I shortlisted for an open position in our company. One of the key ways for me to judge ability, as well as initiative, is to send them a test to do. It’s not an easy one, but it’s not rocket science either. But to anyone without initiative or the hunger (we are looking for), it would feel like rocket science.

So here I was, down to my shortlisted three candidates.

One did it splendidly well, but had omitted to mention that she had already found another job. So she was out.

Another replied with a mail that sounded like a combination of lying and excuses. And when I followed up on what she said in her mail, she didn’t reply. Maybe she never saw the mail, you might say. I use Streak, so usually I know who has seen my mail, and how many times. So I know she saw my mail about the test 10 times, and the follow up mail once. She didn’t have the courtesy to say, No, thank you. Sadly, I seemed to have been proven right about the combination of lying and excuses. So she fizzled out too.

The third person saw the mail, and chose to not respond either. But when I followed up, she said she was in advanced negotiations for a job, and that it would be unethical for her to pursue ours. So that candidate went bust too.

So when all three candidates didn’t work out, I did what I usually do, which is question my modus operandi. Am I being too tough? Am I being too picky? Do I not want to close this position (what if deep down my subconscious is sabotaging the efforts!)? And on and on.

Then I looked at what I am trying to build. It’s cutting edge stuff, it’s not stuff for the faint hearted. It requires a toughness and staying power that many people don’t have. And while many freshers have this, experienced people exhibit less and less of this. They have defined their comfort zones and want to play in that. Comfort zone of not being asked hard questions. Comfort zones of known evils vs unknown evils. Comfort zones of working for a brand.

And that’s okay.

The other way to look at this is that they have defined their discomfort zones for other aspects of their life: maybe their personal lives push them out of their comfort zones quite a bit, so their work becomes their comfort zone. That’s certainly okay, isn’t it?

Some of us treps go into a mode of lamenting that people just don’t want to play outside their comfort zones. Just because we do, and many of our team members do, it doesn’t mean that everyone out there must either. It’s not their calling. So let’s drop the lament, shall we? And focus on the ones who do like to be out of their comfort zones at work.

Then there are others who play outside their comfort zones at work, and seem to go off-balance really quickly. When you extend help or solutions, they listen but come back and say, “No, thank you. My discomfort zone, my rules.” Sure, that works too!

Then there could be others who say they want to play outside their comfort zones, to learn more, to earn more. But if they are not authentic enough with their work, it starts becoming apparent that their ability to step outside their comfort zones is limited. And then it can become discordant, in terms of being misaligned on what one says and what one does. Is that okay? For them, perhaps. For a manager or an entrepreneur? Maybe, maybe not. For me, it’s not okay.

So what are my takeaways this week from all this?

  • That I don’t have to hyperventilate about people not wanting to step outside their comfort zones. If I want people who do so, I will just have to keep looking and find the right people.
  • That comfort zones come in all different sizes and shapes and forms. And I don’t have to insist that your comfort zone has to match mine.
  • That in case of an integrity issue with what’s being said, and done about comfort zones (or anything really), I want to question it.

On that note, I look ahead to a week that will need me to be out of my comfort zone quite a bit. Both at work and at home.

Cheers!