When the Building Came Alive

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Kasturi Dhama Apartments — the play area where many evenings came alive. The lights would go out without warning. For a brief second, the entire building would fall silent. Then, from somewhere in Kasturi Dhama Apartments, a chorus would erupt. “Yayyy!” It is difficult to imagine children celebrating a power failure today. But in the Bangalore of the nineties and early 2000s, a power cut did not always feel like an inconvenience. Especially in the late evenings, it felt like permission. Permission to stop whatever we were doing, leave the darkness inside our homes, and step into the building outside. Before Kasturi Dhama became home, we had moved through a few different parts of Bangalore. My family had begun in Srirampuram and Vyalikaval before gradually cementing ourselves in Malleswaram for the next few decades. My earliest memory is of living in a vatara —a Kannada word loosely used for a building or a cluster of homes—on 15th Cross, near Karur Vy...
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Thriving

The good and bad thing about life is that you meet different kinds of people; some making quite an impression on you.  That's one of the things I like about travel.  It's not just the experience of seeing new places, but meeting some fantastic people along the way that makes a big difference.  That doesn't mean day to day life doesn't fetch interesting encounters.  All along, you have interesting conversations, and once in a while, you look back and think twice about what the other person said, and that's when you realize that the conversation has made an impact on you.

Bay area is all about crazy entrepreneurs and insanely smart people that you come across almost on a daily basis.  And they talk about how they have had successful exits from previous startups and so on.  It's actually pretty inspiring.

I came across one of the guys who I don't even know why he still works.  Apart from a regular job, he has side projects, and talks about passionate ideas.   He has been a part of four startups, out of which he has had two successful exits.

This is how the conversation went.

"How many startups have you been a part of?", I asked.

"Four, but only two were successful", he said.

"So, what are you doing here? You should be at home, retired and spending time on your hobbies."

He smiled and said, "I can retire if I want to.  I will be able to survive for the rest of my life.  But, what's the point in such a life.  I want to thrive not just barely survive."

I thought about this statement.  You don't just want to do well in life.  You want to do really well in life, and lead the kind of life you want to lead.

Ultimately, it's one life, and you better have the allowance to do whatever you want to.

Some conversations just strike a chord, and for good.

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