Tag: writing

The Start Up of You

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by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha

This is the book, I got so excited to read and got so disappointed after reading it.

I was looking for a book, that can instill the curiosity in me, in terms of my profession. I was thinking, after few years working in a large bank, structure seemed to have gotten boring to me, and I wanted a shake up. I am looking for opportunities that excite me and push me. But, that’s when I thought, with the years in such a structured world, if I try to navigate an unstructured environment, won’t I break systems and reduce my self-confidence. So I leaned into structure again.

I thought maybe I can prepare my mindset, to acknowledge the gaps I have right now and prepare myself to delve into growth and uncertainty. The top recommendation was this book 😦

Do I regret reading it? No, I would never say I regret reading a book.
If I am honest, I did have few takeaways from the book. The first 3 chapters were truly eye opening for me.
Assessing oneself with regards to aspirations and abilities, was something I needed to work on. Plan A, Plan B and Plan Z – are something everyone should think at every point in life. I learnt those via this book.

But after that, it is only disappointment to me, Hoffman rightly created LinkedIn, because he believed that networking can take you to places in the professional world, not thought of before. He is absolutely right about it and I completely agree. After all, the world still revolves people and systems created by the people, gaining trust and networking is what brings you the unexpected, usually hard to get / find fruit.

Later on, the whole book was about networking in various forms and phases and examples of how networking saved and brought opportunities to people.

That’s why it was a disappointing read to me, I had an objective to get out of this book and it did not provide me that.

And after all, Hoffman, makes it sound so easy to network and everyone has or finds the time and prioritizes this. I have heard that this is mostly a silicon valley experience. I am from India and I live and work in India. This doesn’t apply as he narrates.

So, there is an underlying culture difference between the US and India, with respect to experimentation. After being under colonial rule, Indians have rightly been conservative in their approaches and have taken the beaten up path for financial incentives. With few businesses, that flourished from the 70s to 90s, most of them were of manufacturing sector and some of them were even created by families that were already wealthy and thriving in businesses, and after 2000, India utilized the software industry but in terms of offering services, rather than building in-house tech first products, which involves the capital and risk, that Indians are conservative about. Of course, there are few exceptions, but this is the larger picture.

With initiatives for funding start ups, and building a community for founders, India is now creating a budding atmosphere for startups and experimentation. Still, a large majority of people would prefer a huge stable paycheck, than building something of their own, on their own and take the risks involved. They can’t be blamed, there are numerous families, who are just trying to escape the trap of being poor and trying to build something for themselves first. After all, survey shows that inequality in wealth distribution is at an all time high.

With the introduction, now when I say, it is hard to network with people purely with fascination towards the field, hope you can understand. I have tried. But, Indians are labelled as people who just take care of all on the off-shore activities, and moreover with the speeches on why 70hr and 90hr workweeks are essential to create value, that are given by the entrepreneurs of the country, where is the time to look beyond work and connect with people genuinely?

This is absurd, I started writing it as book review, but I think I am enraged on how work-life balance in India is a joke. When someone stands up for it, they are often punished or labelled. While the whole western world tries to move towards 4 day work week, American hustlers thought it is a good idea to work 9 to 9 for 6 days a week, and Indians have been doing the same, for cheap for so long.

When the people in the other countries get to experience the time, lifestyle and health alongside the work that pays them for all of it, Indians lose their health, become insanely obese, lose time for family and friends, let alone networking for work, there are no words to describe the lifestyle India has to offer. Of course, quick commerce and delivery options are available, they are just other means of consumptions that Indians pay for the lack of time and energy they have after toiling at work and again, this is eventually going to make them pay more hospital bills as well. Where is the good air to inhale, less commute time and better roads for the taxes paid? After all this, of course, it is good idea to work 70hr, yes.

This article was not supposed to be a rant on the Indian workplace, but after reading the book, I can’t but, just be frustrated about how Indians lose opportunities that another part of the world sees as normal. Any human can innovate, with the needs and the space, but not with the lack of time. Ideas do get born out of desperation, but not out of lack of enthusiasm. It is time to get back enthusiasm.

Thanks Reid for selling LinkedIn in a book to me.

The God of Small Things

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The god of small things

By Arundhati Roy

I have always had this book on my TBR list and was excited to read it when I got the paperback. I have heard so much about the book before reading it. I thought I already knew the spoilers, but it turns out Arundhati Roy wrote it that way.

Before reading the book, I must say I have watched many interviews of the author – about the book and about her activism. I have liked her, I have grown fond of her, the way she articulates her thoughts, how she unapologetically and confidently expresses her opinions. I did go through her Wikipedia page previously to know more about her. When I started reading the book, I was confused to find her story in the starting chapters. It turns out, The God of Small Things is a semi-autobiographical novel.

I have now read this book at a time when her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me has been launched and received a warm welcome. (I might pick up the new memoir someday.)

What’s the story about?

The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize, making Arundhati Roy the first to receive it for a debut novel. The story narrates the childhood and adulthood of twins (two-egg twins, as she stresses enough), and how their lives change entirely within a few days. I have a hard time condensing the plot without giving spoilers. The most important thread of it all is the life of the twins’ mother – her decisions, her childhood, and the love she had chosen – and how all of it was overpowered by the God of Big Things.

Things I must say

I loved the rich narration of Arundhati Roy; her writing was truly transformative. It is sad that the book still stays relevant today, given that casteism plays a major role – the Big Thing in the lives of the characters.

The brilliance of embedding comedy and a child’s perspective into such a serious and nerve-breaking theme is what made me understand the reason behind the wide acclaim for this work. I must say I wasn’t planning to write a glorious review of this book. But when I start finding words to express what I feel, these are the words that find their way.

The Writing – (Spoilers)

Small things are human nature – the longing for love, belonging, and happiness. Big things are the pillars and structures that humans have built for no clear reason but to maintain authority, including casteism and racism.

The author shows clearly how the God of Small Things is crushed when the Big Things take the stage – and it is always the Big Things that get the center stage.

That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

Not something a child would want to listen from her mother, and wonder if her mother loves her less. If her mother and her uncle, would always love the cousin of her more, a white girl more. Will she have to always wonder at things and be not careless in her childhood. Would she have to run away from people who constantly remind her, that she and her mother have no place in the house they live.

Estha Alone is a phrase often written by Arundhati, depicting how the child, in every sense, was left to figure out his own path. Be it the abuse he had to endure, the return he had to walk through – leaving his family, his world – with no guide but himself. Not a single word was uttered by him throughout the adult phase of his life. When he is returned, he simply admires his sister, finds the beauty of his mother in her, and holds the pain both women had to endure. No glimpse is offered into his inner world, yet his seems the shakiest of all, the most tumultuous.

The notion that a woman stops belonging to the family she was born into once she is married is one of the most depriving ideas a society can hold on to. Again, the Big Thing wins, and Ammu is left with no support or right to belong anywhere – only to suffer.

Life would be much easier if the Big Things could take a step back, and if we stopped giving them the space they least deserve. For all the time humans have known, we have fought – and for what? We die after all of it, leaving behind only memories in the minds of others who are also bound to die.

This book is great – thought-provoking, touching, and something that instills fear and anger at the same time.

Lives of women – Kang Kyŏng-ae

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The Underground Village

I am currently reading  Kang Kyŏng-ae’s The Underground Village. It is a short story collection. I have read the first couple of stories. However, something in those stories stirred my heart, prompting me to write this article.

Before delving into the stories, it is important to know about Kang Kyŏng-ae. She is a Korean author who focuses on portraying the lives of Koreans, especially women from an impoverished community. Kang’s pro-feminist writings reflect the hardships of women in a colonial and patriarchal world.

The first story is called Manuscript Money. In this story, a woman writes to her friend ‘K’ about earning 200 won from a newspaper for her work. She wishes to buy things for herself like a fur coat, a gold watch, and even dental work, with the money earned. But her husband urges her to spend the money on others, for instance, helping in medical aid for a comrade. The woman goes on to write her friend about the obligation she is bound to, spend money on society and not herself.

The second story is called Salt. In this story, a woman and a man live with their son and daughter. When one of their children asks for a shoe, the woman explains the toil they have to go through, just to feed themselves. The woman loses her husband to the exploitation of labor. Her son disappears, and she is left with her daughter. She lives in Manchuria, as one of the many ethnic Koreans who were displaced during the Japanese occupation of Korea. She knows no one and no place, and she ends up seeking refuge from the very man who exploited her husband. She does domestic chores in his household. She gets sexually exploited by the man and also gets pregnant. But she gets kicked out of the house along with her daughter by the wife and the landlord, after knowing that the son of the woman was killed by the communists. She then gives birth to a girl child. She nurses a baby not of her own, and she makes money from her breast milk. Her daughters spend all their time alone, while the elder daughter goes through a hard time bringing up her baby sister, without her mother. Tragically, she loses both her daughters to illness, and she also loses the right to see the baby she nursed all the while. She has no will to live, but the starvation competes with her zeal to die. She then smuggles salt, merely to live her life, and that also ends badly.

The parallels from the stories are quite interesting. Both stories revolve around how a woman is viewed, her self vs the community, the control of a man over a woman, guilt, loss, and the survival of a woman from an impoverished community.

In Manuscript Money, the woman is made to believe that she is selfish for spending her earned money on herself. She is torn between self-care and community. In salt, the woman has no control over money or even her body. While the male partner dictates how her money should be spent, the landlord in the latter story exploits the woman’s body. The women in both stories feel guilty at the end of the day. In the former, she feels evil for just wanting her own money and wanting to live well. In the latter, the woman feels guilty for just being alive, after the loss of everyone in her family; she survives by instinct and has lost everything.

Kang’s words echo the hold of patriarchy in an already oppressed society. Mere survival of Korean women during the Japanese occupation was made difficult by double oppression. Her stories depict the systems and the values they associate with women. The silent suffering of the women during those times, whose values were in serving others, and whose existence was punishable, was alive in the stories.

I am excited to read the other stories!