January 5th 2024

 I am already a day behind- thanks to the accursed flu. Lest this begins to slip up more, let me try to play catch up. Yesterday I was able to fix my OWNDAYS prescription glasses for no cost. This was a blessing as I really don't like any of my other glasses. Subsequently I went to se Johannes, my South African GP at the Meadows Mediclinic. A short conversation, 50 dirham co payment and a prescription for Antibiotics and I was out of there. The medical insurance provider had changed and so now I apparently needed to pay 30% of the fees of the medicines. As it happened, the pharmacy could not get through properly to my insurance provider and I got fed up and paid 100% of the cost of the medicines. This reminds me , I need to get on my own insurance and not my wife's. I will need to figure out how to change this. Here everything is tied to one's Emirates ID. And  mine was tied to my wife's provider. All in all this type of spouse dependency has decidedly made me a bit cavalier about my extracting maximum value out of my own employer's benefits. If any part of this extraction is not automatic, it is usually enough to make me not even bother. Such has become the gravity of the ennui that I am perpetually engulfed in at the slightest provocation of some sort of bureaucratic tedium. I need also to move my sons to my work visa, in order to avail their education allowance- which happens to be a bit higher than my spouse's. All of this needs to be accomplished preferably this month- of which the first week has passed in a state of a virus induced stupor. The other task that has to be accomplished is for me to open a saxobank trading account. My spouse has one but not I.  I have a modicum of cash sitting in a Fixed Deposit - awaiting an entry into the equity markets following the next massive correction- of which there can be no doubt, but no one predict exactly when it will happen. But I need to be ready when it does. Note to self- go to the saxobank website and do the needful. 

This morning, after my first coffee, I lay in bed for a while. My phone was charging which made me reach out to a text which I had been  reading over the last several months. "Indian Identity" by Sudhir Kakkar. It is dense reading for sure, but that is really no excuse. Especially when I compare this performance to that of one Gopal Krishna Ranjan. The fact is that I have also succumbed to this beastly malaise of Facebook scrolling. I awake in the morning and right away reach for the phone and indulge in a sliding over movement with my thumb. Often this leads to inadvertently liking a post or even dimming the brightness of the screen of the phone. The content is right at me, fast, furious and relentless.  I imagine myself to be a stationary train, and the landscape and stations are passing me by at top speed. Occasionally a station takes fancy to me and comes to a grinding halt, I step out and check out the offering and board right back. And the station moves away. What an impoverishing waste of time- and to think it is making other people rich in parallel. This is what everything around is reduced to. Smart people will figure out a way to monetize the vast majority of men and women of weak character who will easily slide into any number of booby traps cleverly designed. And forming a habit of it is a cinch. One can argue that scrolling must offer some form of gratification else why would any one do it. This is where the men are separated from the gratification seeking infants. Reading a book, playing an instrument, composing a poem or cooking up a new recipe- not to mention climbing a mountain, going for a hike, a swim or a run- all of this is more enriching that scrolling. And you will be surprised how many minutes you spend doing this if you really start measuring it. I can anecdotally attribute to my lack of reading to it. I cannot spend so much time this year partaking in this vile act. I have successfully quit smoking. Surely I can do this. In your face,  fuckerberg.

Reverting to "Indian Identity". There are many passages in the book that make for decent reading but nothing really struck me until the section on "gurus'. Indeed in recent years, I have secretly been intrigued by this. It came close to home in that two of my classmates from school- both very financially successful in the business world, declared to me that they had "Gurus" who acted as their spiritual guide. One of these classmates resides in California, the other in my own city. The latter and I have grown very close over the last years and therefore I am privy to his private matters to an extent larger than most other similar friends. He expounded on this obsession with his guru. I came to know for example that the person resided somewhere near Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh. The friend's family visited him every year at this abode. Equally the Guru visited them at theirs- literally staying with them for a few days. I don't know the content of the discourse but the fact that this was a planned event now- ongoing for years was a lot to take in. I had first been dismissive, reverting to my Bengali roots, which has a fundamentally irreligious orientation. The fact is that this is not religious. It happens to be an aspect of the Hindu tradition but in essence it is a traditional practice that has been there within our civilization for millennia. It is not something my successful business friends came up with out of the blue. For years, growing up., my atheist dad would often say about the overtly religious hindu business community. " they commit a lot of sin to accumulate so much personal wealth- hence need to triply atone for their transgressions and thus their religiosity". I have always intuitively known this not to be true but now am learning with more perspicacity that it isn't.  More on this on my next post.