May 19, 2025

A lot of time has passed since I made an entry. My writing trajectory is veerting towards an off-ramp similar to the previous year. I am not sure why I had stopped writing this time around. There was no dearth of things to write about. There still isnt. In chronological order, I guess it is important to consider a number of events. The first is my health, which seems to be holding up well, but I have not had my check up for a long time, nor a blood test. So my bloodsugar situation is still an unknown- although I don’t feel anything off in particular. My exercise regimen is stable but at a lower level. I have had a bout of  cold towards the end of April, attributable to the sudden temperature dip for a few days. Fortunately, the cold was shortlived and so was the nice weather. Nice weather increasing seems to cause more pain than hot weather, healthwise. The scalding 50 degree heat makes for no outings, but atleast you can feel healthy while indoors. The use of the Ayurvedic tonic, on balance, has been working. I am not experiencing the bouts of extended flu like symptoms that I had last year. However, there is currently and odd pain on the base on my right big toe as well as some spasms. Some sort of gout or arthritis? Who knows- will see how it goes after some anti-inflammatory drug ingestion.

Moving on. Last week, I lost my boss. As in he is still alive but no longer in the company. One can only surmise, but I suspect he was held accountable by the board for overseeing some rank bad behaviour by two members of the executive team ( who were let go earlier). What this has meant for the year thus far is that we have not even started on any activity other than the ususal operational stuff to keep the lights on. A ton of initiatives are now being re-thought and in particular the e-procurement system implementation could well stand cancelled altogether. This was supposed to help close various audit points, which then shall remain open. Also, one has to count the money spent on resources trying to launch this system as well as the license fees already paid for this year. All in all, a really messy situation. The manpower budget for the Supply Chain department has not been agreed. All other departments, I believe, have already closed this point. Not Supply Chain. When I inquired as to why this was so, I had a bunch of arguments thrown at me from my now erstwhile boss as well as the HR manager, none of which made any sense to me. From my vantage point, I saw it as an unreasonably biased treatment against one department- which had already been treated shabbily in 2022 post Covid- wherein almost half the staff had been let go in a cost -cutting exercise. All of this did not make for very good inspiration for my team- which is now simply going through the motions. I feel I am doing the same. And yet again, I am seeing how some management and board decisions, however fair or unfair, are creating a loss of spirit. This is all there really is that differentiates any organisation from another. It is the spirit of the individual and the collective collaborative spirit of the team. It stand summarily crusheda at the moment, and all I can hope for in the days to come is a restoration of it by righting the wrongs by the new boss, as it were. The new boss also happens to be a board member so it may be well within his individual powers to do so. And yet he may hold a different view and one which does not see things my way. After all ,there are various agendas at play, all of which I can never be aware of. When you most expect support, sometimes you get surprised. At other times, you don’t expect much but a windfall ensues. More the former than the latter though. Just consider the US support for the Indian cause in it is stand against terrorism. They support the stance of Israel as it deals military with terror- but not with India. With India, the US frames this as a geo-political conflict and so the same rules against terror somehow don’t apply. They also have to sell arms to Pakistan, since we don’t buy any from them- and if they help to douse this fire so far from their home, it appears that it does more harm to them than good. Every country is only looking out for themselves. It stands to reason that every individual does as well. There may well be cases where there is some altruism involved, but these also get mired into colour where they are regarded as political machination to gain some sort of moral high-ground.  Common people’s views still need to be addressed in democratic societies as they matter as an electorate in the aggregate. In the corporate world, not the same need exists. And so you can easily get away with inequity at a much grander scale before there is a course correction. There eventually will be, but it could be at the cost of multiple management teams that get sacrificed in the process. It is to be seen how this pans out at my workplace. Whatever happens, I am happy to accept and more than anything it will help to enrich my understanding of corporate behaviour beyond what I had thus far seen in a big multinational company. All of this shall be a book some day. Preferably a scholarly piece which draws from literature in the field of psychology. It will not change anything, nor am I stating that anything necessarily needs change. But if anything is able to shed some light on the workings of the world, I consider it a win. Particularly these days, where in anything that you consume in written or oral form is far more likely to be, shall I say, “enshrined” in falsehood. It is very exhausting. Maybe this will make reading books cool again.