The Infernal Diurnal Journal

  A few things are occupying my mind at the moment. The return of my boss from his vacation is at the forefront of it all. As expected, we had a board room meeting immediately upon his return to discuss something about Succession Planning. And as I have now come to expect, these meetings very quickly become confusing, circumlocutory brawls where it is best to stay silent and get it over with. There will be much more of this in the new year, this much is clear. I felt somewhat sorry for the two new additions to our team, an American of Korean origin and a Brazilian who was formerly a resident of Chile. The two looked rather hapless as the somewhat argumentative meeting went rambling on. I am sure I had a similar expression in the first few months when I started. Aside of work, I happened to serendipitously bump into a group of eclectic musicians from India who happen to be a well-established International Touring Band, based in Delhi. They call themselves Peter Cat Recording Co., ...

    Today one of my colleagues gave me some feedback. He said, “you need to work on your branding”. To paraphrase, he was disappointed with my lack of presence or activity on LinkedIn. I agreed with his observation but I was not sure about his conclusion. There is so much fluff on LinkedIn, as we all know and privately acknowledge- and yet we still jump on this bandwagon for fear of being left out of some sort of race for talent that is being observed on this forum. This particular colleague of mine, posts something every other day and has divulged to me his modus operandi in doing so. Basically, he thinks of a topic to write about and then uses a prompt on Gemini AI by Google to get some text which he then re-formats or edits- adds the odd picture from google and off he goes. Now, there is very little chance that there is any content worthy of note is these type of repeated posts that come at you at 90 miles an hour. It does improve visibiilty because the moment you get on ...

Today we had an invite to a dinner event at a friend's place in the old part of town. These are apartment building that used to be the gold standard 30 years ago in the GCC, until monster developers like EMAAR arrived on the scene and provided ultra-modern apartments in more central areas- these tended to be occupied by more international expatriates while the older part of Dubai still was largely inhabited by South Asians. As a consequence, there were many small grocery stores and Indian cafe restaurants in the neighborhoods which made for a very convenient lifestyle that included just-in-time and inexpensive home deliver for just about anything. On the other hand, there were more posh parts of the city that beckoned to anyone who wanted to feel like they belonged to a "higher-fidelity first class travelling set". Each had it is points. In any case the rooftops of these buildings almost always had a nice sized terrace and a swimming pool and made for excellent party venu...

It was a quiet dinner with P at the Nonya restaurant at the Taj Hotel at Jumeirah Lakes Towers to mark off year 24 of our marriage. The next one is the major milestone- and P has grand plans for a grand celebration. Meanwhile, I was in a reflective mood. Growing up I was particularly close to two cousins, well- one cousin and one technically a niece. The cousin (brother) was three years my senior, while the niece was about a year senior.  In all collective family gatherings, of which there were so many when I was growing up, the three of us would hang out together, exchanging notes, experiences and everything in between. There were occasionally fights within us, but they were ephemeral. All in all, it is a formidable childhood memory that I cannot easily discard. We even got married within a year of each other. My cousin married in 1999, my niece in 2000 and me in 2001. At the turn of the millenium, while everyone was bogged down with the red herring called "Y2K", each of us ...

Elon Musk- what an enigma this person is. On the one hand he has achieved some feats that are truly unprecedented for a single human being. Interplanetary space missions, getting close to building life on Mars, creating an Electric Vehicle that disrupted the US car industry and so many more. Everyone in general is in sheer awe of this superhuman being. And yet sadly, the more superhuman you are the more sub-humane you need to be. Not a soul really likes working for him. The manner in which he overtook Twitter and fired 80% of the staff was staggering. It was probably the right thing to do but he took no prisoners doing it. And now he has been supporting the Trump presidency- has not only overtly campaigned for him but also bankrolled him- in the end Trump won, following which he has somehow become Trump's right hand. He is getting himself involved in all kinds of politics ranging from decisions on Tariffs (presumably to protect his other business interests) to overthrowing foreign ...

 I hope this turns out to be less than a rant post, but I suspect it will be. I participated in a "Journey to Excellence" training program at work. Now I was the one who awarded this contract to a rather suspect individual who was an Arabic speaking man of Lebanese origin that somehow resided in Hungary. It was an expensive contract and I was not sure of the material or the deliverables. After a long discussion, we settled on a discount and the contract was his. What it ended up being was a series of lectures and faux-activities for all employees done in week-long segments across executives, and middle managers. I am not sure if it was jsut me or the facilitator but everything came up to me as so much fluff. I understand it is a leadership course, so we are not expected to be solving differential equations, but still. I guess I have had several of these at INSEAD and then later in Shell and so was amply jaded by the vacuous and banal pronouncements like "Groupthink"...

  This must be the laziest Sunday I have partaken in in a number of years. No walks, no swims- just ensconced under the blankets and watching OTT for the entire day- punctuated only by coffee and bathroom breaks and a small bit of time in the kitchen to fix sandwiches and some khichdi for lunch and dinner respectively. I have to say a strong reason for this is my discovery of this Bengali thriller series called "Chotolok"- which happened to be streaming on this channel called Zee5- and which, via my IPTV subscription, I was able to stream on my TV. I had to search long and hard for it, as the user interface on these things leaves a lot to be desired. But once we started watching it, P and I, there was no stopping. It is always rare to find any well-made series on OTT these days let alone one in Bangla. This was partly the reason I had gotten rid of my separate Netflix subscription and I had resorted to avoiding the TV altogether except for the occasional news or sports. “chot...