Category: Life & Living

A day in my life at Mumbai


My weekend begins like any other day at around 6 am with a cup of fresh brewed coffee. We pray to God and listen to devotional songs and infuse our home with the fragrance of incense sticks.

We then proceed for our daily walk in the park.  We are lucky to just cross our road and there is this beautiful green park along the Arabian Sea.  We go around the garden for about four rounds and use this opportunity to chat about all our family members and their well being.  We are greeted by the melodies of the birds and the soothing music of the sea waves. We also have interesting exchanges of men and women we meet in the park and have given them nick names to identify them.

On alternate weeks, we go for an Ayurvedic massage to tone up our body muscles and detoxify ourselves after a long working week behind us.  We go together for this too and have been doing so for more than a decade now.

We then return home and do our routine yoga for about half an hour.  This is followed by a simple vegetarian breakfast like idli or poha and reading the morning newspaper at leisure.  We exchange news items we have read and share common interests we have in the city or around the world.  Then it is time to attend to household chores.  It is interesting that the division of work between me and my spouse has been quite clear and consistent since the time we got married 33 years ago.  I take care of all the household chores outside the house like shopping for provisions, vegetables or repair of household goods etc.  My wife takes care of all issues at home.  Of course we are happy to help each other in case the need arises like the sudden leave of the house hold maid etc.  We have always respected each others’ likes and dislikes and hence supported accordingly.  For eg, my spouse does not enjoy driving and hence I drive always.  On the other hand, I do not enjoy cooking and hence she does it.  Of course, if there is a need we are willing to support each other in these chores as well.

On some days, we go for a day trip organised by the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) or indulge in writing poetry or blogs as both of us have our own individual hobbies. A visit to a nature park is of common interest.  We love to admire birds, trees and animals and follow the experts of the BNHS quite regularly whenever time permits.  Alternatively, we indulge in writing as our passion dictates us.  We also help each other as editors and critiques of whatever we write.

It is also true that I love to go for a weekend trip whenever I can, to be with nature as in the photo above near Tarkarli, a beach resort near Goa.

We always prefer to have home made lunch consisting of rice, lentils, vegetables and yoghurt.  We watch the news or some car show on TV and then it is time for an afternoon nap.  It is followed by evening tea and snacks.  This is followed by some cleaning and clearing work at home and browsing through some magazines or books, which we may collected during the week before.

Then the evening begins by another stroll in the park to admire the sunset and get refreshed by nature.  We return home for our early supper.  This is followed generally by a music programme on TV or a sports match like cricket.

We watch the evening news at 9 pm and this is followed by some documentaries or business shows of relevance and then it is time to go to bed.  We love to listen to soothing ghazals or instrumental music at night as we go to sleep.

Our day ends at about 1030 pm and we end the day by thanking God and everyone else for a wonderful day.

S Ramesh Shankar

My second innings – “Era of gratitude”

I have been a big fan of cricket right from my childhood. I find a lot of similarities between the game of cricket and life. If my first innings was about my career, my second innings is about my giving back to society.

All of us aspire to achieve our career dreams and goals. We strive our best to get there. We may partly or wholly be successful but we try our best. We desire for all the material things in the world and fantasise to get them. We may again get all we dream of or at least most of them in our life.

If I call my first innings as the “Era of gratification”, I would say my second innings should be an ” Era of gratitude”. God has been kind to me. I have achieved almost all I dreamt of in my career. My family and friends have supported me to be happy in life most of the time. Now it is time for me to give back to society.

I have bought all the material things in life I have wished for. Today I hardly crave for something and regret that I do not have it in my life. So, it is time to give back. It is time to express my gratitude in actions and not only in words. I assume I can do it in many ways.

The first thing I plan to do is to write more and share my experiences of life and living. This may help the next generations to think and reflect. It may help the youngsters not to make the mistakes I did. It may help them take the right decisions.

All my net earnings from the sale of my books (Sights & Insights and Life and Living )will be donated to a charity, which works zealously in “eradicating preventable blindness amongst children”. This way I will share more, learn more and at the same time give a little back to society.

I am also starting an organisation by the name “Hrishti” ( Means joy in Sanskrit). I will use this organisation as a platform to coach and mentor. I will try to mentor and coach business and HR leaders and again use all my net earnings to promote the same cause.

I also plan to work with start ups and NGOs to share my experience and learnings so that they can learn from my insights at work and life. This may help new start ups and NGOs to scale up and succeed in their chosen fields. At least, they will not repeat the same mistakes I did in my career.

I also want to teach in business schools, engineering colleges and universities. This way I can share my learnings and also enable young students to be industry ready. The gap between industry and academics needs to be bridged and I think people like me have a role to play in it.

I can also be a consultant to organisations and share my experiences in areas of their need. I may be able to give back to society in more ways than one. It is upto me to explore all possible ways to do it. After all when I needed help or support, there were thousands of people amongst family, friends and organisations, who did that for me. Now it is my turn.

Lastly, I am blessed to have enough of what I need to live happily for the rest of myself and my family. Hence, I commit that everything I do will contribute to society’s larger good.

Time to start my second innings in life post my retirement is after 31st March 2019. You can follow me on http:\\srameshshankar.com or connect with me at srameshshankar@yahoo.com or srameshshankar@gmail.com post this date. My mobile number will also remain the same as of today. I will continue to post every Friday even in the future.

S. Ramesh Shankar

Nothing is permanent..


I recently came to know of two tragedies. In the first case, a mother lost her grown up son in a fatal accident. In the second, a daughter lost her father in a hospital bed. While the first was a young aspiring student preparing himself for the travails of life in a business school, the second was an aged father who had fought cancer and was healthy and self dependant at 85 till he fractured his leg by falling from his bed and succumbed to his post operative trauma.

If we look at both the incidents the affected people were shattered. A mother in the first case was heart broken to get up one day to know that her son is no more and has met with an accident in front of his college gate. In the second instance, the daughter had nursed her father in the hospital for a week and his fracture was operated successfully and within days of her proceeding to help her daughter in another city, her father breathed his last as he could not fight back from the post operative stress.

I can imagine the state of the mind of the mother and the daughter in both these cases. It would have been like a glass sculpture shattered into pieces. While condolences may pour in from around the world, no word can console you. No assurance can build back the belief in you. It is like you can never put together the shattered pieces of the beautiful glass sculpture even with the best adhesive in the world.

Time is the only healer and it takes time to realise it. I have personally gone through a few tragedies in my life and I have experienced this vacuum. It neither can be explained or can be consoled. It shatters your foundations. It makes you lose faith in yourself and even lose faith in God. No power on earth seems to have any impact on you. You are tempted to give up even before you given in.

Let us try to understand why this happens to all of us, who go through such tragedies. I remember someone told me that when you lose your father at a very young age, it is like someone pulling away the umbrella from your head during a thunderous downpour. It is something like that. Life is good and we are treading along. Suddenly a tragedy of this magnitude engulfs us and we are shattered. It comes like a Tsunami and leaves us homeless. We may not have lost our physical belongings but we become emotionless for some time.

We do not know the difference between laughing and crying. There are no tears left in our eyes. We want to be left alone and feel restless in a crowd. Family, friends and society are no longer a source of solace. We look at the sky with blank eyes and no emotions. Music is no longer soothing to our ears. Our life literally comes to a stand still. Days become longer and nights shorter. We do not want to see or meet anyone.

It takes weeks, months or even years to recover from such a shock. It took me more than year when my father died when I was 25. After a few years, I realised that time is the only healer. I recovered slowly but surely from the slipping ground below me. I started believing in myself and others after a while. I visited a temple after a year to assure God that I was now standing on my own feet.

This is the time one realises that “Nothing is permanent” in life. Neither joy nor sorrow. Everything is ephemeral. It will come and go. We need to have the courage and the patience to weather the storm. We should neither get carried away by the joys of life and float in the air, nor buried by the sorrows of life and sink into the earth below. We will realise that time is the best healer.

Life is like the weather today. Gloomy and rainy in the morning but bright and sunny in the evening. Nothing is permanent. Not even the weather on a single day. 

Let us believe in ourselves and our good deeds and leave the rest for time to heal.

S Ramesh Shankar