Tilak Amitava Chowdhury

The year 2020 was cruel to most of us, but it taught us many positive lessons. It made us appreciate and be grateful for all that we have, and realise what we really need in life to be happy. It was a lesson needed for the world to reboot and rethink of its priorities. It reminded us that we have been making the mistake of using people and loving things when it needs to be the other way round. It made us realise the importance of the people in our lives - even if they are the people who do mundane jobs in our households and whom we tend to take for granted. It also made us realise that our wealth can't protect us from the virus or a calamity, but our fellow humans can; the great work done by the medical fraternity, the workers who helped us stay alive during the lockdown, was truly commendable. No words can really describe how grateful the rest of us are for these courageous selfless servants of humanity. I hope we have learnt the lessons and learnt them well as a race, as life ten

It was in 1981, a company called Maruti was started by the Government of India that had the dream of making cars affordable for the Indian middle class! The rest is History... Exactly four decades after the success of Maruti, we are at the crossroads for another revolution. Cycling! Times have changed. The traffic is only getting worse everyday and the pollution is a perennial problem in the cities. The long hours at desk jobs and the junk food culture is making health a big issue. On the other hand, public transportation has greatly improved. Most metro cities in India have a robust metro infrastructure that can help people commute with ease. The only problem: last mile connectivity. It is therefore now is the best time for the government to support and promote cycling. Not as a sport, but as a way of life. It can help the country immensely in the long run and help in having a healthy population. We have some very successful European models to emulate. If the countries with higher per

I have heard horrid stories about the lockdown that gripped the whole world for nearly five months. I have heard how restless people were to go out. Somehow for me, it was a time to detox my mind and let the brainwaves flow freely. A stupid comparison, but I guess this was to me a time that was similar to the sages who spend time in the Himalayas to reflect upon life, the world and the role we play in the larger scheme of things. Though I agree, I wasn't entirely saintlike. My mind was disrupted from time to time with some very vulgar and violent series from Netflix, some very abstract novels on Kindle and some delicious high calory home food. My mind pondered over the rat race that we all are forced into, knowingly or unknowingly. The whole uselessness of our existence trying to show some people how successful we are and when how we dislike them in person. The whole life that is focused on worry as the prime driver and ruler. We are running for life from the fears that frighten us

The modern man is a confused man. He has complicated life. He has started to love things and use people. He is chasing a life of luxury that only makes him more miserable. There are stories of successful young people who are full of potential, are killing themselves...for what? What is it about these people that they who have achieved somuch in so little time, have actually lost interest in living! Why? Probably because we chased a wrong life! A life where we only learn to achieve but forget to cherish that achievement. A life where we are only rats in a rat race, we win or lose, we remain a rat.... To become humans again, I feel we must embrace minimalism and hold it tightly as if our lives depended on it. We must learn to enjoy the little things in life and relish the things we have. Many years back, someone wise had told me, if you want a bigger car, there are two ways to get it...either you can abuse your destiny that life has been unfair to you giving a small car, or you can be gr

There is a part in all of us. I don't know where we keep it. Hide it from the world. But it is there. Always coming to our rescue when we are sad, depressed, hopeless, it comes to give us hope, love, care. It is the sacred island within us.  We are born on it, the sacred island. Well most of us. We have happy childhoods where we are the centre of attraction we are the nucleus and the whole world revolving around us. Then the island opens to the world. For the first time we realise that there is water all around it. Water that can drown it, soil it, dampen it. Slowly, as we grow, we tend to store all our loving memories, feelings, emotions and treasures on this island and guard it fiercely. We are lost in the ocean around the island fighting the pirates and the sharks. We get busy forging alliances of like minded warriors who can help us stay alive and protect that island of ours. All our life we want to live on that sacred island, waiting for the right time. When we are ready and t

Why do we exist?  There was a time when we existed to live to achieve something. Kings lived for bigger kingdoms where people lived happily and found a way of life better than ever. Scholars lived for discovering something that never existed before...something that made lives beautiful and made life more inclusive and worth living. Warriors fought for defending an ideal or a way of life that they thought true and sacrificed their lives for it. We read about it in the epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata where the great kings and learner men live for an ideal. A way of life that was called sacred. They practiced and prepared for it through personal sacrifices.  Somewhere, something changed. We started living a life of immense power. Power that we only imagined a few centuries back was real and in our hands. We lost the big picture. Everything became about instant gratification atvany cost. Greed became good. We were self obsessed with ourselves. We lost the vision of our forefathers who

In my view, the gift of hope is the greatest gift mankind has with it. Every achievement no matter how small starts with this ability of ours - hope. And from hope arises the second gift we have - trust It's a combination of hope and trust that actually runs this world. When we get into a plane and are flying in the air with no safety net whatsoever, hope that we will be safe and the trust that a few of our species namely the engineers and pilots and even the person filling the fuel in the aircraft have done their best. We trust their ability to take care of us. The pilots do the same with pharmacists who design pills that we eat without thinking if we will be alive. Because we hope that we will get well and we trust our fellow humans. Name a profession, and we are bound by an unseen contract of hope and trust with humanity. The army, the farmers, the barbers, the bakers, the teachers, the nurses....the list is endless but yet the hope and trust is what we really buy in return for

As a child, I have always been fascinated by the birds. Well, I don't actually love love birds, but I found it very intriguing that these tiny little creatures had the power to migrate thousands of miles to save themselves, year after year. The remember the direction like it's in their DNA, passed on from generation to generation, along with this unbeatable survival instinct. They also are born leaders. They instinctively know how to choose to lead and give up that position when they feel they are no more in that position and someone else is better suited for it at that time.  I feel that we humans, though we claim to be the most superior of species, seem to lack this instinct, the instinct to be selfless when it comes to saving the community. We claim to ourselves that we are a social bunch. We even created a branch of study dedicated to the society - sociology. But are we really social? Are we really like the birds and animals who lead and follow seamlessly according to the s

Machines are coming. Machines are taking over. But I'm still optimistic. I'm still confident of the immense potential that each one of us have. We the humans have created everything that we are going through at this point in time. Nature is just the backdrop, like a side role in a Bollywood flick.  True, every raw material comes from nature. But transforming the raw materials into something so different and powerful that one wonders if there is any resemblance between the raw material and the finished product, is the skill of human kind. It's the ultimate culmination of art, science, imagination, observation, perseverance, grit, vision and desire that has transformed our world into what it is today. We have come a long way, from the dark caves to the limelight of the socialite parties, from the era of helplessness to the era of attempting to be God.  Wait a minute! Are we trying to be God? Are we trying to create us? Yes but then again may be that is what God wants us to do