Category: Personal
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Write better with Elements of Style
About twenty years back, I was a member of the Toastmasters club. The club helped me to learn more about public speaking. One of the topics I spoke about was about communicating ideas. Yes, in a workshop meeting on communication, we spoke about how to communicate. When I looked at the discussion note, two things…
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Healthy Eating for Happy Life
One evening about a decade back, my father had a heart attack. Fortunately our neighbor took him to the hospital in Chennai within 20 minutes (within the golden hour). My father received angioplasty with stem implant to cure his condition. Since then my father has been on stricter diet and medications. This was a wake…
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Digital Tools to help with Tamil Learning
As shared earlier, I am reading more Tamil Literature these days. To understand more, I am also writing more about what I am reading. To start with I am creating a simplified Verse Reader site that will have the verses along with meaning in English and Tamil. Slowly and steadily a collection of tools are…
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Discovering the joy of reading Tamil Literature
In my high school days, I used to read a variety of ancient Tamil books. Comprised mostly of poetic writings, these classic literature books spoke about nature, humans, kings, morality, etc. Initially I read to prepare for speaking competitions and debates. Soon curiosity drove further engagement. We had a single public library with dusty books…
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Learning anytime, anywhere, and continuously
Thanks to increasing access to broadband and much improved real-time communication software, we have novel models to learn. An avid learner with a smartphone or computer or (or tablet) and broadband connection can learn many things from anywhere, anytime, and from anyone! In 2020, I had the opportunity to try out several models of learning.…
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Opportunities Aplenty
Last week I had a very interesting conversation with a young and upcoming engineer who I worked with in the past decade. His first input was that there are insufficient opportunities for him. And hence he wanted to go look for a new opportunity. At the surface what he indicated seemed convincing. As I dug…
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The New Normal
We were normal; We sought things, novel! We had weekdays and weekends.We made things during weekdays;We enjoyed things during the weekends.Such was the working life. Too much novelty may not be the best;for who would have thought about the rest? We were normal;We sought things, novel! Suddenly from Wuhan, sprang a virus, was indeed novel! Invisible…
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Traversing through COVID19 stay home time
In the USA and world over, we are in the thick of things with COVID19. We as a family have been staying home for the past 19 days!! That is the longest that I had stayed at home or at a place without much movement. I did go out for groceries and for food pick-up…
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Completed a year at Starbucks
I just completed 1-year as a partner at Starbucks. I am fortunate to have the opportunity to work here. It has been a great year for me, my family, my team, and the company. Starbucks Coffee’s corporate mission is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a…
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A house to dwell – buy or build?
Several of my friends and family know that I had moved around a few houses in the past 20 years. We bought and sold a condo, a house, rented in the middle, bought and remodeled an old house, and separately had built a brand new house. All these moves and changes had taught me a…