| Sunday, 22 October 2023 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
Have you ever noticed how Sundays are often when we observe and discover the changes around us?
A room that needs painting. A plant that needs pruning. A closet that needs reorganising. A book that needs restarting. An artist that needs relistening.
These days, I’m enjoying the gradual entry of winter into our lives. The sunlight that is just the right degree of warm and cool, the Flame of the Forest avenue trees laden with ridiculously bright flowers, and tolerable traffic (on account of the Dasara season and holidays, I presume).
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Of course, to those living up north in India (I grew up largely in ‘80s and early ‘90s Delhi), Bengaluru winters are a joke. Forget heaters and sweaters, for years now, the only allowance I’ve had to make for winters is to dig up a couple of light jackets and perhaps switch off the fans at night. (Of course, Bengaluru’s right-back-at-ya winter joke can be captured in three letters: AQI! The winter morning fogs of ‘80s Delhi are now all-day smog.)
That’s what time off from work or school does to our minds. We calm down and relax. Our senses, no longer distracted by the never-ended demands of deadlines and to-dos and alerts and meetings, start to see what’s always been around us.
Sometimes, it’s our own selves.
“I don’t know if it’s a mental model, Rohin, but I’ve realised I end up relying on it very often when I have had to make tough decisions,” said Kamal Sagar, the co-founder and CEO of Total Environment, the Bengaluru-headquartered real estate company that has a cult following.
We were talking on the phone this Thursday evening. He’d flown back from Mumbai a few hours ago.
“It’s my intuition, and it will often tell me to do the opposite of what logic and calculations tell me to do,” continued Kamal.
Doing the opposite of what logic tells him is a running theme with Kamal. In 1990, while he was studying architecture at IIT Kharagpur, he was given an assignment to design an elementary school for kids. He got a “C” for his efforts.
[aesop_nutgraf_quote_block title=”“And I had designed it in a manner that the roof of the school was sunk three feet below ground level.
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