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The month that changed my life, and helped me fulfil my dreams! November month in India is a festive month. The biggest festival of India Dipawali falls in November. Also, my birthday is in November, so that's kind of icing on the cake on top of it the biggest literature festival of Mumbai TATA Literature Live happens in November. Thus November month occupies a special place in my life. Surprisingly, November 2018 was a life changing month for me. I learned a lot, I adapted a different lifestyle and at the same time I started exploring an area which I wanted to work on since long. Dipawali is the biggest festival of India. For me it is the greatest festival of all. Diwali is very special for me. Every year, since I am born, I have celebrated my Diwali at my grandfather's home in interior of North Gujarat. So, I am deeply rooted to the ancient culture of India as well as the contemporary lifestyle.  Now, what is so special for the Diwali celebration at my ances...

How Shifting from Chaos to Minimum possession can be more productive. In this modern world, we are carving for more. More Apps, More Mobile data, more resources, more gadgets, more choices, and practically everything we need more. As the notion goes, 'The Power of More.' I propose here an alternative to this, ' The Power of Essential Minimum' . If we distill down the things we need for our living, surprisingly you will find that we need only a few handful things to survive on this earth. We need things for our survival and we need tools for our work, which supports our survival. That's it. We need two sets of things: 1) Things for Survival & 2) Things to do work . Everything you possess can be very easily classified in above two sets, everything! 'Simple Living High Thinking' , as the notion goes. We should have high degree of thinking and that is what the truth of life is. The living I believe can be more effective with minimalistic possessi...

Dr Kalam, The People's President. My life lessons from the most beloved scientist in our country. Certainly the best scientist of his time and the best president of all time India has ever had. Dr Kalam is the inspirational figure for most of us Indians. He is second to none in igniting my mind and showing me path during my tough time. When we are disturbed, wounded emotionally and totally hopeless then you need a person who can come to you and whisper in your ear that, "Hey, everything gonna be alright, this isn't your life, don't get disappointed." For me that person is Dr Kalam. In my PhD I was devastated, I was broken down to pieces and I was humiliated and manipulated to such an extent that I got disturbed in my personal and professional life. I could not find a way out and was completely hopeless for life. In that dark phase, I got a ray of light from Dr Kalam's insight. I got inspired by reading his books. I got inspired by watching him on...

How Smartphones are killing our Growth? It is said that Smartphones were invented to save our time. I ask a question here, is smartphone really saving our time or rather killing it? Yes, this blog is about Smartphone and it's about to cut short their use. Smartphone is more addictive than cigarettes and alcohols. I can go further and claim that they are as addictive as narcotic drugs. When you are an addictive consumer of narcotics, you just want it more and more, you can't live without it. Same is the case with smartphones. The ping from your friend on whattsapp, the message on your facebook, and the like on your insta, are as addictive as a narcotic drug. We just can't live without checking those clicks, those pings, those likes and those messages. The result of all this is we have lost our attention span. The humans who have greatest attention span on this earth, have lost it to mere 8 secs because of smartphones. 8 seconds of attention span? Are you kiddin...

Three weeks ago, I encountered an accident. A serious accident which I thought could have broke my leg . However, to my surprise, my Orthopaedic doctor, after examining the affected area and taking few X-Rays (You know kind of Front View, Side view, Top view) said, its not a fracture but a serious ligament tear. Now, I was happy that it was not a facture, at the same time I was sad, because doc said you have to plaster your leg with glass fiber for additional support, and complete bed rest for 3 weeks. Three weeks without my loving students is anything but pleasant (I am a professor at Mumbai University, India). I had no choice, I got my foot plastered and travelled 40 kms in Uber and arrived at my parents home for taking rest. I packed my   paperback books, my iPad, my Kindle and my iPhone, to accompany me for 3 weeks. I grabbed the opportunity of living for 3 weeks without any physical heavy activities and utilized this time for effective reading. I am an avi...

The big pile of books, equally big pile of documents and my huge files along with my HP all in one, all these on a working desk of a standard office table. The stuffs were overloaded, the office table was screaming at me, “Remove the unwanted stuffs.” I was deft to the tables screams and just overlooked the untidy work space for almost a month, a whooping month! To tell you the truth, I am a Pharmaceutical person, means, I love clean and tidy place. From my college days I have been taught about the importance of organized and well-arranged things. I am following this practice of well organized behaviour past 2 decades. Yes, I cleared my college degree 20 years back and am still surviving! However, for past one month I was very busy. Now, that’s the truth, I am overloaded with my teaching duties as a professor at the university and also managing my reading passion and my writing endeavour. This chaos of overwork made my office desk overloaded. It was clumsy, unprofessio...

Learning is a central part of any human success. We human have learned infinite things since the appearance of our ancestors around 200K years before. We as a species has learned to communicate, to use language, to farm, to built cities and very recently to build human babies (genetic engineering). What makes us to learn? Well, at the outer level, it's our desire to do something valuable and useful. However, we learn because we want to achieve something invaluable as well. And it would be appropriate to state that, 'learning is as important to our survival as food.' Now the question aries, "How do we learn?" Well, that is what this blog is all about. Learning, at its core is building myelin on our neurons (the brain cells). We all know that our neurons fire an electric signal at each other. This firing of neurons is in a systematic way and it's in a circuit. Here is where our learning comes into picture. When we say, 'we are learning something...