Mind of my Stroked Brain

I keep reminding and following up on many things with everybody I ask for something. To the point of frustration and getting upset with me (although everyone is polite and thank me for it 🙂). I can certainly imagine how irritating it must be. I do it simply because of my own experience. Everybody has a huge pile of things to do everyday and they keep adding to the pile and many many things get forgotten or slips down in priority and I only try to bring back things to the top of the pile. Obviously I have a great memory to be able to do this consistently with many people on many fronts. So what is the secret to my good memory? I wish it was some glamorous thing like that and I could tell you my diet for the reliable memory. The reality is, I had a massive stroke years ago and my memory is worse than anyone who I know. Definitely much worse than myself before my stroke. So what is the secret behind it? The secret is knowing I have a very poor and unreliable memory - and accepting it ful...

Yesterday, I watched a news item. A young man in a big city was on a two wheeler and was knocked down in a hit and run case. He lay on the road bleeding and struggling for a long time. A crowd gathered around him. They took videos of him and some even stole his mobile phone and few other personal items. He eventually bled to death on the road itself. Nobody helped him, nobody called an ambulance nobody called any emergency number etc . I don't really know if karma exists. However, I know the definition of karma at a broad level (I might be wrong), but broadly, I understand karma as a outcome or consequences of our actions. In the above case, I can think of 5 actors: 1. The person who caused the hit and run accident in the first place.  2. The folks who gathered around and looted the dying fellow 3. The folks who made and uploaded videos of the dying fellow 4. The folks who stood around and watched but did nothing 5. The folks who saw it happening but were too busy to stop even...

Before my stroke, I was a regular bloke with lots of work, lots of goals, lots of priorities and lots of distractions. This was both office work and personal life at home. Like with any regular bloke, I had ample share of distractions, procrastination, laziness etc, etc  After the stroke, it has come down significantly . I am not professing to be above all these. It has come down significantly though. Very significantly. I keep getting the complaint from everyone about my very painful following ups, urgency with everything, pestering about progress as follow up to something or updates etc. I have thought about it. It's not like I was setting such crazy expectations and the bar so high earlier. I had assumed it was just natural because of the effect of not being able to do anything & understanding the value of time and abilities because I am like this. It made sense and I had made peace with that explanation to my mind. Some days back, I was watching a podcast type talk show, wh...

I loved food. Any kind as long as it was vegetarian. It has been that way ever since I have been a kid. I don't remember me fussing to eat anything. This was only passive consumption. For almost a decade before my stroke, the love for food xhanged from passive consumption to active experience and experimentation with food. I used to love cooking - especially without any recepie and just try various things and see how it turned out. I loved entertaining and feeding others as well. For the past 4½ years, I have been having only fluids through a tube - initially it was a ryles tube through the nose and almost 4y afterwards through the peg tube to my stomach. When I had the stroke, after coming out of the disoriented and confused state, one of the first things for the mind to come to terms with was not being able to swallow and consume anything. Water, food etc. Not even my own saliva. It was very disturbing to see others eat foods, gulp down water, have a hot cuppa, etc. After sometim...

I watch many things that generally interests me. In that process, I end up watching news from various geographies, watch some interesting things on YouTube and watch a lot of podcast format talks. Most of the time, it is usual facts and explanations etc . However, sometimes I come across something very different. Very impactful for everyone. It is very less, maybe < 5% of the stuff. When I come across such matters - maybe scientific, maybe economic, maybe political etc, I also look at how exclusive is this content/ knowledge. Ie, how difficult is it to get to this knowledge. Almost nothing is exclusive and hidden. Anybody can reach it easily and freely. Most of them have very far reaching consequences to people - whether it is global, geographical regional, as a society, as a social group, as an individual, etc. And when I see how many people have watched it - it will usually be in many many thousands .  And I keep wondering, why is not there a bigger reaction to this by folks -...

I am a very simple fellow with a very simple mind and thinking. I don't know much about economics, global economics and macro economics. To my very simplistic understanding, inflation is because of 2 things 1. Visible inflation: increasing prices of almost everything constantly. In India, the published inflation is ~ 7%. It is usually because of supply and demand imbalance. (Growing demand for everything and lesser supply of things). 2. Invisible inflation: as the name suggests, we can't easily perceive it. I generally think it is around 4-5% in India. It is caused not because of increasing prices but because of reducing value of the money we have. It is usually called reduction in purchasing power. It is caused by infusion of new money in the economy because of the need for it by banks, by governments etc. If there is more money available then it goes without saying that the value of the money you are holding goes down. Put together I think the real inflation in India is aroun...

We have heard about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's very simple - Basic and important needs have to be met first to aim for the next rung of higher level of needs.  It might have started the same, but now It will be different for different sections of the society today as the order of needs are very heavily dependent on economic realities and affordability - as everything is organised nowadays and nobody usually stays in the jungle looking for things. I don't know about all segments of the economic strata in the society but I can take a shot at myself (I will say middle of middle class. I think even in middle class , there is upper and lower). I have a feeling it will not be very far from others in the similar economic strata and above... The very very basic thing is air to breathe - that is the same for everyone. After that, it becomes complex. It should be water. Water is indeed needed, but most dwellings today have a backup - a borewell. On top of it, usually there mig...