“You went to IIMA? What did you learn there?”

This question popped up late last year during one of my client pitch calls. I was talking to a smart young tech fellow, who had just raised money for his company. And usually these calls are about getting to know each other, what they do, what I do, how we can work together, communications, content, stories etc.

So... this question was unusual.

I am not a big credentials person. But when you are running your own business, every little helps, right?

Anyway, it made me think. And I thought: You know what? I should share this with my Twitter friends.

***

IIMA teaches you a lot about many things. And your mileage will vary. I loved it.

But two, ostensibly tiny, classroom experiences have really stuck with me from my time there from 2003-2005.

The first was the Arun Icecreams case study. (IIMA uses the case study methodology a lot. I don’t think I appreciated this as much as I should have at the time.)

This case was a sweeping history of the company from its inception in 1970 all the way to an inflection point in 1997 where the company’s leadership now had to make some business decisions in the face of rising competition from people like Unilever. Our job in the class was to discuss and debate options.

Two decades later I have zero memory of the conclusions of that session. But I remember one particular question that the professor asked to kick things off. It had to do with this section on page 1 of the case study. Let me paste the text here. (You can Google up the whole thing.)

Slightly long excerpt. But there is a point to this.

“Chandramogan, son of a vegetable wholesaler from the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, set up Arun Ice Cream in 1970 in Madras (now re-named Chennai), essentially motivated by the urge to “do some thing”. After his college studies were discontinued at the pre-university stage, Chandramogan agonised over several weeks about starting some business without being quite able to narrow down to any specific line, mainly because of heavy investments entailed. While driven by an urge to succeed as a businessman, he did not quite know how to go about setting up a business. It was his maternal uncle who suggested the business of ice cream. Investing Rs. 15,000 as his own capital and raising another Rs. 21,000 by way of a bank loan, he set up a small ice candy unit in a rented premises adjacent to his uncle’s retail textile outlet. From a quick survey around the Madras market it appeared to Chandramogan that there were about 350 small-time ice candy manufacturers like himself competing in the low end of the market. These were offering no competition to the up-market segment dominated by the leading brands Dasaprakash, Joy and Kwality. Like the “others in the crowd”, Chandramogan was also selling his Arun brand ice candies for 10 paise and 15 paise a piece predominantly through street-vendors. Thanks to its prominent location in a busy locality, Arun also quickly began attracting walk-in customers. The fact that one could get “fresh” ice candies right across the factory counter was a major selling point in promoting in-factory sales. In the very first year of operations, Chandramogan recalls, Arun clocked a turnover of about Rs. 150,000 and profit of about Rs. 40,000.”

And the question posed to the class was: “Why did Chandramogan choose that particular location to start the business?”

This was a location in Royapuram. And if I remember correctly, it was in a busy commercial area next to a flyover. The details are not super relevant as you will soon see.

With all the alacrity of young MBA students, who all wanted to work at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, we dove into the location question.

Because of footfall! Because of traffic! Maybe it had uninterrupted power supply? Maybe he had access to manpower? Maybe there were other ice cream shops nearby? One guy even suggested it was because Royapuram was very hot, and maybe that would make people buy more icecreams.

The professor, who was clearly having fun, kept provoking us. And eventually he said: “Ok good. Now let me tell you my perspective on what really happened?”

This is a bit of a cheat. But because many of our cases were written by our own faculty, they sometimes had more info than was obvious from the text. And part of our job was to tease this out? Anyway. I will pause on Arun Icecreams here. And I want you to think about his question: Why did Chandramogan start the first shop in that location in Royapuram.

***

Second story. One of the final courses I did was one on Entrepreneurship, that was run by the venerable Sunil Handa. It was a bewildering, often bizarre course. And the point was to make a room full of campus-placement obsessed fellows think about running their own businesses. (Please remember, this was way back in 2005, when all this VC-funded startup frenzy was very very nascent. The default thing to do was very much get a campus job.)

Right at the end of the course Sunil Handa told us that it was time to grade our performance on the course. He said there would be no exam, no tests, no presentations. Nothing. We were all handed a piece of paper. And we were told grade ourselves on the standard IIMA Scale. A, B+, B and so on. (Was there an A+? I have forgotten.) On what basis, we asked. Whatever basis, he said. You decide. I don’t care. Whatever you grade yourselves I will accept as your grade for this course.

We all graded ourselves and handed the slips in. The next week, the last session of the course, Prof. Handa bid us all farewell and good tidings. And then gave us a distribution of the scores. “Most of you gave yourselves a B of some sort,” he said. And it turned out that exactly one guy gave himself the highest possible score. Nobody else. And the scores had very little correlation with performance. Most of us thought about attendance and participation and field trips and so on, and scored ourselves aiming for some notion of “fairness”. Something like that.

He said: “You guys need to realize that entrepreneurship is not primarily about fairness or justice or anything. Entrepreneurship is about making the most of the opportunity given to you. When someone gives you a chance, for god’s sake, take it. You should have all given yourself an A+. Never talk yourself out of success. Go you fools, and never forget this lesson!”

I embellish, of course. But that moment remains etched in stone on my heart. I gave myself a B+.

Back to Arun Icecreams.

***

Professor: “So guys. Let’s talk about the uncle figure.”

“What do you think the maternal uncle is thinking to himself? Look at this guy, my nephew. He has dropped out of college. He wants do something but doesn’t know what. I had to tell him what to do. Plus he has now taken a loan and put in some of his own money. Maybe I have given him some money myself? I am not letting that guy out of my sight. I want to make sure I can keep an eye on my nephew, in case he screws this icecream thing up.”

And that is why, the professor told us, he opened the shop right next to his uncle’s. His uncle found the location for him. So that he can keep an eye on this nephew’s shenanigans.

“Business is not always location, footfall, tactics, and 2x2 matrices and stuff like. Often business is just human beings doing human being things. With simple human incentives and motivations. Never ignore the human aspects of business. Always keep the individuals, their motivations, fears, excitements, tendencies, and eccentricities in mind. Ask the human question first, apply the framework second.”

***

Two decades later, a day doesn’t go by when I don’t think of those two lessons.

When I talk to clients I am always provoking them to tell me why... they are in Royapuram. And I have to constantly tell myself that there is a time to be humble, and there is a time to be your own champion.

Many thanks for your attention. Cheers. And have a nice day. Oh, and have a great 2026.

I give this note an A+.

And it turned out I had written a post about the incident in 2015! The post was shelved.

But then I decided that this was thinking too much. I had enough hurdles that threatened to derail my blogging. Let’s not add a new one. Especially one so old-fashioned as ‘originality’. Pfft. So henceforth if you feel like I am telling you a story I already have, well just please adjust.)

Travelling to Seville this week for a short trip. And I would like to present a few scenes from an airport. Actually from more than one airport. So more like scenes from airports.

On the concourse from the Gatwick duty-free to the gate an unhappy child of 5 or 6 has just punched his mother in the face. And the mother has just retaliated with an absolutely full-bodied slap across the child’s face. And now both have hugged and settled into a truce.

At one of the coffee shops there is a very large group of friends. Young men on a stag party I suspect. When groups are very large they lose a center of gravity. So they fragment into smaller groups. And usually they fragment along thematic lines: the talkative faction, the posh faction, the womanizer faction, and, perhaps worst of all, the current affairs faction.

Here in the coffee shop there is a current affairs faction. And each member is trying to impress the others with general knowledge. It is unbearable. Imagine a state in India that was only composed of Kannada and Bengali college-level quizzers.

The very thought makes the skin crawl and the heart palpitate.

When I was in pre-university I was once flying back from Abu Dhabi to Kochi. On a Gulf Air flight. After summer vacations. When my dad and I arrived at the check-in counter they informed us that the flight was overbooked.

If I were willing to be booked on the next flight, they would give me 100 of the UAE’s finest Dirhams as compensation.

My dad, much like your dad, is a big fan of free money. He immediately said yes, we pocketed the money, and then I went and sat in a cafe nearby for a couple of hours before checking-in again.

Then I got to the Emigration Counter. Which, back in those days, always had a very intimidating man staffing it. He looked at my passport, frowned, and then asked me to accompany him to his manager’s cabin.

Friends, “please come to the manager’s cabin” is one of the scariest things anyone in an airport can tell you. My pants were in very imminent danger of turning from blue into brown.

Off I went. I sat in a chair in the corner. The men conferred with each other for a few minutes. And then the manager asked me to walk over.

“You have overstayed your visa. You have to pay a fine.”

Friends, you will enjoy this.

So my father had procured a visit visa for me that ended, exactly the same day as my return flight to India. And my return flight was late at night. But in choosing to take the later flight, in lieu of compensation, I had inadvertently stayed past midnight. The clock ticked over. And now I had overstayed my visit visa by exactly one day.

And what was the fine for overstaying on a visit visa back in those days?

Correct. 100 Dirhams per day.

So I handed over the very same 100 Dirhams that Gulf Air gave me. And I eventually landed in Kochi, several hours later than planned, with absolutely no extra liquidity.

Gatwick airport seems to have much better restaurants now. With actual menus, and healthy choices, and customer service, and decent coffee. What is more, they now have boards outside the restaurants telling you how long the kitchen is currently taking to send out orders.

I had some sort of Moroccan breakfast. Sweet potato, flat bread, sour cream, spicy hummus, a poached egg, guacamole. Very obviously everything was pre-prepared and assembled to order.

But it was quite good.

Cultural generalizations ahead.

Broadly, in the West, there is a fascination with all-day breakfast. People are weirdly excited about eating Breakfast throughout the day.

Indian airports are the opposite. People seem to want eat dinner always. Especially early in the mornings. I remember I was at an Indian airport (Delhi?) a few months ago. And the longest lines were not at the X-ray, the security or any such, but at the KFC. Lots of people were demolishing buckets full of fried chicken. It was 4am.

---

You know what is the ideal airport beverage?

Zero-percent beer. Naughty. But nice.

---

In late 2019, not long before COVID, I flew from Mumbai to London via Delhi.

Everything proceeded in a satisfactory fashion. Until it was time to line up at the gate for my Etihad flight to London. Suddenly I realized I couldn’t find my UK Visa Biometric Card thing. I couldn’t find it anywhere. And the staff were very clear I could not board unless I found it.

I looked everywhere. I retraced my steps all over the airport. Including the toilets and the duty free shops and the cafe.

And I could not find my Card. So they held the flight back, and offloaded my luggage. Then the flight left without me.

Literally five minutes later I found the Card. It was in the dustbin next to the gate. One of the cleaners had absent-mindedly swept some garbage on the floor, including the Card, and tipped it into the bin. It was not my idea to look in the bin. I think one of the Etihad staff told me to check.

It was all very embarrassing. And what was worse is that the Etihad staff were extremely annoyed and kept complaining about me. But in Malayalam. Because they didn’t know I was one of them. It was so embarrassing guys.

“This is the kind of guy who is an international embarrassment to Indians…”

Et cetera. Cringe.

Anyway. So now I had to beg Etihad to book me on another flight at minimal cost. They said fine. Just call this number. It is our call center in Belgrade. They will take care of you.

Friends without hesitation I picked up my phone and called up the number and began speaking with the agents. Not realising that I was making an international call from India to Serbia whilst roaming on my London phone. So essentially I was paying some INR 35,000 per minute or something.

Literally moments before they could confirm my flight, my phone disconnected. And then I got a message from my London cellular service provider. “Hey bloody fool, you have hit the roaming expense limit you had set on your phone. To use further roaming, please go online and add funds.”

OK fine. I decided to connect to the airport wifi. This should be easy enough right? Never in human history has it been easier to give other people your money. Right? Apple Pay. UPI, Google PAY. Credit Card. Stripe. Link. So easy.

Wrong. Fools, all of us.

You see the airport WiFi only worked if you keyed in an OTP. And they sent you the OTP via a text message to your phone number. But my phone number could not receive OTPs any more because it was no longer roaming.

Friends, please reflect on this. I could not connect to internet because I did not have funds in my roaming account. I could not top up my roaming account because I could not connect to the internet.

I went and spoke to a few airport staff types. And they were all: “No boss, national security risk if we give OTP to some random dude in the airport.”

Eventually an Air India ground staff guy took pity on me and said he would get me the OTP on his number provided he could see what I was using the internet for.

And that is how I finally booked my tickets back to London via Abu Dhabi, through Belgrade.

At Abu Dhabi I briefly lost my boarding pass, before finding it again.

But that is a story for another day.

I believe we have discussed enough scenes from airports for today.

Have you enjoyed/created/witnessed/provoked scenes at airports? Please leave detailed comments.

Phew. Very tiring. And I am one of those people who get so enthu on calls that the AI meeting recorder is like: “Bro have you heard of chill? Is there no chill in Kerala?”

Oh! Thank you for asking. Business is going well. Signed a new client just ten minutes ago. Very exciting client. Very exciting Vadukut. Very much work to do.

Why did I start typing? Oh yes. So earlier today while scrolling through Twitter for between-meeting amusement, I thought of a joke.

Ha ha. Naan. Very funny. Very bad. But this is how my brain works. I cannot help it. I merely succumb to it. Who are we to know what happens in the brains of handsome men?

But then I realized many people had made this joke before. So I let the feeling pass… but not before opening the Wikipedia page for naan. Which is very good. Then I saw this titbit:

So two things:

1. They make Tandoors in Japan??

2. But only one person makes Tandoors in Japan??

I immediately started Googling. And got several results that were exact copies of the Wikipedia page. Verbatim. Then I Googled the name of the company. Nothing.

Immediately my “Is this a Wikipedia fraud?” spider sense started tingling.

But I then let out a sigh of self-disappointment and clicked on some of the citations to the text. And landed on this page from the website of the Sankei Shumbun newspaper.

The article is entirely in Japanese. So I used my friendly AI translator. You can read the Google Translation here.

The article by Akiko Shigematsu is delightful. She visited a South Indian restaurant called Dakshin in Tokyo and appears to have enjoyed a Chicken Chettinad served with naan. Only to be informed that this was an unusual combination.

“In South India, there is no naan. The staple food is rice or dosa, a crepe cooked on a hot plate. As a South Indian, it’s a bit frustrating, but when we opened our store nine years ago, we decided that we needed naan to cater to Japanese customers,” says President Rajkumar Ratha.

Indians are also said to be surprised and laugh at the shape and size of Japanese naan.

“The original naan was round and slightly smaller than the plate. I guess each store competed to stretch the dough to please Japanese customers, and it got bigger.” Lunch at the restaurant, which is popular with office workers, starts at 880 yen. You can have as much naan as you want, and some customers have apparently eaten up to six pieces.

Why was naan-culture in Japanese so… unusual?

…but behind the scenes of their naan, there is a “Japanese-made oven.” “We want to serve good food in a good oven. They can repair it right away with just one phone call.”

So our good friend Akiko goes on a trip to meet the only Tandoor maker in Japan. It is a great story. I am not going to paste it all here. You should read the link above.

The location is Kanda River Stoneworks (Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo), located close to JR Asakusabashi Station. It is the only naan oven manufacturer in Japan. President Tomoyasu Takeda (71) is loading nearly 200 kilograms of ceramic inner pots onto the back of a truck. “Today, we’re delivering them to Indian restaurants in Chiba and Setagaya,” he says.

Each unit costs between 300,000 and 500,000 yen, which is about 10 times the price of imported kilns, many of which are made in Nepal, but the company has shipped a total of 3,500 units to date, supplying approximately 90% of Indian restaurants in Tokyo.

Of course now I had no option but to search out the company on Google Maps and see if there were any pictures.

A few minutes later I had the location and a photo!

It appears that the shop with the mostly-open shutter is… THE ONLY TANDOOR MAKER IN JAPAN.

Look closely at the truck.

OMG. Surely that is a Tandoor? Off to soon make over-sized naans for the Japanese masses?

Anyway. So that is how I spent my afternoon today. How was your afternoon? Was it productive?

Or… naan-productive?

Thanks.

It did remind me of something that happened to me a few years ago. An incident of a visa-adjacent nature.

Some years ago I had to obtain an official document from the British government for residency purposes. And this included submitting, among other things, my Indian passport.

Now my official name as per my Indian passport was “Sidin Sunny”.

Wait what happened to ‘Vadukut’ you ask? The problem was that my dad botched up the paperwork when applying for my passport when I was a baby. In fact I don’t event think he filled in the form. Some local travel agent uncle did all the paperwork and went on a 3-day vacation to Trivandrum to get the passport.

Not only did above-mentioned middleman not include my family name in the passport, he also totally bungled up one other thing. In my Indian passport I had two first names: “Sidin Sunny”… and no surname or any other name. The guy just put both names in the first name area, left out my family name, and left the surname space blank.

Again, not a huge problem in the general scheme of things.

(Except that some years later my dad decided to include my family name in my school paperwork. So there I am Sidin Sunny Vadukut. Except that at some point he dropped the Sunny. So I became Sidin Vadukut. And then an uncle changed the spelling yet again. So in some other paperwork I am Sidin Vadukkoot.

However this is very useful if you want to work in three companies at the same time.)

Anyway. Back to London. So when I filled in my British paperwork I decided to correct this wrong in my Indian passport. Why not? Why perpetuate a mistake?

I put in Sidin as my First Name, and Sunny as my Surname.

Now I could at least live with nomenclatural respect in the UK.

A few days later I got a letter from Her Majesty’s Government telling me that there was a problem. My Indian passport and the application form did not match. Therefore in order to get my new paperwork I had to send them a letter confirming that my name was as per the new form, and not as per my Indian passport.

Friends, please take a moment to understand what this means. Do you see the problem?

Yes. Very good. Ten points to Gryffindor.

So I had to make and sign and submit an affidavit to the UK government… in which I had to hereby declare that “my name is Sidin Sunny and not Sidin Sunny.”

True story. Sidin Sunny and not Sidin Sunny.

The documents were issued shortly after.

I believe there are broadly two types of countries in the world:

Type A: They ask you, with a very stern voice, for a clear list of documents and then don’t check anything.

Type B: They ask you for a vague set of documents, and then check everything so closely that you will inevitably have to bring more documents.

Anyway, I hope all you H1B guys are doing ok. And your families? Such stress.

So that brings me to the exciting topic of the day. And the reason why recent updates have been delayed. I am setting up something on my own! Indeed! Yay! Exciting! Mutual high fives and platonic hugs all round.

A few months ago I decided to step away from ongoing professional things, take stock, and decide what to do next. I was itching to do something on my own. And had a whole lot of ideas.

If you know me, you know that I do everything with extremely high levels of childish enthusiasm. So I wanted to choose carefully before ordering 35 portions of enthu cutlet from Ubereats.

I started by rounding up everyone I had worked with for a few years, and asking them for feedback. What was I good at? What did I suck at?

Two things came up as strengths: a drive to deeply understand founders and companies, regardless of industry, and a superb ability to craft internal and external communications for companies.

Very good. So how to merge those two things?

I thought and thought. And then it hit me. Founders, especially those at early stage companies, constantly struggle to get their identity and narrative right. And with all the chaos of just running a company, many of them just kick this can down the road over and over again.

Meanwhile they keep publishing decks, and posts and LinkedIn updates that they… frankly speaking… hate. The other approach is to hire an agency to write your Tweets and Linkedin posts.

Which is good. Distribution is great. But what are you distributing? And why?

And this is how SIDIN was born. Identity + Narrative for Founder led companies. You have a great vision, I help you turn that into a great public voice. And now you don’t have to kick that can down the road. You can pick it up and turn it into can-fident communication.

(There is a lot more to all of this. It is a lot of work. And surprisingly, the average engagement is about 90% listening and 10% writing.)

You can read more on this very simple website. Please spread the word. You guys are literally the first people I am sharing this with. All feedback welcome.

Ok onwards and upwards. Speak soon. Take care. I wish you all clear identity and coherent narrative.

I am particularly grateful to the haters who said that I would write one post and vanish again for ten years. To my haters I have just this to say: Your hate is the Bordeaux mixture fertiliser to the mighty coconut palm that is my writing. The more you hate me, the more I will harvest my coconuts.

Ok. Now that I’ve made myself crystal clear.

So, like most of you reading this, I am also in possession of a liver.

And until the September of 2015 I had no reason whatsoever to think about my liver. My liver did whatever it does in a healthy fashion and I carried on with my life. I had minor issues with other organs:

1. Thyroid: Volatile activity

2. Knees: Popped a ligament

3. Forehead: Injured by toothpick (by brother)

4. Head: Tree fell on it

5. Brain: Excessive intelligence

But liver? No issues.

Until, that is, September 2015 came along.

The story actually begins in August 2015. Exactly ten years ago, when myself and a few of my gentlemen friends from business school, including Pastrami (remember Pastrami?), embarked on a road-trip. The itinerary was as follows: Estonia → Latvia → Lithuania → Poland → Czechia → Germany → Switzerland.

The idea was to drive around, see the sights, eat the food, and achieve adequate cultural immersion. Due to personal commitments, I joined the rest of the group in Vilnius, Lithuania, and then, after everyone had dispersed, I would proceed to Basel, Switzerland for a few days of Swiss watch journalism activities.

The trip was magnificent. Every single stop on our journey was a delight. I particularly enjoyed Prague and Krakow. We ate good food, drank good wine, and one evening spent listening to jazz in a basement bar in Krakow was a particular highlight.

We also stayed in some... unique Airbnb properties.

There was this one place in Warsaw, I think. A first floor apartment that went for a rustic agricultural theme in terms of interior decoration. There were bales of hay in the rooms, and one bedroom had an old bicycle hanging on the wall.

An entire life-size BSA SLR style bicycle hanging on the wall. We slept well that night because bahut chain ki neend aayi ha lol ha.

That apartment also had the most intense piped water situation I have ever seen in my life. Every single time we opened the tap the pipes would emit this ear-splitting knocking sound.

Guys. It was like a diesel generator.

Dunk dunk dunk dunk dunk. The pipes would knock, the walls would shake, and then a thin stream of water would emanate from the taps. At one point a neighbour came and screamed at us in Polish. We called the owner who then called the neighbour who then came and said sorry, you should have told me it was the pipes knocking again. "We thought you guys were having some kind of booming bass party."

More like balding uncle party.

And then, friends, there was the palatial house we stayed at in St. Blasien.

To this day I remember driving up to the house in our hired car and thinking that surely this was a GPS mistake. It was huge. Like that house in the Sound of Music.

The rooms were all so far apart that there was an intercom system inside the house. There was also a billiards room, and a huge library. Please remember this was not some kind of cottage or collective residence situation. It was one house. And in the entire house there was a silver-haired old German man and his 30-something-year old pregnant Brazilian wife.

We were staying there for a night. And as we were moving our things in we made small talk.

"So where did you guys meet?"

"Oh she has relatives in South America of German origin..."

"Ok... where do we leave our bags?"

"Oh just use all those rooms there. We live there on the extreme right..."

"Ok..."

As evening came and it was time for bed, we began to freak out a little.

1. Why does someone with such a huge house need the AirBnB money?

2. What is up with this guy?

3. What is up with this house?

4. Is this some kind of organ-harvesting thing?

We were so freaked out we all promised to sleep lightly and be ready for any hand-to-hand combat situation that might arise in the middle of the night.

Meanwhile I used my journalism talents and did some research on the guy.

I discovered that someone with that exact same name used to run a chain of old age homes in Switzerland. And this someone was fired after unspecified charges of impropriety with residents.

Gulp.

The next morning we decided to spend a few hours in the house before parting ways. (It was our last night on the road before we dispersed.)

I browsed the substantial library. And then noticed a coffee table book full of nude photos. And then another one. And another. Before realising that one section of the entire library was dedicated to expensive, wonderfully produced erotic photography. You know the type. No one is standing or sitting like you or me. Instead one gentleman is pointing to the sky, while a lady nearby is standing on her head plucking pomegranates from a plant with her legs.

It was very tasteful and artistic. But after 45 minutes I decided enough is enough. But spent another 30 minutes just to be sure that enough was, indeed, enough.

Two weeks later I was back in London and had a terrible fever. High temperatures, sweats, chills, and a persistent headache. I went to my doctor who was taken aback at the intensity of my fever. She gave me strong drugs. Two days later, thanks to the miracle of modern design, I still had all the old symptoms, but also incredible back pain.

I was admitted to the hospital. A series of blood tests followed. The doctors were puzzled. I had all the markers of an infection, including in my bloods, but no sign of where the infection actually was. The doctors were puzzled.

And then a new guy came and asked for a complete patient history again. So I told him everything including the road trip.

"So you went on a roadtrip?"

"Yes."

"With your men friends?"

"Yes"

"So did you do anything on the trip that you are not telling me about?"

"No."

"Please be open. I can ask your family to leave the room..."

"What? No! What do you mean?"

"Mr. Sunny. Did you do anything on the trip that you might not have told us about and are currently not telling us about because your family is sitting there?"

And then it slowly started making sense. He was asking me if I had an STD. (Medical complication, not ISD PCO Xerox.)

At this point my mother-in-law sitting nearby says: "Sidin beta it is ok. You can be open. We understand. These things happen to men of a certain age. Your health is more important to us."

By which she means that as soon as I admitted to this deed, and got treatment, and came back home healed, she would beat me to death on the doorstep with light furniture.

You will be happy to know that I had not contracted an STD. Two or three puzzling days later, during my 4th or 5th ultrasound scan, the scanning lady poked me under the ribs and I screamed in agony.

"Eureka!," she said.

"Yes ma'am?" said Malayali nurse Eureka Chacko from the corridor.

"No. I mean I think I know what is up with this man."

And "what was up" was a table tennis ball sized amoebic abscess in my liver. It turns out I may have got this from drinking tap water in Warsaw. (Which apparently is generally safe except when it isn't.)

Later that day I was wheeled back into a scanning machine to be drained and cleaned and tidied. A few minutes later a short, stocky man of Indian origin with curly hair exploded into the room and walked up to me.

"Hello Amoeba Man! How are you?"

"I am in pain..."

"COOL HIGH FIVE!"

I high-fived him!

"WE ARE GOING TO HAVE AN AMAZING TIME AS I DRAIN YOUR LIVER!"

"What the..."

"ANY QUESTIONS?"

Yes I have questions for breakfast did you have cocaine?

"Doctor is this dangerous?"

"NO MY FRIEND! OK MAYBE 3% CHANCE OF MORTALITY!"

"What the..."

"I AM INSERTING THE PIPE NOW!"

A few weeks later I was at the local Sainsbury supermarket. And guess who is standing in front of me?

COCAINE DOCTOR!

"Hello doctor! It is me Amoeba man! You drained my liver!"

He looked at me in total silence. And then he spoke.

"I have no idea who you are. I do not talk to my patients outside a hospital environment. Goodbye."

But first. Welcome back to Whatay. (Or, if you are here for the first time, welcome to Whatay! Please come back.)

When was the last time I actually blogged something here? I don't mean self-promotion-y things like book announcements, or stuff like that. But actual, old-school, blog type things.

Ten years? Maybe more? God.

So much life water has flowed under the Sidin Vadukut bridge since then, that I think it is time for a brief recap. And for the convenience of people who are just joining, let me start at the very beginning.

Deep Breath

I started blogging on a Blogspot blog sometime in 2001. (Ok now say that line again and again for maximum tongue flexibility.) Things meandered along at a frequent but obscure pace, until the summer of 2004. That was when I was MBA-summer-interning at Johnson and Johnson in Mumbai. It was an intensely hot summer, a somewhat dead-end internship involving hernia operations, and about a month into the whole thing I fell ill with some sort of heat-stroke. I recouped for a couple of days on a metal bed frame in a dorm room at Makichan Hall, where some of us interns were residing.

Then I decided to do something to cheer myself up. I found an extremely air-conditioned internet cafe nearby, and decided to write blog posts.

And I wrote something that went, as they say these days, viral. Suddenly my daily reader count went from 5-10 people, most of them MBA aspirants, to tens of thousands of people.

In that moment everything changed. Suddenly I was thinking to myself: "Am I a writer?"

The summer came and went. I went back to Ahmedabad to complete b-schooling. But I kept writing and people kept reading. In fact the comments section became a small community unto itself. I am still friends with some of those people from... 21 years ago.

This was a really great age for Indian blogging. It was a nice little community. And there was this sincerity that came from a lack of revenue. It was very nice. Largely pointless. But nice.

Then after a brief stint in management consulting, sometime in 2006 I decided to pursue writing for a living. My masterplan was that if things didn't work out I could always just beg someone to give me an MBA fresher job somewhere. Raghuram Rajan was partly responsible for this. But that is a story for another time.

Then, ensconced in my bachelor pad in Wadala East, I wrote a book. I lost that manuscript. I wrote columns. Articles for Cricinfo. Blogged the Kala Ghoda festival. A column for the Hindu. Basically I was doing whatever I could to get work.

I also blogged furiously. It was all very satisfying.

Then a short stint at JAM Magazine later, I ran into someone who worked at Mint. This happened at the Sports Bar at Phoenix Mills. The exact same evening Yuvraj Singh hit six sixes. A column followed. And then in early 2007 I joined Mint outright.

I went on to work for Mint for around 11 years. First in Bombay and then in Delhi and then, from October 2010, in London. I wrote all kinds of things. Edited all kinds of things. But also started blogging less and less. And less. I am not sure why. I was writing around a 100 articles Mint every year. So I guess it just became too hard to write in my leisure time as well. (That is not to say my Mint job was a pain. It was an amazing job. A dream job. I had both the freedom to do things, but also fantastic bosses who taught me stuff.)

But also I was using my free time to write books. In 2010, I published my first novel. Dork. Two more Dork novels followed. Then The Sceptical Patriot. The Corpse That Spoke. And then Bombay Fever. All of this writing happened between 2009 and 2017. Phew.

All of this is to explain why this blog essentially died sometime in 2010. (I did manage to do a lot of busy work on it though. Templates. Platforms. Design. But not any of the actual writing. Tee hee.)

I did do a podcast, and briefly a newsletter. It was all very nice. But I had too much to do at work. Also I was very much 100% not Mr. Mathrubootham.

Oh also Twitter happened. (The other day I was on a conference call with a company. And some of the youths on that call only knew me as that annoying guy from Twitter. Some of the older people knew me from Mint. And the OG dadbods knew me from Whatay. And none of them knew what each other were referring to. It was very amusing. And ego-boosting.)

Anyway. Where was I? So yes. If you were a Whatay regular back in the day, this is probably the point in the timeline where we stopped speaking to each other. Sorry! I want to change that!

How many words is this so far? 861?

Ok accelerate.

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This is a brief (cough) timeline of what transpired from 2017 onwards:

2017: Bombay Fever. A novel about a global pandemic. Mint mint mint. Swiss watches. Mint. So much Mint.

2018: Editor at Mint called me up and said he wanted me to revamp a team and lead some new things. Two days later HR from Mint called me and told me it was my last day. They even tried to avoid paying severance and outstanding expenses. Also completed a Part-time Masters in Historical Research from the University of London. (I like learning things and writing exams.)

2019: Freelanced, wrote a few things, did some cool work with an advertising company in Birmingham. And also rested. I had written a lot for a long time. So what did I do? Yep. Set up a content company with a few co-founders that was focussed on taking true stories from India and turning them into great shows like Narcos or Chernobyl or Serial.

Had a second child! I could write an entire book on that experience.

2020: Built the company! It was fun! It was exhausting! Produced amazing journalism. Amazing podcasts. Amazing ads. All of us slogged our asses off and made decent revenue. An actual pandemic happened. Still not blogging.

2021: Company was respectably booming but we now needed to raise money to expand the team, stay liquid, and actually make the spectacular media stuff we wanted to. Investors backed out. Tried raising money. Other investors did not want to touch anything that had a journalism angle in India. Plus we were a little bit of an agency business. So I get why all the VCs were nice but said no. Sold the company back to the seed investors. Did not become a millionaire.

Completed a part-time MSc in Archaeological Practice from the University of London. (I really really like learning and exams etc. See above.) Still very much not blogging. Once again decided to take a break. Once again failed at it. Met the CEO of a B2B SaaS company on Twitter. He needed someone to help with content, comms, talent, and just generally being an adult in the company. We hit it off splendidly. Joined the company.

2022: B2B SaaS-ed my ass off. Hiring people. Running meetings. Getting COVID. Getting COVID again. Expanding offices in Bangalore, Berlin and Helsinki. Doing whatever it took to support the founders to get stuff done. Learnt a lot about Data Engineering, DAGs, Kubernetes, ClickHouse, Grafana, Kibana, Jo Vaada Kiya Voh Nibana etc. Great people. Smart people. But definitely needed an adult.

2023: SaaS company headcount was now 3x. And I felt that my 0 → 1 generalist adult role had run its course. Decided to step back into an advisory role.

Meanwhile a brand new Venture Capital fund in Bangalore asked me to join them in another 0 → 1 role focussed on brand, comms, research and marketing. Wow. Avoid. Wow.

2024: B2B SaaS guys were like bro come back for a few months? Help sort out some operational issues? In the interim the company had grown even bigger. So I said ok why not. Not exactly 0 → 1. More like 1 → 1.2.

2025: After SaaSing around for a second stint, I was now thinking of what to do next. And then a sequence of conversations happened. Some people came to me and said: Bro why did you stop writing things? Write about everything you have done? Write about 0 → 1 things? Write about funny things that have happened to you? Write about South Indian names? Have you seen the number of Vihaans and Amairas? (Yes. It is a plague.)

So I thought and thought and decided fine. I am going to take a couple of months off. Rest. Exercise. Read. But most importantly... write! Blog! Podcast! Just do things. And then in September or October 2025 I will think of what to do next in terms of directing coin towards bank account. Maybe more 0 → 1 things involving being "adult in residence" in companies.

But for now I will write, and do some fathering for the children during school vacation.

So I immediately opened up a file on my computer and started writing dozens of blogs and recording hundreds of podcasts hahahahahaha no. I was doing absolutely nothing. Absolute 100% writer's block.

And then the funny thing in the title of this post happened. Totally forgot about that.

I live in a suburb of London called Bromley. It is fantastic. We just got our very own Taco Bell. We also have our very own Desi Shop. I actually don't know what the shop is called. I just call it Desi Shop.

A few days ago I went to the desi shop to pick up dosa batter, yam, plantain type items. And suddenly craved some banana chips. I carefully went through an entire rack of options and chose one SKU made in Kerala.

Then I went to the counter. The shop, by the way, is owned by a hilariously passive-aggressive Sri Lankan Tamil couple. I mean with each other. Not with customers. Remind me to blog about that soon.

I go to the counter with my basket and the man starts beeping things into his machine. And then he says:

"Don't buy these banana chips..."

"Why not?"

"They are not good."

"How come?"

"They are made in Kerala in coconut oil. They are terrible. Please go take that one. It is better. Made in Gujurat."

"Excuse me?"

"Are you wearing Airpod again? I said you should buy the authentic banana chips made in Gujurat! Don't buy Kerala chips."

Friends. Readers. My homies. What the heck man. I mean.

What the.

What the heck.

Immediately I thought to myself: "This is 100% the kind of travesty I would blog about."

I came back home. Made some notes over a few days. And now here I am. Writing my first old-school blogpost in maybe ten years.

Anyway. So over the next few weeks, months, maybe even years, I am going to publish here. I am going to write blogposts and publish brief podcasts. I am going to write the first part of multi-part blogposts. And completely forget to write any further parts. And we will enjoy it together yes?

I might also write about things I have learnt from the last few years of doing work things. I will try and not make them read like LinkedIn influencer things. But what can I do? I am an older and wiser person. And most of that wisdom has to do with MRR, ARR, KPI, HR, CI/CD, MCP etc.

I have a plan to make it fun for both of us. You can always complain in the comments or via Twitter or telegram.

I also have an idea for a podcast. I am not going to overthink it. And just do it. I have a plan to make it fun for both of us. But you can complain.

So to summarize: I have two plans. You can complain about both.

So there. Banana Chips was the final straw that broke the writer’s back camel that went through the needle... wait what?

Anyway. Welcome. And Welcome Back. Leave comments. Are you as excited about this as I am? No? I thought so. Rascals.

But this little plaque is no bigger than a couple of paperback novels placed spine to spine. It is white with a black border and has no more than five lines of text on it.

Partigiano
Walter Stefani
Di Anni 25
Caduto il 20-09-1944
I Compagni Del Rione

Not only is the plaque quite small, but it is also mounted high up on the wall between a barred window and a small mailbox. Unless you look up as you walk past under the portico, there is little chance you’d spot the memorial to Walter Stefani who died in 1944 aged just 25.

And even if you did spot it, the chances are you really wouldn’t care. There are bigger, brasher, more luminous things to look at in Bologna.

But I was suddenly taken by this young man. Who had died during the second world war. And was some kind of partisan. Who was Walter Stefani, I asked the lady who manned the hotel reception. She shrugged her shoulders. He must be one of the boys the Germans shot during the war she said.

So I googled him up. One Walter Stefani was a writer from Vicenza had just died recently. Not him. And another Walter Stefani was a plastics entrepreneur. Not him.

And then I finally found him. Walter Stefani. On the ‘Storia E Memoria De Bologna’ website, a portal on the ‘history and memory’ of Bologna run by the city municipality. Walter Stefani. Son of Ernesto and Ida Zani; born on 2 December 1919 in Sasso Marconi, a town 17 kilometres southwest of Bologna. 

There is precious little about Walter Stefani available online. And the little there is mostly in Italian. Running the handful of sources through Google Translate tells the story of a simple man who went out in a blaze of heroic glory. Walter Stefani was a young man who was a fan of Bologna FC in his childhood. For several years, according to more than one source, he was Bologna Football Club’s ‘first mascot’. It is unclear what this means. Regardless Stefani was associated with the club when it was going through its brightest patch. They became national champions twice in the late 1920s. And then after the establishment of the Serie A, they won four more times before the onset of World War 2.

Stefani was a delivery boy or a bellboy, or both, at the outbreak of the war. Then on the 1st of May 1944, he joined one of the many Italian resistance groups that sprung into action following the 1943 armistice between the Kingdom of Italy and the Allies. The Germans responded to this perceived treachery on the part of their erstwhile allies by turning on Italian troops and eventually invading and occupying Italy. All over the country resistance and partisan groups began to sprout up and engage the Germans. Bologna became one of the main cauldrons of this resistance and witnessed some of the most significant engagements between German troops and resistance fighters anywhere in Europe.  And as the Allies took Rome and marched northwards, these resistance fighters were further motivated to do their part in undermining German resistance.

Stefani himself joined one of the most storied partisan groups that functioned in the Emilia-Romagna region around Bologna. Called the Stella Rosa (Red Star), it later became known as the Stella Rosa Lupo brigade after its leader Mario Musolesi aka ‘Lupo’ or the wolf. The charismatic Musolesi had put together the brigade from a ragtag group of fighters with diverse political beliefs and even some Allied POWs who had been freed from captivity. 

Surely the most remarkable of these fighters has to be Sad Singh, a Sikh officer from New Delhi. Attached to a tank regiment in the British 8th Army, Sad Singh had been captured by the Germans during the Allied invasion of southern Italy. But Singh escaped, hid aboard a train from Florence to Bologna and then joined Stefani’s Red Star Lupo brigade. Perhaps he fought shoulder to shoulder with Walter Stefani. 

If Lupo’s fighters were looking for a chance to hurt the Germans they soon got it. In August 1944 the Germans drew up a defensive line in the Monte Sole regions south of Bologna. This was precisely where the Red Star Lupo fighters were ensconced. The Germans knew they had to neutralise the partisan and resistance fighters in order to keep their lines intact. But what they eventually carried out was nothing short of a war crime: a massacre of the villages of the Monte Sole. Of the 2000 population of these villages the Germans killed some 800 including h216 children, 316 women and 142 ‘elderly people’.

According to one website that studies the history of the Monte Sole atrocities, these massacres have “been transformed by public memory into an epic history of the Resistance. The extreme violence against the people of the region employed by Nazi Army, the complicity of local Italian fascists and the role played by the partisans have been transformed into a collective public myth: the martyrdom of an entire people for the sake of the liberation of Italy.”

Walter Stefani himself did not die in Monte Sole. Instead, he was captured and taken prisoner. Then on 20th September 1944 Stefani along with ten other prisoners were taken to a shooting range on the Via Agucchi, to the northwest of Bologna not far from where the airport is located today.

Twenty-five year old Walter Stefani was executed. Four days later a local newspaper reported his execution and declared that all eleven victims had confessed to acts of terror against German soldiers. Stefani’s remains are interred at the Ossuary Monument to the Fallen Partisans, inside the monumental Certosa Di Bologna cemetery complex.

Today there is a plaque outside a house on a narrow little alley in Bologna that reminds us of the supreme sacrifice young Stefani made for his country and his beliefs. His life as a partisan was short. He signed up in May 1944 and he was dead just four months later. On 21st April 1945, Bologna finally passed into Allied hands.

When we read great histories of the Second World War, or indeed any great endeavour, we are often swayed by the portraits of the great men and women. The presidents and generals and dictators and emperors. The lives of the small men and women often pale in comparison. Walter Stefani is no Eisenhower.

Thevarthundiyil Titus, Anand Hingorini and Ratnaji Boria are but minnows next to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Yet if they hadn’t been amongst the first 80 to march alongside Gandhi, his Dandi March may have hardly become the turning point in Indian history that is.

But this is not just a matter of remembering the forgotten. Small plaques outside obscure homes on narrow alleys are also objects of empowerment. They remind us that sometimes giants stand on the shoulders of minnows.

Walter Stefani helped defeat fascism.

"Wake up Sidin wake up wake up wake up wake up. Enough of sleeping like a wild buffalo. Wake up wake up."

As far as I know my Malayali family has never owned a wild or domesticated buffalo. Cows? Yes. Chickens? Very much. Rabbits? For a brief period. Turkeys? Yes, and hilarious. Venomous snake in the copra warehouse? Unintentionally.

But buffalo? Never. We've never owned them. And I highly doubt if my mom ever spent any time observing their sleep patterns. And yet here she is insinuating that I sleep like one.

But uniquely, on that night, I woke up instantly. We rushed to the living room, switched on the TV, and promptly sat down to watch West Germany versus UAE at the 1990 World Cup. My mom and I were excited beyond description. UAE. UAE! Our UAE! At the football world cup! And playing against Germany! How is this possible?

Is this real life or just fantasy? Etcetera. We were super excited.

Now this expatriate excitement no doubts seems a bit strange. I mean UAE is hardly a paragon of human rights, religious freedom, labour law enforcement, workers welfare etc. But as NRIs who grew up there in the 1980s may tell you, you felt a certain fondness for the place. Because you lived in it. (And what, really, is patriotism but just finding yourself somewhere and thinking what the hell why not.)

So some 1980s-NRIs might remember a time when policemen used to speak a bit of Hindi and a little Malayalam. And when the emaraati at the customs counter would ask you if you had 'coconut halwa' in your luggage, and when they trusted the Indian fellow in accounts--aka Dad--so much that they let him draw up all the cheques, which they would sign with merely a cursory glance.

True story from 1978-79:

Dad: "Please sign here sir."
Ancient bedouin boss uncle whose Welsh-educated kids ran the company, but who still insisted on dealing with all money himself: "Oh Mr. Sunny very big amount eh? Very very big..."
Dad: "Sir, that is the date. This is the amount."
Boss: "Inshallah company is in your hands Mr. Sunny."

So anyway. We were unbelievably excited.

And on June 15th the UAE faced West Germany. They'd already lost to Colombia previously. But a match against West Germany? United Arab Emiridiciulous level of hype.

The Germans quickly put two past UAE goalkeeper Muhsin Musabah. Did this do anything to undermine the electricity coursing through the veins of mother and son? Absolutely not. I vividly recall sitting on the edge of our sofas, mom and me, waiting for a moment of magic from Adnan Al Talyani (UAE Legend, UAE Player of The Century).

And then in the 47th minute a moment of magic came, not from Talyani (Legend etc.) but Khalid Mubarak (Firefighter from Dubai). Who took advantage of a spot of bad defending, and scored a really fantastic goal.

Boss, we lost our minds. Mom and I just completely and utterly lost our minds. We were bouncing off the walls. Hugging. Punching the air. UAE had scored! UAE HAD SCORED. AGAINST GERMANY!

Twenty-eight years later I still remember that moment quite well. Was mom wearing a nighty with little blue flowers? Yes, I think so.

Or at least I think I remember that moment very well. I try hard to remember it. Periodically I tell myself: do not forget that moment. Save it. Stash it away. The goal. The moment. The celebration.

That is because two and a half weeks later, on the 4th of July 1990, my mother had a heart attack. That morning we were on our way to the airport, to catch a flight to Trivandrum. We were going on NRI summer vacation trip to Kerala. All the luggage was carefully placed in the dickie of a friend's car. Mom came hurrying down the stairs. And just as we were about to step into the car, she said she felt ill. Dad told my brother and me to wait in the little Malayali hotel nearby and rushed her to hospital. She didn't make it. She passed away in the car. Nobody knows exactly what happened. Perhaps it had something to do with her thyroid problem.

The next few days are a blur. I remember very little of it. I recall our house being full of people. Everyone was talking all the time. Because, I think, that is how Indian families cope with stuff. They talk and talk. First, they talk of the tragedy of it all. Then they talk about funny memories and laugh until no one can stand it any more and then everyone cries. And then when everyone is done crying, they talk. And then they eat. They eat all the time.

At some point, someone came and told my brother and me to go play. Something. Somewhere. Don't just sit here and watch the grown-ups. Someone went and bought a toy helicopter for us. The only problem was you aren't supposed to play in a house in mourning. So eventually someone suggested we could sit in the bathroom and play. And that is what we did. We played with our helicopter in the bathroom.

Four days later we were in Kerala. Driving around inviting people for the funeral. At some point, late in the night, we were driving back home when the driver of the Ambassador taxi suggested we drop into his house. "It is the World Cup Final," he said. "You can't watch it in your home because of the mourning. But you can watch it in mine."

So we sat in the driver's house and watched that very bad, very very bad, final. Almost as if the football too was in mourning.

Sometimes people ask me why I like football. Or why I support Arsenal and so on. And I find this a funny question. Nobody asks this when I say I love aubergine. (I love aubergine.)

I like football for many reasons. So many reasons. Last night's free kick, for instance.

But I am also thankful to football for one very important memory. There are many different ways in which we remember someone... for the last time. In which we capture a snapshot that we will then carry with us till we run out of snapshots ourselves, so to speak.

And UAE's goal against Germany in 1990 is a moment I will carry with me forever.

Anyway. Enjoy the world cup. You never know when you'll need the football to help you remember.

And England will win. Mark my words.

Other people have lucrative investment portfolios, expensive cars, high metabolisms, statuesque physiques, healthy BMIs, and a capacity to sleep on planes during long flights. Very good. Congratulations. But I have hair. Quite tremendous hair. My hair is thick and dark and even. There is, I admit, the occasional grey strand. One cannot resist the ravaging of time, but one can succumb to it with style.

But otherwise, my hair is really quite exceptional. Apply a little Brylcreem—Red—and it will stay in place like a Studds helmet. No wonder attractive ladies in business school used to run their fingers over my head and whisper ‘So dense, so thick’.  Many still want to, but their bald husbands will get jealous, what to do.

Having said this, you will be surprised to know that I have only ever had two hairstyles in my entire life:

• Mild ‘Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men with left partition’, 1979 - 1989

• Mild ‘Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men with right partition’, 1989 - present

What happened in 1989, all those years before the 2014 elections, for my hair to suddenly move from left to right?

Friends, please sit down, it is a short but good story.

It was, if I recall, a Thursday morning in Abu Dhabi. Thursday was the first day of the weekend in those days in Abu Dhabi. Dad was getting dressing in his Thursday casuals for work. Mom was in the kitchen experimenting with some recipe from Vanita magazine no doubt. Chicken sambar or pineapple puffs or some such nonsense.

My brother was watching some WWF wrestling on TV. And I was lying on the floor of the living room, propped up on my elbows, reading the newspaper. I was 10 years old at the time, my brother was six.

I was a 10-year old who spent most of the weekend reading the newspaper. I was, and still am, considered to be a very cool person within very limited social circles.

As I was reading the paper or doing the crossword or some such, I noticed a toothpick lying under the sofa. I remember this very distinctly. It was inside a Kentucky Fried Chicken wrapper. Perhaps the remains of a weekend fast food meal the evening before. 

For reasons I just do not have, I reached for the toothpick, unwrapped it, and began to just look at it. 

Why? No idea. I just said no, boss!! I have no reasons. 

At that exact moment my brother leapt off the coffee table and onto my back like some stupid WWF wrestler. He was so enthralled by the program on TV he had decided to produce what I believe is called ‘user-generated content’.

For a moment I was just mildly irritated. And then I saw the drops of blood on the newspaper. And then I noticed that the toothpick was no longer in my hand, but sticking out of my head, near the hairline on the right side. (My right, your left.) Panic ensued. I tried to pull it out, the toothpick broke in half, leaving around an inch still embedded in my head. I ran to the bedroom. 

Dad, I said, there is a toothpick in my head. 

Shut up Sidin, Dad said, don’t make fun of such things. One day it will really happen and then nobody will believe you. 

Dad, oh my god Dad, Dad there is a toothpick in my head.  This is not a drill.

My dad ran his fingers over the skin of my scalp and recoiled in horror. The inch-long piece of toothpick was stuck between the skin of my scalp and the bone of the skull.

All this is completely true.  Completely.

We rushed to the hospital. (New Medical Center, Abu Dhabi. )

One doctor came and checked and said, wait one second I need to call another doctor. Then another. And then another. Until there was a small group discussion around my head. The problem, they said, was trying to figure out how to approach the piece of toothpick. Apparently, the foreign object was moving around between the layers of skin and bone.

Dad: “Look is he safe? Doctor, is anything going to happen to my son?”

Doctor: “Absolutely no problem Mr. Sunny. He is 100% safe. We are just discussing how to remove this without causing too much scarring or physical disfigurement...”

Typical Indian Dad: “Thank you Jesus. What scarring doctor, as if he is going to look handsome like Rajiv Gandhi or Prem Nazir when he grows up. You just take it out. If there is any problem he can wear a cap for the rest of his life.” 

After two or three hours of this nonsense, they finally decided to operate. The operation itself took no more than an hour or so. There was a lost of unpleasant tugging and pulling and stitching. Did it hurt me? Well, I don’t have any strong feelings about that question... because they used local anaesthetic.

Ha ha ha. Classic. 

After applying a massive—and I mean massive—bandage around my head they said I could go home.  The doctor asked me if I wanted to go to school the week after. Of course, I said, I am participating in a poetry recitation competition.

Doctor: “Are you sure? The bandage will distract from the poetry...”

Sidin: “Not at all doctor, let this bandage be a strong message to other students about the value of safety and a culture of precaution in the...” 

Doctor: “You want to get extra sympathy marks in the competition?” 

Sidin: “Correct, can you make the bandage a little bigger?” 

This proved futile as that stupid Andrew M with his voice like melted Amul butter sliding off a silver spoon into a pool of melted chocolate won the contest. (Bloody fool won every single year throughout my time in that school.) I got third prize I think.

The stitches and scarring meant that I had to switch my hair partition from left to right. For years afterwards I used to impress people by showing them the scar in my hairline. This scar has now vanished. But I don’t need it anymore. Why would I need it?

I have my fantastic hair. And people are always impressed. 

Where did it come from?

In Switzerland, a woman collapses in the arms of an Indian journalist, her body disintegrating into a puddle of gore. She is the first victim of a monstrous disease that will soon kill hundreds with relentless fury . . .

Who will it kill next?

Unsuspecting men, women and children are ravaged by a killer that experts have never seen before. As the outbreak wreaks its bloody havoc—killing rich and poor, young and old—thousands try to flee . . . including the most powerful man in India.

Can anybody stop it?

All that stands between Mumbai and the apocalypse is a desperate team of doctors, civil servants and scientists. But can they do anything to save this city from the greatest, most horrific crisis it ever seen?

But these days, when the weather is beginning to get a bit warmer and then sun a bit more forthright, I step outside and sometimes just stand there listening to the birdsong. Birdsong, I suppose, is a bit like love or hunger. You don't notice it until you do. And then you notice nothing else.

A few weeks ago, now that life seemed to have returned to a semblance of normalcy, I decided to go and see my local club play football. Frequent visitors to this blog will recall that once upon a time I used to live right outside Arsenal's Emirates Stadium. I now live a twenty minute walk away from Bomley FC's Hayes Lane ground. It is impossible to exaggerate the difference between the two venues. 

This plan had been forming in mind for many, many weeks. What greater sign of commitment to your local community is there than to go and see the local football team play in the fifth tier of English football. Bromley FC play in the Vanarama National League.  

Arsenal play in the Premier League. Then there is the Championship, League One, League Two and the National League. Confusingly enough the National League is what many people here call 'Non-league Football'. Because it is semi-professional at best, and a bunch of barbers and school teachers and accountants at worst.

Bromley FC, the night I went to see the Ravens for the first time, were sitting somewhere in the middle of the National League table. Which is not bad for a team that had only recently been promoted up to this level of football. (Organized English football, I am told, goes down fourteen levels. Crazy.) 

The club, however, was coming off a somewhat bad run of form. They had just lost 4-0 in their previous game. And I was hoping my presence would perk things up. After all, in seven years of watching Arsenal play live at the Emirates infrequently, my club has won every single time. Really. It is a great record.

So the missus dropped me on Hayes Lane, and I walked down a dark path to the ground. Which wasn't too bad at all. Comparable to a good college football ground in Kerala in every aspect except for the excellent pub and the green pitch. I showed my ticket to the cheerful girl in club colours at the gate, walked up to the pitch, had a look around, nodded in self-satisfaction, and then went to the pub for a pint. Inside my jacket pocket I carried enough cash to procure a burger, chips (french fries) and tea at half time. It was a very cold night. But I soon found a vacant seat and sat down to enjoy...

Bromley conceded a penalty after five minutes. Braintree Town scored. 1-0. There was a murmur of disapproval in the stands. (Later I was informed that less than 500 people attended the match. More people get arrested for anti-social behaviour at each Manchester United game excluding players. However the murmur was strong.)

Then Bromley's Lee Minshull was sent off in the 16th minute. 

In the 32nd minute Bromley's Daniel Johnson was also sent off. And in the ensuing brouhaha Bromley manager Neil Smith was also dismissed. 

One minute later Bormley conceded another penalty. 2-0. 

And just before half-time Braintree scored again. 3-0. 

At half time I walked over to buy my burger, fries and tea in a mood that can only be called "Bencho yeh kya ho raha hai". 

I was fully expecting to come back to my seat for the second half expecting to find the crowd in a violent mood. Instead I spent the next 45 minutes enjoying exquisite gallows humour. Resigned to humilation, the Bromley FC fans were indulging in some comedy to somehow get through the next 45 minutes. Memories of IIT-JEE papers came flooding back.

Braintree scored twice more by the 73rd minute.

I have never, in all my life, witnessed a more one-sided sporting event. (I have participated in a far more humiliating contest. But that is another story.) 

When the final whistle was blown some fans stayed back to applaud the Bromley players back into the tunnel. The referee walked away to resounding boos. I applauded and booed respectively, had another drink, and then went back home. And then after thirty minutes of waiting for the missus to stop laughing I went to bed. 

Bromley are playing at home again on the 25th.  

I am conflicted.

P.S. I am hopeless at this blogging thing no? But I am rectifying this.

One thing led to another and by August 2015 I had admissions to the MA History course at UCL and the MA Historical Research course at Birkbeck. Both, obviously, as a part-time student. (Not that the full-time course was impossible. It is just that I didn’t want to take a risk. I am an Indian journalist you see. It has been years since I did any actual work. So I decided to complete my MA over a less hectic 24-month period.)

I finally chose Birkbeck and have had the time of my life ever since. It has been very challenging. The average class requires some 200 pages of reading and plenty of thinking. And this is if you just restrict yourself to the compulsory readings. Optional readings often run into hundreds of pages more. Per lecture. Crazy. There are no examinations to pass, thankfully, as each module is evaluated via the submission of a 5000-word essay.

Which is what I wanted to blog about in the first place.

For my first module, on the theories and methods of historical research, I submitted an essay on the declassifications of Soviet archives on the Space Program and the Nazi-Soviet Pact. How did these declassifications take place? How did Russians receive these declassifications? How did they react afterwards?

(Why did I choose this topic? Two reasons. There was an excellent exhibition on the Soviet Space Program taking place at the Science Museum when I was choosing topics. And secondly the Netaji Bose files were being debated at the time. Click. Click.)

You can download and read the essay PDF here. I am happy to report that essay was marked well and I passed the module.

But ever since the essay I have been fascinated by a particular aspect of post-Soviet life in Russia: public memory and collective memory. How do Russians, old and young, process their past history?

No-one, I think, has asked this question better than Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich. Her latest book is Secondhand Time. Lithub ran an excerpt from the book this week:

“So here it is, freedom! Is it everything we had hoped it would be? We were prepared to die for our ideals. To prove ourselves in battle. Instead, we ushered in a Chekhovian life. Without any history. Without any values except for the value of human life—life in general. Now we have new dreams: building a house, buying a decent car, planting gooseberries… Freedom turned out to mean the rehabilitation of bourgeois existence, which has traditionally been suppressed in Russia. The freedom of Her Highness Consumption. Darkness exalted. The darkness of desire and instinct—the mysterious human life, of which we only ever had approximate notions. For our entire history, we’d been surviving instead of living.”

You can read more here. You can also read an interview with Alexievich here.

I cannot wait to read Secondhand Time.

Anyway… more on the MA and my experiences going back to university in future posts. Cheers chaps.

More here.

"MARTENSITE! MARTENSITE!" I would scream, bounding down the steps, thus saving everybody in the stadium and subsequently appearing on News Hour.

The closest I've ever come to doing anything remotely heroic is staging a walkout from my class in engineering college. Not because I am Malayali--*laughter*--but because the night before somebody fell off a hostel terrace and died, and the authorities were trying to hush it up by acting as if nothing happened. Oh and I also broke a story on CWG 2010 corruption long before it became cool to do so.

Anyways. I digress. This is a story of a true hero.

But then Norman did something else. “I believe in what you believe. Do you have another one of those for me ?” he asked pointing to the Olympic Project for Human Rights badge on the others’ chests. “That way I can show my support in your cause.” Smith admitted to being astonished, ruminating: “Who is this white Australian guy? He won his silver medal, can’t he just take it and that be enough!”.

Smith responded that he didn’t, also because he would not be denied his badge. There happened to be a white American rower with them, Paul Hoffman, an activist with the Olympic Project for Human Rights. After hearing everything he thought “if a white Australian is going to ask me for an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge, then by God he would have one!” Hoffman didn’t hesitate: “I gave him the only one I had: mine”.

I've read this story many times before in different places. And each time I am moved tremendously.

The White Man in That Photo

In India's Rio Olympic contingent of 100-plus, Dipa Karmakar's presence is undeniably the most unexpected. Her joyous arrival has driven her sport out of the shadows, and uncovered her home state Tripura's four-decade-old romance with gymnastics. It's a sport that India follows at the Olympics usually with a detached sense of wonder, lacking any personal investment. Until Rio 2016.

You will not read a better long-form piece on Indian sports anywhere. Ever. The kind pf piece they should teach at journalism school. Brilliant. Sensitive but detached. Here.

COWEN: For fiction, what would be the country or region — now, what’s a country, what’s a region is even up for grabs — that is really underappreciated relative to what it has done? If you say, “Oh, classic Russian fiction,” even if people haven’t read it, people know there’s a lot there. You probably wouldn’t pick that. What’s the counterintuitive pick for most underrated region or country for wonderful fiction?

ORTHOFER: Underrated, I would absolutely think the regional language and literature of India. I think surprisingly, even though, perhaps, English is the main literary language of India and a great deal is locally translated, even there much of the vernacular literature still isn’t available in English.

What one can see of it and also in part hear about it — we’re missing an awful lot. There is a literary culture there, especially, for example, in Bengali, but we’ve had that since Tagore. One of the remarkable things is Tagore won his Nobel prize over a hundred years ago, and there are still novels by him which haven’t been translated into English. He is really a very good novelist.

It’s truly worthwhile, and this goes for many regions. The southern region of Kerala where they write in Malayalam — there’s remarkable literary production there, and we just see so little of it. Also, what is available, because a fair amount is — it tends to be underappreciated, especially in America and the United Kingdom. It hasn’t really reached these shores.

More here. The whole collection of Conversations are great and are also available in podcast form for on-the-go listening.

1. Perhaps they think I can help them get mileage or visibility in mainstream or on social media.

2. Perhaps they think that my own personal and professional experiences enable me, in some way, to assist or educate them on starting up, taking risks, self-promotion and so on.

3. Or perhaps their start-ups are associated with media, publishing, history, Raveena Tandon or any of the other topics in which I have slightly more experience and insight than the average person on the street.

I am always, always happy to help. Indeed I am tremendously in awe of start-up entrpreneurs. With each passing year since my graduation from business school I have developed a greater and greater appreciation of the sheer challenge involved in setting up, running, and making successes of businesses. It is very, very hard. And I don’t really think I have the bottle to do anything like that.

Typing for hours everyday and then getting ravaged in book reviews is the most risk I want to take, thank you very much.

Some people think that quitting a job to, say, run a cafe or a mobile gaming company is in some way similar to the act of chucking a career in management consulting to become a writer cum columnist cum social media timewaster. 

There are some, slim similarities in terms of estimating risks, networking with people and institutions, being self-critical, promoting one-self, learning to be self-reliant, inculcating a thickness of skin, handling family, and so on…

But, once you go in deeper into the process of succeeding and failing, being an entrepreneur is entirely different from being a freelance writer or an author or journalist. Let me oversimply by saying that most entrepreneurs have to deal with ultimate business upsides and downsides that are vastly greater, in both directions, to those enjoyed by people like me. Bad journalists and authors, in other words, can make a decent living. I don’t think bad entrpreneurs can.

Having said that there is one piece of advice I give EVERY entrepreneur who every appoaches. Even if they don’t ask me for insights at the ‘business model’ level, I still butt in and give this piece of wisdom anyway.

And I was reminded of that wisdom when I read a piece on the QZ India website titled: “How my startup lost Rs15 lakh and shut down before its first anniversary.”

Pardeep Goyal writes:

I thought I would make millions of dollars through my startup, but I failed miserably.

I had read amazing stories of startups like Flipkart and Zomato, but nobody told me that 90% of new companies fail within two years of taking their initial steps.

I failed in my first year.

It is a great piece and well worth reading.

That piece of advice I always give, that essential wisdom, is also the first of the lessons that Goyal took away from his experience: Know your customer before building your product.

The point should be clear by now. We built our product based on the assumptions and feature lists of our competitors. We should have talked to our customers before building our product.

We should have convinced two to three schools of different sizes to test our product. In exchange, we should have provided a lifetime free product and support for early-adopter schools. I should have validated my product before leaving my job.

On the face of it, this is entirely basic stuff. Why would you start making a product or designing a service before you’ve spoken to your customers? Shouldn’t phoning up a potential customer or client be the first ‘start-uppy’ thing you do after buying turtleneck sweaters and blue jeans?

And yet at least 85% of the budding entrepreneurs I speak to, perhaps even more, don’t seem to do this till they are well into the entrepreneurial process. By which point this dialogue can be very, very upsetting and unsettling.

Let me draw a parallel with something budding writers and columnists do when pitching stories. Or, to be more accurate, what they don’t do: read the publication they are pitching for.

Again at least 85% of everyone who talks to me about writing for Mint, Mint Lounge, Mint On Sunday, Cricinfo, Scroll etc. don’t spend much time on reading these publications before pitching. They have no idea what they publish, the kind of topics they cover, and the kind of columnists they commission.

This was one of the first lessons I was taught when I transitioned from blogger to writing-for-a-living-er.

It has important implications for entrepreneurs as well. Please try to talk to potential customers. Even if you’re unwilling to reveal your secret plan, figure out if the problem you’re trying to solve actually exists in the real world. And if it does, figure out if there are people who are willing to part with money for solutions.

Let me give you an example of a conversation I had with someone some years ago. This budding entrepreneur wanted to set up a company to help kids in Mumbai indulge in more sports and games and get more exercise. His solution was led by the internet and social networking, and he had spent some months on it. I thought it made sense on paper/powerpoint. 

Also he had spoken to both kids and schools and they all seemed enthusiastic. 

“What about parents?” I asked. (This was not some kind of business bolt of lightning. But something I had come across often in the Mint newspaper. Parents are, generally, decision-makers when it comes to most kids' products and services.)

“Parents?” he said looking at me with furrowed brow as if he had been downloaded whole from the internet on his date of birth instead of having been reluctantly presented to the world by a very, very annoyed woman.

“Yeah man. They will have to pay for your services no?”

“Yeah…”

“You really need to speak to the parents in Mumbai man. You need to talk to the people who are going to pay you.”

As we sat in that Costa Coffee I saw a cavalcade of emotions pass across his face. Most of them troubled. In the six months he had worked on the project he hadn’t spoken to any parents.

I wished him well. And I did this sincerely. But I haven’t heard from him or his company since. (Again, there is no schadenfreude here. I assure you.)

Why does this happen so often? Why do so many people forget to ask these basic questions or engage with the consumers as an exploratory measure?

There is one theory I have. I think it has to do with the way problem-solving is taught in schools and colleges, and generally framed in popular culture. (I don’t say ‘Indian’ schools or colleges, because the problem seems universal.) 

I think there is excessive focus on problem-solving instead of problem-identification. And this bias, if you will, is magnified by examination and evaluation driven systems. Take the IIM system. I think it is safe to say that the most open-ended problem-identification and problem-solution experience most IIM grads go through is that group discussion round during the admissions process.

Once they make it through, they are faced with an avalanche of tests and exams that, usually, extend very little latitude for the identification of problems. (In my experience there was some latitide, but little incentive to unpack a problem in this way.)

At the risk of stretching a parallel to breaking point, I want to say that journalists also face this problem. Journalists too often assume the existence of a problem, then assume the social/political need for a response to this problem, and then go to great lengths to analyze and write about the desperate need for that solution. This has the terrible impact of making every issue sound like a life-and-death struggle.

RBI rate-cuts, international trade MOUs, egovernance, and especially digital solutions of any kind—each of these are often portrayed as being the only thing standing between chaos and Utopia. And yet time and time again we find that there are other problems and other life-and-death struggles actually standing between us and a Keralotopian nation.

All this is reinforced by the media’s inexhuastible appetite for moments of crisis and, dare I say, solutionism.

But back to entrepreneurs. Yeah. So if you’re planning to start-up anything please talk to your consumers first. Just have a free-wheeling conversation about issues and problems and solutions and purchase decisions.

It may be useful. Also, if you’re planning to ask me for help, it will help shave off the first five minutes of our Skype call.

Best of luck to all start-up types. Feel free to ping. Happy to help

More here in this essay for Mint On Sunday. You should read Mint On Sunday. It is quite good.

p.s. Planning to do this more. And in general blog a little more. I miss it very much. Used to be fun.