I have been coaching talented individuals since i was 18, and one thing i can say with certainty is that one learns a lot more than the person by coaching (from their mistakes for instance) and that our education systems have failed to prepare the mind (and for life), and that we have a mental health crisis on our hands in this pandemic.

Rote learning prepares you for exams based on a template, rather than for black swans such as the pandemic.

Suppose you have been trained for the hospitality, aviation or retail sectors, and one has to now do things which are deeply uncomfortable which one is not ready. How do our labour geographies intersect with the mega trends of the day?

There is too much pressure to define oneself as per the neat categorisations of the LinkedIn header. Agile should not only be an adjective, let us embrace the verb too. Life is messy.

The devotional music paying homage to Sabrimala and Lord Ayyappa sonically enveloping the community centric diaspora store with a Puja offerings section and the spices section stocking up on MDH and Shan opens the possibility of the transnational as a local site of familiar sensibilities. The emotional switchboard in the words of Prof Ato is electric and immediate and transports me to temple town Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu being present physically in Singapore, which is a global site for Tamil Culture.Cultural bubbles in the everyday are the placeholders of the creole in the multicultural global city.