Personal

Being a nice person sounds great until you realize it mostly involves agreeing to help someone move a sofa on a rainy Sunday morning. If you never say no, congratulations, you have achieved the peak human form of a door mat.

I was 14 when I first laid eyes on her. It was a chance encounter; I’d wandered into the club’s billiards room searching for my swimming buddy. There she stood, draped in flawless green, her elegant curves illuminated under the hazy glow of cigarette smoke.

Let us face it, cricket is not just a sport for us, it is more like a religion. Whether you are a fourteen year old teenager who thinks he is a pro bowler or a fifty year old uncle playing with a bad knee, everyone forgets their age the moment the game starts.

I remember a time when we understood each other through simple, human moments. A lingering glance felt like a quiet promise. A gentle tilt of the head quietly conveyed, “I see you, I really see you.” In those moments, distance dissolved without a single word being spoken.

Every snooker table has its own crew of characters, but our gang takes the cake.

“Keep your head down, sir!” My caddie has shouted this so often that I suspect he's no longer trying to improve my swing. He's simply trying to spare me the horror of watching where the ball goes. I've even decided on a fitting inscription for my golf bag:

One boy has an Apple. The other has an apple. One is exploring the world through a screen, while the other is enjoying what the world has given him to eat

Have you ever sailed so far into the Arabian Sea that the Indian coastline disappears behind you? No land in sight, no familiar shore to return to, just an endless stretch of water and the sound of the wind filling your sails.

Picture this: We’ve got smartphones smarter than half the people I know, self-driving cars that promise to whisk us away without a hitch, and AI chatbots that can write poetry or solve math problems faster than I can remember my wive’s birthday. Yet, for all their silicon-brained glory, these things can’t even turn themselves on. No, really, try it. Unplug your laptop, set it on the table, and command it to boot up with the sheer force of your will.

Moving beyond a list of disliked code toward a conversation about cost and timing.

Looking for useful lessons without turning hindsight into a story of inevitable failure.