It took a long-haul flight from Mumbai to Vancouver for me to finally experience a comic bookstore I’d only read about online and watched with envy on The Big Bang Theory . The comic bookstore I went to was on Vancouver Island, in a small, charming place called Coombs, within the district of Nanaimo. Coombs, as many would already know, is famous for its Old Country Market—more popularly known as Goats on the Roof—where a family of goats lives on a low sodded roof. The place i

Picture this.   You’re on cloud nine because you nailed a job interview. At least, you think you did. But then, you start having doubts and brood over how the interview might have actually gone; maybe you didn’t leave a good impression. Before long, you’re convinced that you’re not going to get the job. Then, a week or so later, you get a call saying you’ve been hired.   Here’s another scenario.   You catch the flu bug and your doctor recommends routine blood tests as a preca

Our thoughts —some 60,000 to 80,000 per day, as studies suggest—are like bumper-to-bumper traffic with vehicles tailgating one another and getting nowhere. At least not anytime soon. Rush-hour traffic, day in and day out, leaves us stressed and traps us in a mental gridlock. We find ourselves stuck, unable to move forward or backward. As it is on the road, so it is in the mind. While we can do little about traffic jams, we can, however, control our tailgating thoughts by slow

Thich Nhat Hanh, the renowned Vietnamese Buddhist monk, famously wrote about mindfulness:   Tea is an act complete in its simplicity. When I drink tea, there is only me and the tea. The rest of the world dissolves. There are no worries about the future. No dwelling on past mistakes. Tea is simple: loose-leaf tea, hot pure water, a cup. I inhale the scent, tiny delicate pieces of the tea floating above the cup. I drink the tea, the essence of the leaves becoming a part of me.

My wife and I visited a popular book fair in South Mumbai. The book sale was held in a large assembly hall where hundreds of thousands of books —fiction and nonfiction, paperbacks and hardbacks—were tightly stacked front to back with their spines up, in rows upon rows that stretched longer than bowling alleys.   The place was teeming with all kinds of readers, and perhaps even non-readers. There were book browsers casually flipping through titles, old-school readers savouring

12.30 p.m. is usually the time I leave my workstation and head to the office cafeteria for a quick lunch, post-which I step outside for a short walk around the office block. It's a routine I’ve been following on most workdays  for nearly a decade.   Sometimes, I utilise my lunch break to talk to colleagues, catch up on news, read a book on my tablet, listen to music or solve crosswords.   Of all these activities, I enjoy taking walks the most. It has become an essential part

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