Blog@GraceJunction

The train chugged powerfully thru the drizzle as I kept waiving. This was the beginning of a journey; a journey which just like the train was powerfully pulling the load attached, moving against all odds, piercing thru darkness, thru the cold wind and the rain – unstoppable.

It was not the pull of the train that powered the journey, rather it was something else more powerful, that was moving forward – It was the journey of Truth. My mind couldn’t forget the young child’s smiling face, less than a year old. The journey reflected innocence, trust and childlike faith. This friend of mine was traveling out to a very remote jungle to meet an unknown tribe, a tribe which still is centuries behind the normal world, cutoff from the rest of the world this tribe still lives in prehistoric stone age era. (more…)

Three weeks before Christmas 1993, Wolfgang Dircks died while watching television. Neighbors in his Berlin apartment complex hardly noticed the absence of the 43-year-old. His rent continued to be paid automatically out of his bank account.

Five years later, 1998 the money ran out, and the landlord entered Dircks’ apartment to inquire. He found Dircks’s remains still in front of the tube. The TV guide on his lap was open to December 3, the presumed day of his death. Although the television set had burned out, the lights on Dircks’s Christmas tree were still twinkling away.

It’s a bizarre story, but it shouldn’t surprise us. Each year thousands of people are found accidentally days or weeks after their solitary deaths in the affluent cities and suburbs of the world. If a person can die in such isolation that his neighbors never notice, how lonely was he when alive? (more…)

It was 7pm and I was fuming.  Nothing had gone right for me.  The ideas that I had painstakingly worked on all week were dismissed by my boss in less than three seconds. 

A colleague had promised to help me get through my deadline but conveniently forgot.  My cellphone service provider threatened to block my outgoing calls if I did not pay the bill till the end of the day and worst of them all….my paycheck arrived…and the young upstart who joined the company yesterday was suddenly earning more than me! (yes…I sneaked into his payslip…come on, my suspicion wasnt without reason!!) (more…)

Come first week of April and you’ll find it very difficult to get a hotel booking in all the best locations in the country. Reason being almost all sales driven organization will be having their strategy meet or plan for the year 08-09.

They will be planning the entire strategy and targets for the year. The targets is then distributed according to the zone, region and location. Every employee gets their share of target. The meeting goes for two days and at the end of the day there’s a huge party where everybody has a target of how many pegs they’ll gulp down!! (more…)

‘Workaholic’, ‘Stressed Out’ these have been western phenomenon’s for our forefathers who used to work in the dusty and worn out offices of the government and PSU’s for the first 50 odd years from our independence until it one day quite surprisingly had sprung its neck in our families which for us existed only in Manhattan! And may be by a stretch of our imagination in Bombay too! Most of the Indian middle class was brought up in this atmosphere where being late in office was unacceptable to the elders and a taboo when it came to working women! (more…)