What are words worth?

This morning I set off on my usual morning walk, at the quiet and beautifully cloudy hour of 6 a.m. and took my usual route, along a street I have walked on many times before, at different times of the day. Listening to one of my favourite podcast series, I must have had a silly smile on my face as I walked past a tight group of three dogs sitting (in what seemed to be a peaceable manner) in just off the road in a space that would have normally counted as a sidewalk. Quite mindful of the proverbial advice to let sleeping dogs lie I made sure to give them a wide berth as I walked past, thinking to myself that the large white female in the middle looked like she was happily pregnant. All of a sudden, the female dog began barking loudly and rushed at me, and before I knew what was happening, she clamped her jaw on my shin even as one of her two companions ran ahead barking and lunging at me from the front. I managed to shake her off and walk away quickly and fortunately they hung back, c...

Mornings demand multitasking. For most of us, whether we work at home or elsewhere, it's a time when we are rushing to open the door to ten different service providers from the milkman to the newspaperwallah to the trash collector to the next-door neighbour asking for a cup of sugar, while the phone rings to give you the latest on whether the bandh will affect your organization or your child's school or not,  and the other phone, of the mobile variety, beeps insistently with messages ranging from bill alerts to not-to-miss sale alerts. Breathless already? Well that's the reality most of us whizz through every morning--we just don't stop long enough to make that list! When the morning is complicated by a television turned on and tuned into Oscar fever, things don't get helped much. The milk boils over while you are watching Jake Gyllenhall smile at Amy Adams or trying to not watch Aish and Abhishek sound trite and plastic. The toast burns in the toaster that doesn...