Thoughts to Words: The Inner Sanctum of FridgeMagnet Tales
FridgeMagnet Tales isn’t just your average travel blog—it’s a sanctuary of introspection, a digital Pensieve where the author’s musings find a home in the sprawling landscape of the internet. Nestled within its virtual corridors lies a category titled “Thoughts to Words,” beckoning readers to embark on a journey through the labyrinth of the author’s mind.
Much like the enchanted basin of Harry Potter fame, this category serves as a portal into the inner workings of the author’s psyche. Here, amidst the digital pages, visitors are invited to delve into a repository of thoughts, emotions, and reflections curated by the mind behind the blog.
Within “Thoughts to Words,” the author unfurls a tapestry of personal anecdotes, introspective narratives, and philosophical ponderings. It’s a space where the mundane and the profound intersect, where everyday observations morph into profound insights.
Whether recounting tales of self-discovery, sharing lessons gleaned from the winding road of life, or embarking on thought trails that meander through the landscapes of the mind, each entry in this category offers readers a glimpse into the author’s inexhaustible quest for growth and understanding.
In essence, “Thoughts to Words” encapsulates the essence of FridgeMagnet Tales—a testament to the transformative power of introspection and the boundless potential of words to illuminate the human experience. So, take a moment to wander through this digital Pensieve, and immerse yourself in the captivating narratives that await within.
A couple of weeks ago, I was in Chennai for my US Visa interview (I’ve written a blog about that experience which you can read here). After the interview, I had some time before my evening train back to Bangalore. I picked up the phone and called my ever-dependable sources of information – my parents. They recommended the Egmore Museum. And that’s where I stumbled upon something super fascinating – a display showcasing the evolution of the Tamil scripts from 3rd century BC to modern times.
The rapid evolution of the Tamil script
What really caught my eye was the realization that the Tamil script only began to resemble its modern form around the 15th century. Think about that for a moment – a person today who can fluently read Tamil will be completely unable to decipher their own language’s script from just 600 years ago! And this is for a language whose script has been dated back 2500 years and the language itself to roughly 5000 years!
The Tamil script
So this brought me to the question – what is the age or lifespan of a script? I saw a bunch of scripts in the museum that day and none of them exist or even resemble any modern day Indian language – and these were all from the years 800-1500 CE. Let’s try to go a bit deeper.
A global perspective on the evolution of scripts
To understand the lifespan and evolution of scripts, I decided to pick a few popular languages and scripts from modern times and dig deeper into their stories.
English
The Latin alphabet forms the foundation of the modern English script. It originated in Ancient Rome which was itself derived from the Greek alphabet. Some other interesting facts:
One of the most frustrating things for me while applying for the US tourist visa was how little information was available online. There were multiple versions being posted on Reddit threads (often contradicting each other) and the official websites were very ambiguous in their statements. Also, the portal itself had changed recently and most of the content online was relevant for the old portal. So, I’ve decided to pen down my detailed experience of applying for a B2 tourist visa – essentially my personal guide to the US tourist visa process for myself and my 3 year-old son.
The process started in Jan 2024 (remember this for later). I applied for the US Tourist Visa by filling up the DS-160 form and selecting the earliest available appointment date in Chennai – Jan 2025. I was one of the lucky ones – I got back-to-back dates for the biometric and visa interview – both at the same location. There are people who get dates 1 week apart in the same location or even back-to-back dates in different cities. Phew!
Let’s start with the core question of this article – “When was the last time you explored your own city as if you were a tourist?”
This is one thing I’ve noticed very often (and also find funny) – many of us rarely explore our own city like we would a vacation destination. I’ve been a culprit of this as well – I had never been on a houseboat despite being from Alappuzha. My first time exploring the town was with college friends – I was the “local” guiding them!
Same story in Mumbai where I lived for 5 years. The only Mumbai I knew was my home in Chembur, my school in Mankhurd and the few places we used to visit frequently like temples, markets and restaurants. Now I’m looking forward to a Mumbai visit to explore it as a tourist!
To avoid such a thing happening in my current home – Bangalore, we make it a point to explore the city “like a tourist” whenever we get the chance.
AI is supposedly taking over every aspect of life. There are custom GPT-assistants for every task imaginable. One of the popular use-cases is building a travel itinerary with AI Trip Planners. I decided to put it to a test for my recent trip to Hong Kong!
I’ve talked about this before in my blog – a well-planned itinerary can make a world of difference to your trip. My definition of well-planned? I’m referring to the hidden gems, the best of local cuisine and truly cultural experiences. It doesn’t mean I exclude the overly touristy places – there is a good mix of both.
With AI trip planners like ChatGPT and Perplexity, it is super easy to create an itinerary. In fact, it is as simple as typing, “Give me a 4 day itinerary for Hong Kong and Macau and include all the hidden gems and authentic experiences”. Or you could just copy-paste the last sentence and replace the destinations. You can sit back and let AI generate detailed day-wise plans for you. While this can be a good skeleton of an itinerary, it falls short. And I mean, VERY SHORT of what I would call an ideal itinerary. All right then, let’s get into the details!
I love how Perplexity shows the sources just above the answer
What AI trip planners do well
I like to start with the positives. And there are definitely a couple of those.
You need to keep running to stay ahead in the race!!
There’s no time to waste, every second is precious!!!
“I take a (slow) tea break and think about where I am in life. And suddenly, I realise that it has been almost a year in the new job and the calendar is about to turn once again. What am I doing with my life?” How many times have you had this feeling? For me, this question eventually led to taking a career sabbatical – a decision that changed my perspective completely.
Modern city life is fast. So fast at times, that we don’t notice life passing by. That’s the nature of capitalism. That’s how corporates work. Tasks are laid out from morning till night. We keep jumping the hoops, ticking off each task and then go to bed. Next morning, the cycle repeats. There is hardly any time to think about these tasks. Because if you do, you will miss out on a bunch of them and end up feeling inadequate.
A city that speeds up life
This is more so in a city like Mumbai. It never sleeps! I’ve had the opportunity to work in Mumbai for a couple of months. I remember dreading it when I got the assignment. The Mumbai hustle was not something I enjoyed or wanted to be a part of. But within a matter of hours, I was swallowed by the machine. I was no longer an individual – I was a small ball rolling around a complex apparatus – moving from a tightly packed bus to an overloaded shared auto, till I reached my destination. Work was tough and kept the brain occupied the entire day. I never felt the stress that I anticipated and kept going with the flow. Life was easy – there wasn’t a lot to think – just keep doing.
In what felt like a week, I completed those months and was on my flight back to Bangalore! It was a numbing feeling – as if time had fast-forwarded without me realising it.
A “chill” city
I was glad to be back in Bangalore – a city I always wanted to live in. The Bangalore of 2013-14 was the ideal city in my books – it had good weather, was well connected, had ample opportunities, good areas to live in and plenty of good food. The people were nice and the city itself had a “chill” vibe. I remember days when I would go on a walk on the by lanes of MG Road during my lunch break and it would feel so nice and calming!
Fast forward to 2024, Bangalore has been reduced to a shadow of the city that I knew from 10 years ago. Apparently, I was not the only one who noticed all the above qualities of this city (duh!). While its “live-ability” has reduced significantly (I’ve been privileged to not bear the brunt of it to a large extent), some of the above qualities remain. And the important one for me is the “chill” vibe.
I’m grateful to have been around people who have reinforced in me the need to slow down, learn and improve as a human, spend time with loved ones and “experience” life. Thanks to this, I haven’t really been sucked into the corporate “rat race” entirely. Drawing the lines, taking time off, and having a life outside of work – I’ve been lucky to prioritize these decently well over the years.
Entering a new phase of life
A defining moment for me was when my son was born. I was very clear on the kind of father and husband I wanted to be – that meant I had to re-engineer my day to make a lot more time. My job at the time was designed for bachelors (to some extent married folks without kids) – the base assumption was to dedicate life to work. Realization dawned on me that the definition of “work-life balance” had to change further. The perfectly balanced DINK (double-income-no-kids) lifestyle had to change and I needed to break the cycle. NOW!
The idea of taking a career sabbatical started forming when my son was 5 months old. I wanted to spend more time with him and the family. Even though work was entirely remote due to Covid, the days and nights, weekdays and weekends were packed with work – especially because of the festive season. I had seen a close friend opting for the sabbatical policy and opened my mind to it.
Taking a Career Sabbatical – The Decision
I felt that it was the right time for me to exercise the same. Kudos to my company for having a sabbatical policy in the first place. I am super grateful that my circumstances and privilege allowed me to take this pause!
So, I completed the festive period and as soon as we entered the lean months, I informed my manager about my decision. It was planned as a 4 month break. I thought I’d quickly get used to it – after all, I had a good work-life balance, no? Apparently, no!
Struggling to slow down
It was like taking an addict off drugs. It took me close to 2 months to accept that it was ok to spend a day without working all day. I used to panic because I didn’t have meetings to attend, no deadlines to meet. To compensate, I stuffed my day with a ton of things to do – just to make myself feel that I’m not wasting time. Thankfully, most of these things were with Parth – like his morning routine, daily baths, evening walks and night-time reading. No regrets – this was the primary reason for taking the break anyway.
I eased into the new routine along with my baby boy. Ultimately, it reached a point where I stopped noticing whether it was a weekday or a weekend. I felt completely present in the moment – not worrying about deadlines or chasing targets. It felt amazing. Why couldn’t it always be like this?
Realizations and outcomes
That’s when I realised what people mean when they say – when you’re doing your dream job, you never need to worry about retiring. Every day is the ideal day. You don’t need to put it off till retirement. What used to seem utopian suddenly seemed achievable. How? I still didn’t know – I would end up in a corporate soon enough. But I knew I could switch my brain to be more present when needed. The break had opened me up to new possibilities and impacted me way more than I anticipated.
Looking back, taking a career sabbatical was one of the best decisions I made. The break was really productive in many aspects – I figured our family finances, re-balanced investment portfolios, bought insurance (yes!), started using my calendar more productively, read a bunch of books, figured out my career anchors and also made a note on the identity and habits I wanted to create for myself. Now that I look back after almost 3 years, I can see the various tracks that were set in motion in those months. In fact, it has also helped me redesign my current work-life in a way that I’m not sacrificing one for the other (will keep this for another time).
I don’t think I could have achieved even half of this while working full-time on a demanding job. Things actually Moved Faster by Slowing Down!
Finding your balance
Here’s another important bit. While taking a career sabbatical might not be possible for everyone, and that’s perfectly okay, the lessons I learned about slowing down have been invaluable.
Even if you do have the luxury to slow down, it is important to recognize when to hustle and push things harder.
At the end of the day, too much of anything is not a good thing and we all have to find our own paths to balance!
I’ll end this post with something that my first manager told me when I told him about my panic after taking the sabbatical decision. He said –
“In life, always keep upgrading yourself to become a Ferrari. When you get there, you don’t need to feel compelled to drive at 200 kmph ALL THE TIME! You can slow down, enjoy life, experience it and speed up later when you need to. Just don’t forget that you’re still a Ferrari. The choice is in your hands.“
Check out some other non-travel blogs about life, habits and more here.
We’ve reached a milestone on this blog. What you are reading right now is blog #100!
The journey has been long and challenging. I never started writing to get to this number, but here we are anyway. I’ve written earlier in detail about the route this blog has taken. There are two parts, so I suggest you read them after this blog – I’ll link them down at the end as well.
To summarize, it started off as a place to capture memories from college, then I started writing about college trips and enjoyed that more. After college, it became a place to capture thought trails during my travels. Then it became a “proper travel blog” with full itineraries and immersive travel blogs – aimed at making you feel as if you’re travelling with us. I also started exploring other areas of my life in my blogs – so ultimately, this website has become a Pensieve of the memories that I would love to access later in life.
Dumbledore’s memory repository
The big question which keeps popping up is – what next? To put it in the words of my 2-year old son, “Where we are going now?” – a question he came up with when we were travelling to attend multiple wedding functions across Karnataka and Kerala in a span of 2 weeks.
One thing is certain – the travel blogs will continue to come in. I absolutely love recounting the entire trip in detail and believe that it captures the emotions way better than photos. I know that most people don’t prefer to read in so much detail, but this is something I will continue to do for myself and my family. Up next is a series about my very first trip to Europe where we will cover some popular destinations.
A visit to the home of Ferrari in Maranello, Italy is coming soon
Another thing I’ve been working on is to make the website’s flow better and more discoverable. Staying true to my last blog on upskilling as a way to achieve frugality, I’ve learnt a bunch of SEO (Search Engine Optimization = techniques to make your website appear on Google Search) and optimized all 99 other pages for keywords, title, meta description, alt text for images and all that jazz. It seems to be working as the organic search traffic to this site has almost doubled in the last month and continues to go strong. The Kazakhstan series is getting the most number of hits followed by Uzbekistan and then Austria. I’ll keep experimenting to make the overall website better and better.
There are two other topics that I’m really passionate about which I will delve into at some point in future.
One is my parenting journey as a working dad. I’ve struggled to find enough material about this as most “parenting” websites are written from a mother’s POV. I did manage to find a couple of books based on which I’ve implemented things over the last 3 years. I’d love to create a repository of my learnings. Hopefully, it becomes a bunch of content that gives dads more confidence in their parenting journey. It would be fun for my son to read them (I hope) when he is a grown-up!
The second one is balanced leadership. There’s a lot of stuff out there talking about leadership but it is mostly from a POV of climbing the corporate ladder. My take on leadership is that it is a mindset that reflects across all aspects of life – you don’t always need to be the person rallying from the front. The focus would be on how to strike a balance and grow in all aspects of life. I have been doing annual goal-setting and reviews for every part of my life for the last 4 years – I will be sharing my learnings from there as well.
I have no idea how all of this will fit seamlessly into this website. I guess I’ll figure that out on the go – I have a couple of ideas in mind which I will experiment with.
That’s about it. This blog was mainly to break out of the mental block – “oh no, what do I write for the 100th one? Aaaargh!”. I’m super grateful for each and every one of you who has been there on this journey with me – reading, commenting and supporting at every step. Thank you!
Many organizations talk about “frugality” as one of their core values. It is one of Amazon’s famous leadership principles. It is a handy value to have – not just in corporate but also in life. It might come easy (not generalising here) to a person with a typical Indian middle class “mindset” (note that I don’t say middle class “background” because people’s mindset is not the same as the background they come from).
Recently, there were a few discussions at my office around this term which got me thinking – what really is frugality? How does one go about being “frugal” in a corporate setting?
There is one aspect of frugality that is not spoken about much. That’s what I’ll address in this blog and I’ll bank on my learnings over the last 10 years in corporate life.
When we travel, our brains are subjected to new stimuli of all kinds. This could potentially put us into learning mode – once you get into that mode, the brain absorbs stuff like a sponge. It works out differently for different people – some people remember routes even though they’ve gone to a place only once, some remember things they saw in vivid detail, some remember smells and some remember sounds. It is instant teleportation.
For example, an Indian travelling to Europe for the first time has many things to be astonished about – the cleanliness, lane discipline on the roads, the weather (sorry Bangalore folks, I don’t think we can boast about it anymore), to quote a few.
Going by the above definition, it is clear that any new experience can trigger this sort of plasticity in the brain. Which explains why some sights, sounds and smells can take us back to the place where we first experienced them – travelling through time and space. In this blog, I’ll take you on a journey through a few songs which take me back to some places.
In April 2020, the world had been shut down. This statement might sound weirdly apocalyptic to someone who hasn’t experienced those 2 years but thankfully, we made it through. Those years helped a lot of people take a pause from their super busy lives and explore hobbies and interests. I discovered pockets of time where I could do more brain work. For example, cooking – I had to be physically present but my brain wanted to do more. That’s when I discovered the world of podcasts and became a podcast learner.
One of the first things I picked up on podcast was learning more about the history of Ancient Egypt. After our visit to Egypt in 2019 (which I have covered in detail in earlier blogs), I was fascinated by the level of planning and attention-to-detail that ancient Egyptians had – creating things that survived for more than 3000 years. I went on the Google Podcast app and started listening to the History of Egypt podcast. I loved the story telling and how the episodes were structured and got hooked.
It had become a daily routine – wake up, finish off the morning hygiene routine and get into the kitchen to prepare the meals for the day (yup, this was a daily activity during Covid and something I miss now). In the kitchen, on the window sill, I would prop up my phone and switch on to the next episode of the podcast.
Food is a huge part of the overall travel experience. Every place in the world has its signature dishes – food that is made better there than anywhere else. Whether it is the falafel of Amman or the kulcha of Amritsar or the vada pav of Mumbai or the croissant of Paris – once you’ve eaten them in their home ground, everywhere else seems inferior. Then there are foods that are adopted by different people who give their own twists to them. Today, we talk about one such food.
I woke up this Sunday with a craving. Sadly, we didn’t have the raw material to make it at home. And we couldn’t go out as other plans were already made. Basically, this blog is not a story of how I went about successfully fulfilling my craving. In fact, I take you through most of the versions I’ve encountered and how I loved (almost) all of them! This is one thing I could eat every meal of the day, most days of the week. Yes, I’m talking about the DOSA!
Dosa is a dish that instantly connects me to my childhood. My mother used to make the best dosas in the world – crispy but not lethal (yes, some dosas can be lethal – we’ll come to that), with the perfect amount of ghee and paired with some amazing versions of the versatile coconut chutney. No matter which restaurant we went to, nothing could beat this simple yet elegant version of the dosa. Over the years, my mother has changed her style of dosas but I’ve figured out how to replicate the OG version. Now, my favourite “nostalgic version” of dosa is the one that I make <humble brag>.
