Author: Suresh Dinakaran

PSEUDO-KU™: The Puzzle Of Pretending!

 

Caveat Emptor: There is NO such term called PSEUDO-KU™. It’s a figment of my imagination. So, no pretense meant!

 

Let’s begin with a question: Name the most popular game in the world that no one admits they’re playing?

 

Clue: It’s not chess. It’s not poker. It’s not even Wordle on a weekday morning.

 

Now it can be safely told: It’s PSEUDO-KU™.

 

You know Sudoku, right? The New York Times acquired it given its huge popularity. Nine squares. Nine numbers. Every row, every column, every box must have all nine digits — no repeats, no gaps, no faking it. The grid either works or it doesn’t. Numbers don’t lie.

 

PSEUDO-KU™ is the opposite game.

 

A game where every box is filled incorrectly, but confidently.

 

Welcome to the world’s fastest-growing sport.

 

Pretending.

 

If Sudoku is a 9×9 grid of logical bliss, PSEUDO-KU™ is a 1×1 grid of your ego, filled with a number you made up.

 

You Know One. You Might Be One

Pseudo Kus don’t play games. They curate games. They don’t solve problems—they reframe them using words like “synergy,” “helicopter view,” and “circle back.” Then they post a photo of a coffee mug that says “Hustle” while napping through the 3 PM stand-up.

 

PSEUDO-KU™ Is Not Ignorance

 

Ignorance can be cured. Pseudo Ku is performative competence—the exhausting theater of appearing logical, deep, and busy while adding zero value. You’ve seen them in Zoom calls: “Great question, let me unpack that.” Unpack what? Your empty suitcase?

They use frameworks like trophies. They mistake motion for progress. They confuse having an opinion with having a clue. And worst of all—they make the rest of us doubt our own slow, boring, honest struggle with Cell R5C7.

 

The Truth Sudoku Taught Us

 

The empty cell is not your enemy. It’s your teacher. Fill it with guesswork, and you lose. Fill it with thought, and you grow. Pseudo Kus never grew. They just rebranded their confusion as strategic ambiguity.

 

The Rules Are Simple

 

You don’t have to know.

You only have to look like you know.

You don’t have to be.

You only have to appear to be.

You don’t have to build.

You only have to post about building.

And unlike Sudoku, there are no wrong answers.

Only louder ones.

Take personal life.

We’ve become Michelin-star chefs because we posted a photo of avocado toast.

Fitness experts because we bought shoes capable of running marathons.

Spiritual gurus because we uploaded a sunset with the caption: “Trust the universe.”

The universe, meanwhile, is desperately trying to figure out what exactly it is being blamed for this week.

 

PSEUDO-KU™: THE PERSONAL EDITION

 

You’ve met the Pseudo Mindful Person. Meditates for the gram. Posts sunrise photos with quotes about stillness. Loses their mind at the airport check-in queue like they’re auditioning for a regional theatre production of rage. What was that Shakespeare quote: ” All the world’s a rage..sorry stage“.

 

You’ve met the Pseudo Vulnerable Leader. “I’m going to be raw with you today,” they say — and proceed to share a curated, pre-approved, PR-reviewed, totally safe emotion. Vulnerability as strategy. Authenticity as content calendar.

 

You’ve met the Pseudo Reader. The one with the intellectual bookshelf behind them on every Zoom call. Dostoevsky. Yuval Noah Harari. A book on stoicism they bought at the airport and opened once, to the dedication page.The friend who reads book summaries on Blinkist and quotes them at dinner like a prophet. “Actually, Nassim Taleb says…”No, Karen. Nassim Taleb says stop pretending.

 

The grid looks full. But pull one number? The whole thing wobbles.

 

PSEUDO-KU™: THE PROFESSIONAL EDITION

 

The Pseudo Mentor. Gives you forty-five minutes of their calendar and fifty years of their ego. Listens only long enough to interrupt with a better story about themselves.

 

The Pseudo Collaborator. In every meeting: “I love this idea, let’s build on it together.” After every meeting: takes the idea, rebrands it, presents it upstairs. Solo. With a new slide deck.

 

The Pseudo Change Agent. Speaks fluently in disruption, innovation, and transformation. Has disrupted nothing. Transformed nothing. But the TED talk was fire.

 

In real Sudoku, the puzzle catches you. In PSEUDO-KU™, there’s no grid. So no one ever checks.

 

PSEUDO-KU™: THE BRAND EDITION

 

The Pseudo Purpose Brand. Launches a campaign about saving the planet. Ships everything in six layers of non-recyclable plastic. Donates to one tree in a forest they’ve never visited. Wins an award for it.

 

The Pseudo Community Brand. “You’re family to us.” Family, apparently, that gets unsubscribed the moment their data loses value. Heartwarming.

 

The Pseudo Bold Brand. Brave, rule-breaking, convention-smashing. On the outside. Inside: seventeen rounds of approval, two legal reviews, one consultant, and a color palette decided by a committee of people who’ve never spoken to an actual customer.

 

The brand grid looks perfect. Until you buy the product.

 

The New Kid On The Block

 

You guessed it. And there comes Artificial Intelligence.

 

The newest playground for Pseudo-Ku Olympians.

 

Yesterday they couldn’t attach a PDF.

 

Today they’re AI visionaries.

 

By next week they’ll be discussing machine consciousness over quinoa salad.

 

Every conference has one.

 

A person who says “agentic ecosystems” fourteen times in six minutes.

 

Nobody understands him.

 

Yet everyone nods.

 

Because nobody wants to be the first person to ask:

 

“What on earth are you talking about?”

 

Which brings us to the greatest irony.

 

PSEUDO-KU™ exists because authenticity has become terrifyingly rare.

 

We are so busy curating our lives that we’ve forgotten to live them.

 

So busy broadcasting intelligence that we’ve forgotten curiosity.

 

So busy projecting expertise that we’ve forgotten learning.

 

The truly impressive people I’ve met have a fascinating habit. They say:

 

“I don’t know.”

 

Those three words have become rarer than affordable housing and sensible WhatsApp groups.

 

Can We Get Real?

 

Real confidence isn’t knowing everything.

 

It’s not needing to.

 

Real leadership isn’t pretending certainty.

 

It’s embracing discovery.

 

Real branding isn’t shouting louder.

 

It’s resonating deeper.

 

Real life isn’t performance.

 

It’s participation.

 

Maybe the antidote to Pseudo-Ku isn’t becoming smarter.

 

Maybe it’s becoming more honest.

 

Imagine a world where people admitted confusion.

 

Brands admitted mistakes.

 

Leaders admitted blind spots.

 

Experts admitted limitations.

 

LinkedIn admitted exaggeration.

 

Okay, perhaps let’s not get carried away.

 

Until then, the great game continues.

 

PSEUDO-KU™.

 

Where everyone fills every box.

 

Nobody checks the answers.

 

And somehow everybody declares victory.

 

Game on.

 

If this blog post appeals to you and you would like to engage with me, I will be happy to receive your thoughts on suresh@groupisd.com

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

Your Brand Isn’t Hated By Accident. It’s Hated By Betrayal

 

Brand hate doesn’t go viral. It goes nuclear. And by the time you see the mushroom cloud, your NPS score is just a eulogy.

 

The scariest thing about modern branding?

 

Customers no longer whisper disappointment. They livestream it.

 

Welcome to the era where brands are no longer judged by what they say. They are sentenced by what people feel.

 

And feelings are wonderfully irrational creatures. They remember. They exaggerate. They screenshot.

 

Which is why “State Of The Heart Branding” is no longer poetic philosophy. It is business survival.

 

Exactly what the latest edition of SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is articulating.

 

Brand Love Is An Asset. Brand Hate Is A Wildfire

 

What we have been measuring has been wrong. NPS tells you if someone would recommend you. It says nothing about whether your brand makes them feel anything at all. And in a world where emotion drives every purchase, every post, every rant — that gap is costing you more than your last bad quarter.

 

Strong emotional positioning is a double-edged sword that cuts beautifully or catastrophically. Patagonia told people not to buy their jacket — and built a cult. Gillette tried to redefine masculinity — and split their audience clean down the middle. Fabindia stayed rooted in cultural continuity — and earned trust that no campaign budget could buy. Zomato cracked jokes on the internet — and built a brand personality millions actually look forward to.

 

Same lever. Wildly different outcomes. The difference? Alignment.

 

Most brands are busy measuring Net Promoter Scores while completely ignoring Net Emotional Fallout.

 

Consumers today do not merely buy products. They buy alignment.They buy emotional resonance.They buy moral consistency. And increasingly, they buy brands that feel less like corporations and more like emotionally dependable humans.

 

“What’s one promise your brand makes that your customer service team doesn’t know about?”

 

The UFP Decode is ruthless: Weak positioning disappears. Misaligned positioning combusts.

 

The future belongs to brands whose operations, leadership, culture, customer experience and communication sing from the same emotional hymn sheet.

 

So before your next brand campaign goes live, ask yourself the question most meeting rooms overlook answering: Where is our brand overpromising emotionally?

 

Purpose isn’t a campaign. It’s a contract. Break it, and brand hate won’t just find you—it’ll franchise you.

 

Emotional equity compounds. So does emotional debt.

 

The clock is ticking. Which one are you building? What is your SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story  ?

If this blog post appeals to you and you would like to engage with me, I will be happy to receive your thoughts on suresh@groupisd.com

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

 

Spit Happens; And How!

 

From The Mouth Of The Nation: The Great Indian Expectoration

 

There is one thing — and I say this with the full weight of empirical field research conducted over several years of ducking, swerving, and occasionally not swerving fast enough — that absolutely, unconditionally, magnificently unites this country. Not cricket. Not cinema. Not Pakistan. It is, my friends, the glorious, glistening, gravity-defying art of THE SPIT.

 

Oral Tradition, Taken Literally

 

India does not have a caste system when it comes to spitting. It has a classless system. CEOs in BMWs, uncles on bicycles, aunties in salwar kameezes, priests exiting temples, politicians exiting rallies, software engineers exiting Ubers — all contributors. Equal opportunity. No reservations required. Age? Irrelevant. Gender? Abolished at the lip. Religion? Every faith practises it with devotional sincerity. The toddler in the pram is already in training. The 90-year-old grandfather is still at the top of his game. This is the one Olympics where India has been winning gold since before the British arrived.

 

The Science Of The Spit

 

It more complex than ISRO’s trajectory calculations, I assure you. The velocity is a direct function of what has been consumed. Plain saliva? A gentle, apologetic drizzle. Fresh pan masala, two minutes in? A confident medium-range projectile. Zarda, fully marinated, held for strategic duration? We are now talking ballistic. The thickness — oh, the thickness — achieves a viscosity that NASA materials scientists would pay to study. It defies classification. It defies gravity. Occasionally it defies the person who launched it, when the wind, that treacherous accomplice, decides to change sides.

 

The Great Indian Aerosol Export Industry

 

Forget caste. Forget creed. Forget income brackets. When it comes to public spitting, we are one glorious, synchronized civilization performing a mucus-led flash mob across the republic.

 

The billionaire in a luxury SUV.

The uncle on a scooter carrying three children, two gas cylinders and unresolved anger.

The gym bro with protein shake confidence.

The paan philosopher outside the tea shop.

The corporate executive who says “circle back” twelve times a day but cannot locate a dustbin within a three-kilometre radius.

 

Spitting Is The True Secular Activity Of The Subcontinent

 

No discrimination. No exclusion. No RSVP required.

 

And the styles. Sweet mother of projectile geometry.

 

Some spit like they are launching a weather satellite.

 

Some spit with the emotional turbulence of a failed relationship.

 

Some do a gentle “tchh” like they’re rejecting a bad IPO.

 

Others sound like they are rebooting a tractor engine from 1974.

 

Then Comes The Texture Department

 

Thin consistency. Thick consistency. Foam-based experimental formats.

Limited edition tobacco slurry.

Vintage paan residue with notes of regret and cardamom.

 

Each spit tells a story.

 

A biography in liquid form.

 

You can almost reverse engineer breakfast from the splatter pattern.

 

“Hmm. Strong gutka notes. Trace elements of masala dosa. Possibly one cutting chai. Fascinating viscosity.”

 

NASA studies asteroid debris.
We study staircase corners.

 

And what strategic decision-making!

 

Indoors Or Outdoors? Take Your Spit!

 

Indoors, the creativity truly blossoms. Staircases are galleries. Lift walls are canvases. The corner of a landing between the second and third floor of any government office building has witnessed more human expression than most art museums. Bathrooms, of course, are the sanctum sanctorum — though the mystery remains eternal about why someone standing six inches from a pot decides the wall is a better target. Ambition, perhaps. Vision beyond the visible.

 

Outdoors, the moving vehicle spit deserves a thesis. The train-window spit, executed at 80 kmph, achieves a horizontal spread that meteorologists would describe as “significant precipitation event.” The bike spit — left side, without mirror-check, at a traffic light — has ruined more white shirts than every dhobi in the country combined. The car spit, practiced with the window barely cracked, suggests a man who wants to spit but also maintain air conditioning. He wants it all. He gets it all.

 

Footpaths near restaurants, schools and temple entrances are, of course, premium real estate. There is something profoundly philosophical about spitting at the entrance of a place of worship. It suggests a man who is leaving his burdens behind. Spiritually unburdened. Orally evacuated. Ready to face God and the world with an empty mouth and a clear conscience.

 

And mind you, this is a ‘pan‘ India phenomenon.

 

And Then…PHOOOOOOOTTT

 

The saliva exits at Mach 3 while innocent commuters on Platform 2 reassess life choices.

 

Bike spitters are particularly ambitious.

 

At 60 kmph they rotate their neck exactly 17 degrees, calculate wind velocity, traffic density and karmic indifference before ejecting what appears to be a sponsored content partnership between paan and lung capacity.

 

But the undisputed grandmasters?

 

Car spitters.

 

Especially luxury car spitters.

 

There is something deeply poetic about a man emerging from a vehicle costing more than a small island only to spit like he’s marking territory for future archaeological excavation.

 

And then there are the anti-wind spitters.

 

These are the scientists.These are risk-takers. These are people who believe physics is merely feedback.

 

Spitting against the wind is not an act. It is a lifestyle philosophy.

 

Nature has a sense of humour. And excellent aim.

 

Occasionally the spit returns home. Like a subah ka bhoola hua.

 

Landing magnificently on their own windshield. Or on the windshield of the Innova Crysta behind that has been trying to keep safe distance( read 6 cms).

 

The Distance Game Is Another Matter Entirely

 

Every spitter secretly believes they are competing in the Commonwealth Games.

 

Some aim for two feet. Low on ambition, I dare add.
Some believe they can cross state borders. That’s my boy!

 

You can almost hear internal commentary.

 

“Ladies and gentlemen, representing Sector 4 Bus Depot, weighing 84 kilos and carrying years of nicotine experience… Rajuuu ‘The Spraymaster’ Yadav!” Move over Gun Master G9.

 

Release angle: 43 degrees.
Trajectory: alarming.
Public hygiene impact: catastrophic.

 

Acknowledging The Raw Material

 

It will be remiss of me not to bring in all the state actors involved. All of them must be acknowledged with due reverence. Pan Parag, Rajnigandha( endorsed by Hrithik Roshan), Vimal( endorsed by half of Bollywood) , Goa 1000, Manikchand, Director( Rohit Shetty offering a helicopter view to the brand), Kamla Pasand ( Big B, Sunil Gavaskar, Ranbir Singh and the list goes on), Rajshree (Salman Khan) — these are not brands. These are patrons of the arts. Without their generous sponsorship, the pavements of this nation would be tragically beige. Thanks to them, our public infrastructure has developed a rich, impressionistic colour palette that no government beautification scheme has ever come close to matching. The WHO can keep its reports. MOMA(Museum Of Modern Art), Louvre Museum watch out. We have murals. At every nook and corner.

 

Without them, half the walls in India would regain their original colour.

 

Entire economies are built around generating raw material for public expectoration.

 

Marketing teams somewhere are probably brainstorming:

 

“How do we create longer-lasting flavour with greater spit retention and improved launch capability?”

 

Tagline possibilities:

 

“Now with Extra Splash Technology.”
“Leaves a Mark. Literally.”
“For those who believe walls deserve personality.”

 

Meanwhile every public wall in India has already become a customer testimonial.

 

But Beneath The Laughter Lies The True Marvel

 

The confidence.

 

The absolute, unshakeable belief that the world is one giant biodegradable spittoon.

 

No hesitation.
No shame.
No warning label.

 

Just a primal conviction that gravity and public spaces are here to collaborate.

 

Which brings us to the biggest question.

 

What exactly happens inside the human brain seconds before spitting?

 

Is there a committee meeting?

 

Does the saliva submit a resignation letter?

 

Is the mouth saying:

 

“Team, we’ve had a fantastic quarter together. Unfortunately due to restructuring, some liquids will be transitioning externally.”

 

These are spit second decisions.

 

Tiny moments between impulse and impact.

 

Civilization hanging by a thread of mucus.

 

And somewhere, every freshly painted wall is whispering softly:

 

“Brother…not again.” There you go: I exercised my License To Spill.

 

If this blog post appeals to you and you would like to engage with me, I will be happy to receive your thoughts on suresh@groupisd.com

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

The rearview mirror is beautiful. It’s also the wrong direction

 

Yesterday Is A Drug. And You Are Probably Hooked.

 

Statutory Warning: This is a blog post that might make you nostalgic about the time before you read it.

 

We all know that smell? Old books. Rain on hot asphalt. Grandmother’s kitchen at 6am. Your first Nokia ringtone.

 

That smell is called Yesterday. And most of us humanity has been snorting it like there’s no tomorrow.

 

Take out the cobwebs. Nostalgia is beautiful. Nostalgia is warm. Alas, Nostalgia is also quietly killing your future.

 

The Comfort Trap Has a Velvet Lining

 

Blockbuster Video had 9,000 stores and 60,000 employees in 2004. They had a chance to buy Netflix for $50 million. They laughed. They went back to their popcorn, their late-fee revenues, their cozy yesterdays.

 

We know how that movie ended.

 

Closer home, Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975. Then buried it. Because film was familiar. Film was theirs. Film was home. By 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy — killed by the very child it abandoned at the doorstep.

 

This is not a business story. This is a human story. About the seduction of what-was over what-could-be.

 

We are all, in some magnificent and tragic way, Blockbuster. We are all Kodak.

 

Then the Floor Moved

 

Alvin Toffler called it Future Shock — the psychological state of “too much change in too short a time.” He wrote about it in 1970. He had no idea how prophetic and gentle that warning would turn out to be.

 

Because what’s happening now isn’t change. It’s rupture.

 

Future Shock Doesn’t Send Meeting Invites

The future doesn’t negotiate. It interrupts.

 

AI doesn’t ask permission.
Consumer behavior doesn’t file an application.
Cultural shifts don’t wait for your quarterly review.

 

One day you’re basking in legacy.
Next day you’re explaining relevance.

 

Ask taxi unions who laughed at ride-sharing apps.
Ask legacy media that scoffed at creators shooting on phones.

 

The future isn’t coming. It’s already bored of waiting.

 

Snapshots from the Edge

 

In Japan, fax machines still hum in government offices. Efficiency bows to familiarity.

 

In Silicon Valley, teenagers are building AI startups before they’re legally allowed to rent cars.

 

In India, we worship heritage brands…while ordering everything on apps that didn’t exist five years ago.

 

We are a paradox generation: Emotionally rooted in the past. Behaviorally sprinting into the future.

 

And brands? Caught in between. Like a dancer who forgot the next step.

 

The Real Cost of Nostalgia

 

Nostalgia is not harmless. It’s expensive.

 

It delays decisions.
It dulls urgency.
It creates a false sense of permanence.

 

The market doesn’t care how iconic you were.
It only cares how relevant you are.

 

Yesterday is a reference point. Not a residence.

 

Rewriting the Script: From Memory to Momentum

 

The smartest brands don’t abandon nostalgia. They leverage it.

 

They take emotion from the past and plug it into the future.

 

Think of how some legacy brands are reimagining themselves for digital-native audiences. Same soul, new syntax.

 

The playbook is deceptively simple:

  • Archive, don’t anchor. Respect your past without living in it.
  • Prototype faster than you reminisce. Build, test, fail, repeat.
  • Listen to the edges. The future whispers before it roars.
  • Make discomfort your KPI. If it feels too easy, you’re probably late.

 

Because the goal isn’t to choose between nostalgia and the future. It’s to translate one into the other.

 

Food For Torque?

 

Rewind is not a strategy.

 

Nostalgia is beautiful. Until it becomes your business model.

 

You don’t lose to competition. You lose to comfort.

 

Legacy without reinvention is just a well-documented decline.

 

The future didn’t disrupt you. Your nostalgia did.

 

The past is a great storyteller. The future is a ruthless editor.

 

Memory is a museum. Business is a battlefield.

 

Nostalgia isn’t evil. It’s just a terrible strategist.

 

Somewhere between a sepia-toned yesterday and a pixelated tomorrow lies a choice

 

You can either curate memories.

 

Or create relevance.

 

The future is already typing…
Are you still reminiscing?

 

Here’s the wake-up call:  You don’t have to kill the past. You just stop letting it babysit your future.

 

Memory is a museum. Not a maternity ward. Visit it. But, please don’t give birth there.

 

So What Do You Actually Do?

 

You don’t abandon the past. You audit it. Ask what still works, what’s costume, what’s wisdom versus what’s just weight.

 

You schedule deliberate discomfort. One new tool. One uncomfortable conversation. One idea from a world completely unlike yours — every single week.

 

You stop mistaking familiarity for safety. The most dangerous place you can be today is somewhere that feels safe because it looks like yesterday.

 

And you build — consciously, stubbornly, daily — a relationship with uncertainty. Not because it’s fun. Because it’s the only currency that will be worth anything tomorrow.

 

If this blog post appeals to you and you would like to engage with me, I will be happy to receive your thoughts on suresh@groupisd.com

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

 

Options are passive nouns. Choices are active verbs…What are you choosing?

 

Peter Drucker’s Scalpel

 

Peter Drucker, the man who taught giants how to manage, once sliced through this fog: “Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”

 

Probably not a clever analysis. Not a spreadsheet with twelve scenarios. A courageous decision. Drucker knew that options are passive nouns. Choices are active verbs. One lives in your inbox. The other lives in your calendar.

 

Options Are What You Have. A Choice Is What You Do

 

Let’s take a look at the typical Indian wedding buffet that explains life better than philosophy ever can.

 

Forty-eight dishes. Six desserts. Three kinds of rotis. A live pasta counter nobody asked for.

 

And there you are…eating plain curd rice.

 

Because options impress people.
Choices reveal them.

 

We live in the golden age of options.
Unlimited streaming. Infinite swipes. Careers with titles nobody can explain to their parents. Keto, paleo, vegan, intermittent fasting and emotionally unavailable diets.

 

Never in human history have people had so many ways to live.
And never in human history have so many people felt so paralysed.

 

Options are external. Choice is internal

 

And those are not the same thing.

 

Most people worship optionality because it postpones accountability.
As long as all doors remain open, failure remains theoretical.

 

The entrepreneur who keeps “exploring ideas” for six years.

The executive who attends leadership workshops but avoids difficult conversations.

The person who says, “I’m figuring things out,” long after Google Maps would’ve lost patience.

 

Choice is terrifying because it amputates alternatives.

 

The moment you choose one path, you grieve the others. That’s why people romanticise “keeping options open.” It sounds strategic. Often, it’s just fear wearing a facade.

 

Look at real life

 

Steve Jobs didn’t create magic because Apple had options. Every company had options. He chose brutal simplicity when everyone else chose clutter.

 

Sachin Tendulkar had thousands of shots available to him.
Greatness came from choosing the right one in 0.4 seconds.

 

A marriage survives not because two people have options, but because every ordinary day contains a quiet choice:

“I will stay kind even when irritated.”
“I will listen instead of reload my argument.”

 

Character is nothing but accumulated choices under pressure.

 

Potential Has Become The World’s Most Over-Celebrated Unfinished Product

 

Many of us today confuse access with agency.

 

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you’ve chosen anything meaningful.

 

You can join five courses, download productivity apps, save motivational reels and buy fluorescent water bottles with time markings.

 

But until behaviour changes, life doesn’t.

 

The gym membership is an option.
The 6 AM alarm is a choice.

 

Networking is an option.
Calling someone when you need help — with humility — is a choice.

 

Love is an option.
Commitment is a choice.

 

Everyone wants transformation.
Very few want elimination.

 

Because choice demands sacrifice.
And sacrifice has terrible PR.

 

But here’s the paradox: Freedom actually expands after choice.

 

The writer who chooses a voice becomes powerful.
The company that chooses a focus becomes memorable.
The human being who chooses values becomes impossible to manipulate.

 

Indecision masquerades as sophistication.
Clarity often looks boring…until results arrive.

 

So Perhaps The Question Isn’t:

 

“What options do I have?”

 

Maybe the real question is:

 

“What am I finally willing to choose?”

 

Because life rarely rewards the most informed person.
It rewards the person who eventually stops circling the airport and lands the plane.

 

Options decorate your life.
Choices define it.

 

And in the end, destiny is not built by the opportunities you considered.

 

It is built by the decisions you survived.

 

Options Are What You Have. A Choice Is What You Do

 

Nelson Mandela sat in a prison cell on Robben Island for 27 years. The option of bitterness? Available. Rich. Abundantly stocked. What he chose — with that same set of options — was to walk out and lead a nation. Same raw material. Radically different choice.

 

“We know where most of the roads go. We just don’t want to drive them.“ — Peter Drucker, on the crisis of not choosing.

 

Here’s what we do, and we do it beautifully, with tremendous self-deception: we confuse having options with being in motion. We list them, we discuss them, we PowerPoint them into professional-looking slides, and then we call that progress. It isn’t. It’s a very well-designed waiting room.

 

The options were always there. What was missing was the one thing nobody can give you, coach you toward, or put in your KPIs: the moment of choosing.

 

Options are the raw material of life. Choices are what you build with them. The tragedy isn’t running out of options. The tragedy is standing in the middle of a well-stocked workshop and never once picking up a tool.

 

So. What are you choosing today?

 

If this post appealed to you in any way, and should yu feel the need to reach out to me, you can drop me a mail at suresh@groupisd.com

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

Your comfort zone is a museum. Don’t die on display

 

When ISRO attempted the Chandrayaan missions, there were failures, public scrutiny and enough armchair experts to fill the MCG. Yet India reached the moon not because it eliminated uncertainty, but because it learned to dance with it.

 

When Airbnb started, people laughed at the idea of strangers sleeping in strangers’ homes. Today, people casually hand over apartment keys to someone named “DragonSoul72” without blinking.

 

Allow me crack this open: Every single thing that changed your life for the better—the job you didn’t see coming, the love you tripped into, the idea that made you sweat—started with three ugly words: “I don’t know.”

 

But no. We worship maps. We beg for GPS in our souls. We’d rather have a wrong answer than sit in the beautiful, humbling fog of maybe.

 

Welcome To The Modern Epidemic: The Addiction To Certainty

 

We worship forecasts. We kneel before dashboards. We carry “strategic roadmaps” like medieval villagers carried holy water. Yet the reality is this: every breakthrough worth remembering was born in a room full of people who had absolutely no idea how things would turn out.

 

Uncertainty is not the enemy of possibility.
It is the entry ticket.

 

Ask any founder who has survived long enough to become a LinkedIn philosopher.

 

Even Steve Jobs — the patron saint of black turtlenecks and impossible standards — once said you cannot connect the dots looking forward. Translation? The future arrives as scattered chaos before it becomes a seminal book (or a TED Talk).

 

Uncertainty isn’t The Fog. It’s The Runway

 

The world belongs to people willing to make imperfect moves in imperfect conditions.

 

Look around.

 

The creator economy exploded because thousands of people posted before they felt “ready.”

 

Startups disrupted giants because they moved before certainty arrived.

 

Entire careers pivoted because someone accidentally attended one meeting, replied to one message or said yes to one opportunity that made no logical sense at the time.

 

Life’s biggest doors rarely open with a (Death By PowerPoint) presentation.

 

They usually creak open through confusion.

 

And Yet…

 

Schools still reward the right answer over the brave question. Companies still promote predictability over imagination. Families still ask children, “What’s the plan?” as though life were a Swiss train timetable.

 

Truth be told: it’s not.

 

The people changing the world are often gloriously uncertain. But they possess one unfair advantage: they move anyway.

 

That’s where the magic happens.

 

Not knowing forces curiosity. Curiosity creates experimentation. Experimentation produces discovery. Discovery changes industries.

 

The irony? Certainty often kills innovation faster than failure ever could.

 

Because Once People Believe They “Know,” They Stop Exploring

 

Kodak knew film. Nokia knew phones. Blockbuster knew retail.
History sent flowers. RIP.

 

IBM pivoted from hardware to services when PCs commoditized. They embraced uncertainty, cannibalized revenue streams, and survived where others clung to comfort.

 

The future, meanwhile, belonged to the restless misfits willing to admit: “We don’t fully know where this goes…but let’s find out.”

 

Think of Spotify in 2006. Napster-era survivors were busy litigating; Spotify stumbled into uncertainty and reinvented how we consume music. In India, think of Amul — a brand born from milk cooperatives that rode policy chaos, local supply shocks and a million small farmers’ unpredictability to build a national myth. The through-line is the same: when the script disappears, improvisation writes something memorable.

 

There’s a wake-up call hiding here for all of us. Because possibility has never sent engraved invitations.

 

The Certainty Trap

 

Alexander Fleming wasn’t trying to discover penicillin. He came back from vacation to find mould had contaminated his petri dishes. A “certain” scientist would have tossed the lot and started over. Fleming, instead, leaned into his confusion. Why is the bacteria dead near the mould? That question — born entirely from not knowing — saved hundreds of millions of lives.

 

The Heavyweight Truth: Uncertainty Isn’t A Void. It’s A Womb

 

When Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw started Biocon in a rented garage in Bangalore, with no funding, no pharma experience, and no “plan B”—every “expert” called her delusional. She called it possibility in pajamas. Today? A $4 billion empire.

 

Sara Blakely cut the feet off her pantyhose with zero manufacturing knowledge. She didn’t know how to build a factory. She knew one thing—not knowing forced her to ask stupid questions. Spanx. Billionaire.

 

Do one thing today without a guarantee.Send that pitch. Start that side project. Speak that truth. Watch how action in ambiguity dismantles fear.

 

The Japanese Get It. Do We?

 

The Japanese concept of “Shoshin“ — Beginner’s Mind — is essentially institutionalised not-knowing. It says: approach everything as if for the first time. No assumptions. No ego. Just open, alive curiosity. Zen masters have been saying this for centuries. Silicon Valley rediscovered it, put it in a TED Talk, and sold it back to us as “innovation culture.”

 

We knew it. We just forgot it.

 

Uncertainty Creates Attention

 

Neuroscience says ambiguity lights up the brain’s curiosity networks — the same circuits that reward learning, risk-taking and imaginative leaps. What does it mean?: the unknown makes you smarter if you let it. It forces questions like “What if?” and those two words are the currency of innovation.

 

Some Wake-Up Calls. Read Slowly

 

One — the next time someone in a meeting says “I’m not sure,” resist the urge to fill the silence. That silence is where the real thinking happens.

Two — build a habit of asking “What do I not know about this?” before every big decision. Not rhetorical. Actual, brutal honesty.

Three — hire people who say “I don’t know, but here’s how I’ll find out” over people who have rehearsed answers for everything. The first type builds companies. The second type protects egos.

Four — get comfortable with the fog. Every great journey begins before the destination is visible.

 

The Provocation

The world isn’t divided into those who know and those who don’t. It’s divided into those who pretend to know — and those brave enough to say “I have no idea, and I’m absolutely fascinated by that.”

 

Uncertainty isn’t the problem to be solved. It’s the doorway to be walked through.

 

Build curiosity scaffolding. Ask more stupid questions. Encourage “I don’t know” as a prompt, not a failure.

 

Go. Don’t wait till you know the way. That’s the whole point.

 

Remember: Uncertainty is the world’s cheapest growth hack!

 

If this post has impacted you in any way and you feel the need to reach out to me, I will be happy to receive your thoughts on suresh@groupisd.com

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

Placebos don’t prove medicine is fake. They prove belief is powerful

 

Way back in the early 90’s, from an overseas trip, I carried a tube of Deep Heat balm for my grandmother(which at that time was not available in India). She was suffering from severe arthritis pain for a long time. And her varicose veins were troubling her as well. Within a few days of my giving here the tube, she called to tell me that the pain had reduced considerably.

 

At that time I had no idea about the power of the placebo effect. The fact that one of her favorite grandkids had got her this from abroad was enough for her to feel good and think the pain had subsided( Deep Heat for all its effectiveness does not work when you are battling arthritis | varicose veins).

 

Seth Godin, with his surgeon’s instinct for the uncomfortable obvious, puts his finger on it beautifully.

 

We have two ways to explain the placebo. One says it’s a magic trick that disappears the moment you look at it directly — some mysterious force that defies physics and evaporates under rigorous testing. The other says: your brain believed something, and your body obeyed.

 

“A placebo is a prompt for our subconscious to do the hard work of healing our body, increasing our satisfaction or maximizing our performance.”

 

Godin bets on the second. So do I. And so, quietly, does the evidence.

 

Price Is The Yardstick Of Effectiveness: The Expensive Pill Problem

 

Researchers at MIT gave two groups the same painkiller — same molecule, same dose. One group paid $2.50 per pill. The other paid ten cents. The $2.50 group reported significantly more pain relief. Nothing changed except the story wrapped around the pill.

 

That’s not a quirk. That’s architecture. Your subconscious runs on narrative. It processes meaning, not molecules. And when the meaning is rich — premium packaging, a confident doctor, a name you can barely pronounce — it dispatches its best work.

 

This is why the expensive placebo works better than the cheap one. Not because of what’s in it. Because of what you believe about what’s in it.

 

Where We Have Been Missing The Wood For The Trees

 

We’ve been treating the placebo as a contaminant — the thing you have to subtract before you can see the “real” drug working. But what if it isn’t a contamination? What if it’s the point?

 

Fabrizio Benedetti, one of the world’s foremost placebo researchers, has shown that placebos trigger actual opioid release in the brain. Real biochemistry. Not imagined comfort. The body doesn’t fake healing — it does healing, prompted by belief. The signal was always internal. The pill just rang the bell.

 

Which means you’ve been walking around with a pharmacist inside you who only takes orders from your expectations.

 

What you believe about what’s happening to you shapes what’s actually happening to you. This is not poetry. It’s physiology.

 

What if the most powerful pharmacy in the world… is expectation?

 

Science calls it the placebo effect.
Modern marketing calls it premium positioning.
Our grandmothers called it “mind over matter.”

 

And honestly? Grandma may have been onto something before neuroscience arrived with their research decks.

 

We love explaining away placebos as frauds. “Oh, it’s just placebo.”

 

JUST?

Imagine dismissing a force capable of changing blood pressure, pain thresholds, immune responses and performance levels because it didn’t arrive wearing a Doctor’s lab coat.

 

The real debate isn’t whether placebos work. They do. Repeatedly. Astonishingly.

 

The real debate is why.

 

One camp treats placebos like paranormal glitches — mysterious effects that disappear under rigorous testing and somehow sneak past the laws of biology.

 

But there’s another possibility. A far more interesting one.

 

A placebo may simply be a trigger.

 

A cue.

 

A psychological ignition key that tells the subconscious:

 

“Alright buddy, healing mode. Let’s go.”

 

And suddenly, the body starts cooperating with itself.

 

Not magic. Coordination.

 

Think about it.

 

Why does expensive wine taste “better” in blind studies when people think it costs more?

 

Why do athletes perform better wearing branded gear?

 

Why do patients recover faster when doctors sound confident?

 

Why does a child instantly feel safer when mom kisses a bruised elbow — despite absolutely zero medical transfer of healing lip molecules?

 

Expectation changes experience. Belief alters biology. Meaning modifies outcomes

 

That’s not pseudoscience. That’s humanity.

 

In one famous study, patients with knee pain improved after fake surgery. Surgeons made incisions, pretended to operate and stitched them back up. Many patients reported relief comparable to actual procedures.

 

Pause for a second.

 

Their bodies responded not to the surgery…

 

…but to the story of surgery.

 

Which should terrify and inspire us equally

 

Because if the mind can manufacture healing… it can also manufacture suffering.

 

Nocebo is placebo’s evil twin. Tell people a harmless pill causes headaches and many will develop headaches. Give employees a terrifying economic forecast and productivity drops before anything actually changes.

 

We don’t merely experience reality. We experience our interpretation of reality. Your subconscious is always listening. So, Choose your scripts carefully.

 

And suddenly, this isn’t about medicine anymore

 

It’s about leadership. Parenting. Branding. Relationships. Performance. Culture.

 

A great teacher is partly a placebo.
So is a charismatic leader.
So is a luxury brand.
So is confidence itself.

 

All of them whisper the same message to the subconscious: “You can do more than you think.”

 

And often…we can

 

Now before the rationalists begin foaming at the mouth — no, placebos are NOT substitutes for antibiotics, surgery or actual treatment.

 

But dismissing them entirely is equally foolish.

 

Because the placebo effect reveals something profound:

 

Humans are not machines responding only to chemistry.
We are meaning-making creatures responding to narrative, expectation and belief.

 

Which means the stories we tell ourselves matter enormously.

 

Tell yourself you’re broken long enough, and the body listens.

 

Tell yourself recovery is possible, and the body often joins the negotiation.

 

That’s not mystical.

 

That’s deeply biological.

 

So perhaps the future of healing isn’t choosing between science and belief.

 

Perhaps it’s understanding how belief itself becomes biology.

 

And maybe the biggest placebo of all…is thinking the mind has no power over the body.

 

Now It Can Be Told: Our Brain Is The Most Underutilized Pharmacy On Earth

 

Expensive Placebo. Cheap Placebo

 

Placebos are the strange currency of belief. Dress the same sugar pill in a gold box, hand it to someone in a white coat, and watch confidence climb. Wrap it in a clinic’s logo, price it like a miracle, and people swear the world is brighter. Call it “ancient protocol,” type it in Helvetica on a glossy label, and boom — value materializes.

 

Now for the real magic: the pill didn’t change. the story did. The placebo is less a mysterious force and more a prompt — one that nudges our subconscious to do the heavy lifting. That prompt can be dressed up in Gucci or shoved into a paper cup. What matters is the story we believe.

 

Which would you choose — champagne hope or roadside solace — if both made you feel better?

 

We love to ask whether expensive placebos are “better” because we want a simple answer: pay more, feel more. The messy truth is more useful. Price and polish are amplifiers, not creators. They tune the volume of the inner orchestra that already knows how to play.

 

Picture two sprinters. One has a state-of-the-art pair of shoes; the other ties on an old, trusted pair and hears their coach whisper, “These are winners.” The one with the glossy shoes might sprint faster — but only because the shiny shoes convinced their brain there’s an edge. Or think of a colleague’s LinkedIn post about a “transformational” coaching program — same techniques you learned years ago, served with artful copy and a designer certificate. People sign up, feel transformed, and tweet grateful receipts. The practice didn’t change. The frame did.

 

Why this matters for creators and leaders

 

Story is infrastructure. Your brand, the rituals you create, the language you use — they’re scaffolding for the placebo prompt. So when you design experiences, you’re either empowering people’s own healing and performance or you’re leaving it to chance.

 

The most expensive placebo is waiting for someone else to fix you.
The cheap one is realizing you already have the remote control. You’ve just been pressing the wrong button.

 

PS: If this blog inspires you to engage with me, it will be a pleasure to hear from you on suresh@groupisd.com

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

Dead Phrases Walking: Or How The Corporate World Became A Graveyard Of Sentences That Should Have Been Cremated In The Early 90’s

 

We are all aware of the phrases in the corporate world that refuses to die.

 

These phrases survive every economic downturn, every AI disruption, every TED Talk, every leadership summit where somebody in a black turtleneck says “future-ready ecosystems.”

 

And yet…they linger. Floating through boardrooms like stale samosas wrapped in old PowerPoint slides.

 

Somewhere between your third meeting about a meeting and your fourth “quick sync,” the English language quietly filed a restraining order against the corporate world.

 

We didn’t notice. We were too busy circling back.

 

Here’s a forensic autopsy of phrases that should have died in a PowerPoint somewhere around 1991(or even earlier)

 

“With all due respect…” Translation: Zero respect is incoming. You’ve essentially said “I’m about to insult you and I want credit for the warning.” It’s the verbal equivalent of a slap with a glove. No one has ever followed this phrase with a compliment. Nobody in human history has ever said “with all due respect” and then followed it with: “You are magnificent. Please adopt me.” “With all due respect” has injured more people than kick boxing. Believe it or not!

 

“At the end of the day…” Which day? Financial year-end? Judgement Day? Next Monday? IPL final Day? By the end of the sentence, we’re all exhausted. This phrase enters meetings the way background music enters low budget crime serials. Meaninglessly. Aggressively. Repeatedly. At the end of the day, the sun sets. That’s it. That’s the only fact this phrase has ever earned.

 

“In my humble opinion…” Said exclusively by people with opinions so unhumble they require structural reinforcement. Nobody truly humble has ever prefaced a sentence with IMHO. Nothing humble has ever followed this sentence. Ever. It’s like a peacock saying “if I may be so plain.”

 

It’s usually followed by a 19-slide TEDx hostage situation involving “disruption”, “synergy” and a graph nobody understands.

 

“Let me add my 2 cents…” Two cents was already not legal tender in 1987. This opinion is arriving at the table with the fiscal confidence of a Zimbabwean dollar. And yet — it never stops. It never pays. And somehow, it always expects change. And BTW, inflation has entered the chat.
Your 2 cents is now a US$4.8 keynote with no early bird offer in sight.

 

“Let me circle back…” The circle has never been completed. Not once. Even in school. It’s a geometric promise made by someone whose follow-up lives in a parallel dimension. Circling back is corporate for “I will absolutely not be returning to this topic in my lifetime.” It actually means forget and hope they die. We know.

 

“Let’s revisit this…” This is “circle back” in formal clothes. No Friday Dressing pretense. Both travel in the same direction: away. From you. From accountability. From the question you just asked that made someone very uncomfortable. Real translation:I didn’t do the work, but I’m optimistic about time travel.

 

“Can we take this offline?” Translation: You’ve said something inconvenient in front of witnesses. Or “You are embarrassing me publicly with facts.””Offline” is where all difficult conversations go to be quietly drowned and never spoken of again. It’s not a place. It’s a time-out corner for inconvenient truths.

 

The modern workplace has become a karaoke bar of borrowed vocabulary. Everybody sounds important. Nobody sounds human.

 

Here’s some more that you might have had the misfortune of dealing with:-

 

“Have a nice day!” Said with the emotional investment of a toaster. Deployed after rejecting your claim, cancelling your subscription, or putting you on hold for 27 minutes. The nice day they want you to have is happening to someone else, somewhere far away. This is usually sent immediately after:

“Your loan has been rejected.”
“Your appraisal is deferred.”
“We regret to inform you…”

 

Have a nice day?
Sir, I now identify it as turbulence.

 

“Truth be told…” Implies that everything before this moment was elaborate fiction. Were you lying this whole time? Is this the first true thing? Beta version honesty? Should we restart the conversation from the beginning? Truth be told — this phrase is exhausting.

 

“I’m in my morning huddle…” You’re in a meeting. About a meeting. That will probably result in another meeting. A huddle is what rugby players do — they have a plan, they execute, they score. Your huddle will produce a deck. Nobody scores. Except the HIPPO( Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) will score brownie points.

 

“Going forward…” As opposed to going backward? Into the past? To fix the thing nobody’s owning? “Going forward” is how you acknowledge a catastrophic failure while ensuring absolutely no one is held responsible for it.

 

Meanwhile corporate calendars continue to sound like rejected Christopher Nolan scripts:

 

  • “Let’s unpack this.”
  • “Low hanging fruit.”
  • “Touch base.”
  • “Bandwidth issues.”
  • “Deep dive.”
  • “Quick sync.”
  • “Actionables.”
  • “Parking lot this thought.”
  • “Boil the ocean.”
  • “Game changer.”
  • “Think outside the box.”
  • “Do the needful.”

 

“I’ll loop you in…” A loop is a closed shape. Nothing leaves. Nobody escalates. You’re looped in the way a thread is looped — around and around, going nowhere, slowly tightening until someone finally cuts it in a performance review.

 

“Per my last email…” The four most aggressive words in professional communication, gift-wrapped in Times New Roman( though given what it does or doesn’t, it should be in Comic Sans, pun intended). You have heard of road rage but this is corporate rage with a paper trail. These four words have started more cold wars than most actual geopolitical events.

 

“Synergize our core competencies…” A phrase with exactly zero caloric meaning. You could remove it from any document and the document improves dramatically. You could replace it with “do our jobs together” and suddenly everyone understands. That’s the horror.

 

“Pivot to…” Said immediately after a strategy has spectacularly failed. “Pivot” makes the failure sound athletic. Like you meant to fall that way. Like the floor was the plan all along. We are pivoting. We have pivoted. The pivot has pivoted.

 

“Deep dive…” Nobody is diving. You’re in a conference room in Whitefield, Bangalore, eating a sad sandwich, looking at slide 47. The only depth here is the depth of the collective sigh when the host shares their screen and it’s not in presentation mode.

 

What Next?

 

Maybe the future of communication is not sounding polished.
Maybe it is sounding alive.

 

Less: “Per my last email…”

 

More: “Did you even read the thing, champion?”

 

Less jargon. More heartbeat.
Less template. More texture.
Less corporate mayonnaise. More human masala.

 

Because language is not just communication. It is emotional architecture.

 

And right now…most workplaces sound like expired yogurt giving a keynote.

 

Some fresh adages we need to euthanize, law permitting:

– “It is what it is.” – The battle cry of the creatively bankrupt.
– “Let’s unpack that.” – We aren’t moving houses, Karen.
– “I’ll ping you.” – No you won’t. You’ll ping my last nerve.
– “Best practice.” – Aka “we’ve always done it this way, and I’ve given up.”
– “Low-hanging fruit.”– Sir, this is a PowerPoint, not an orchard.
– “Bandwidth.” – You have 168 hours. You watched Real Housewives. Then Sacred Games. Then Dhurandhar. So, don’t lie.
– “Blue-sky thinking.” – The sky is currently grey with your buzzwords.
– “Lean in.”– I’d rather lean out a window.
– “Move the needle.”– The needle is your self-awareness. It’s flatlined.
– “Drink the Kool-Aid.” – I’m lactose intolerant to bullshit.

 

Question: Why do we speak like malfunctioning HR bots?

 

Because actual honesty—“I’m bored, this meeting is a funeral for time”—would get us fired. So we invented a zombie language. Polite. Dead. Hilarious.

 

Say one real sentence today. “I don’t know.”“I was wrong.”“Let’s stop pretending.” Watch people blink like you’ve performed magic.

 

These phrases died in the ’70s. Time to stop embalming them.

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

You have all the freedom in the world. So why does it feel like a trap?

 

We banned fear — and taught people to obey. Freedom is unfinished.

 

What if the greatest prison in modern life does not have walls, guards or barbed wire…but premium subscriptions, polite LinkedIn posts, Insta Reels, performance reviews, EMI schedules and “Last seen at 9:42 PM”?

 

THE TWO FREEDOMS NOBODY TAUGHT US

Erich Fromm wrote Escape from Freedom in 1941. The world was burning. People were, paradoxically, running away from the very freedom they had fought for — straight into the arms of dictators, cults, and conformity.

 

He wasn’t writing about then. He was writing about now.

 

Fromm made a razor-sharp distinction: Freedom From and Freedom To.

 

Freedom From is liberation. From oppression. From a bad job. From a toxic relationship. From a country that suffocates you. It’s the breakout. The resignation letter. The one-way ticket. It feels electric — until it doesn’t.

 

Freedom To is the terrifying next question: Now what?

 

It’s the freedom to create. To choose. To build a life on your own terms. To sit with an empty calendar and actually fill it with meaning — not just noise.

 

Most people are masterful at the first. And are paralysed by the second.

 

LOOK AROUND. IT’S EVERYWHERE. LIKE A CONTAGION

 

The millennial who quit corporate life to “follow her passion” — and spends three years doom-scrolling, calling it “finding herself.” Escaped from. Never arrived to.

 

The startup founder who broke free from a boss — only to build a company culture identical to the one he fled. Changed the cage. Didn’t change the instinct.

 

The country that won independence and immediately handed power to strongmen who promised certainty over chaos. Fromm saw this. History keeps rereleasing this film.

 

Even social media. We were freed from gatekeepers — editors, studios, publishers. Every person became a broadcaster. And what did we do with that radical Freedom To? We recreated hierarchies. Chased algorithms. Handed our attention to the loudest voice in the room. Again.

 

THE IRONY UNDER ARC LIGHTS

 

We scream for freedom.
Then quietly rent ourselves out in monthly installments.

 

Erich Fromm spoke about “Freedom To” and “Freedom From.”

Freedom from oppression.
Freedom from fear.
Freedom to create.
Freedom to become.

 

Today, that philosophy has returned wearing athleisure, carrying a smartphone( and a Starbucks) and doom scrolling at 1:13 AM.

 

We have freedom from bosses.
Yet are enslaved by notifications.

 

Freedom from arranged careers.
Yet trapped inside algorithm-approved ambitions.

 

Freedom from censorship.
Yet terrified of saying what we actually feel.

 

WELCOME TO THE AGE OF CURATED CAPTIVITY

 

A world where people proudly announce “I can work from anywhere” while never truly switching off from anywhere.

 

The modern human being has become a strange cocktail of autonomy and anxiety.

 

We have more choice than any generation before us.
And more exhaustion.

 

Netflix asks: “Are you still watching?”
Society whispers: “Are you still performing?”

 

Freedom today is no longer merely political.
It is psychological. Emotional. Digital. Existential.

 

The entrepreneur wants freedom from a 9-to-5 job.
Then builds a startup that chains him to a 24×7 panic attack.

 

The influencer wants freedom of expression.
Then becomes a hostage to engagement metrics.

 

The employee wants freedom from toxic workplaces.
Then carries workplace toxicity home through Slack, Teams and WhatsApp.

 

START WITH THE GUT

You can escape a job you hate (freedom from) but still be trapped by the life you never chose (no freedom to).

 

You can mute toxic online mobs (freedom from) and still feel unable to speak for what matters (no freedom to).

 

The rage and relief we feel today are two sides of the same coin — one cancels pain, the other demands purpose.

 

EVEN BRANDS ARE TRAPPED

For years, companies wanted freedom from irrelevance.
So they chased trends. Memes. Virality. AI-generated everything.

 

Now many brands have lost freedom to sound human. And probably by design?

 

Every brand deck says “authentic.” Perhaps they get a kick out of it. Yet most communication feels like it was written by a committee trapped inside an airport lounge.

 

SOMEWHERE ALONG LIFE’S NH-44, FREEDOM BECAME CONFUSED WITH CONVENIENCE

 

But convenience is not freedom.
A food delivery app can save time.
It cannot save loneliness.

 

A four-day work week can create space.
It cannot create meaning.

 

A dating app can offer options.
It cannot guarantee connection.

 

And perhaps that is the deeper crisis of our times.

 

We have engineered freedom from discomfort.
But lost freedom to sit with ourselves.

 

Children still understand freedom better than adults.
They dance badly without embarrassment.
Ask dangerous questions.
Invent worlds from cardboard boxes.

 

Adults?
We ask:
“Will this look professional?”
“Will this hurt my personal brand?”
“Will people judge me?”

 

The cage is now internal.

 

The tragedy is not that people are imprisoned.
The tragedy is that many decorate the cage and call it success.

 

EVERYDAY PROOF

At work: HR builds policies to shield employees from burnout (freedom from). Leaders rarely train people to invent, decide and fail forward (freedom to). The result: safer, smaller performers.

In tech: Platforms promise “freedom from” friction with one-click shopping, curated feeds, content moderation. They sell comfort. But they also strip agency — we trade decision-making for dopamine. That’s convenience without capability.

In politics: Laws that remove discrimination are vital (freedom from). But democracy needs empowered citizens who vote, organize and imagine alternatives (freedom to). Without both, rights calcify into apathy.

In branding: Brands promise “freedom from” uncertainty — guarantees, returns, safe choices. The brave ones sell “freedom to” — to be bolder, to belong to a chosen tribe, to rewrite routines.

 

A business that masters both doesn’t just reduce risk; it builds agency. Think of companies that train employees to lead (freedom to) while also giving them psychological safety (freedom from). They innovate faster and hold culture longer.

 

WHERE | WHEN DOES REAL FREEDOM BEGIN?

Real freedom begins when we stop outsourcing our identity to society, social media or salary slips.

 

Freedom to say no.
Freedom to pause.
Freedom to disappear for a while without announcing a “digital detox.”
Freedom to build a life that may not impress strangers but deeply nourishes the soul.

 

Maybe the future belongs not to people who have everything…but to people who can walk away from anything that slowly destroys their peace.

 

Because in the end:

 

Freedom From gives you survival.
Freedom To gives you life.

 

And one without the other is merely a prettier prison.

 

FINAL PROVOCATION

 

A life of only “freedom from” is a well-guarded cage. A life of only “freedom to” with no guardrails is chaos. The task for leaders, brands and citizens is to architect both: scaffold the human, then unleash the human.

 

Would you rather be safe or significant? Build systems that let people answer: both.

 

Erich Fromm saw this coming a century ago. He wrote that modern humans escaped the chains of medieval feudalism only to run straight into a new cage: loneliness and meaninglessness. We gained the freedom to choose our chains—social media, hustle culture, performative success—but lost the freedom from the panic of insignificance.

Look Around. It’s Everywhere.

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

Gilli Danda Was Our CrossFit: A High-Octane Tribute to the Games That Made Us Sweat, Cheat, and Cry (Mostly from Laughter)

The Original Indian Fitness App Had Dust, Bruises & One(Sometimes More) Friend Who Always Cheated

 

Before smartwatches began informing us that we had slept “72% efficiently”…

Before people paid ₹18,000 annually to attend something called “Primal Goat Yoga Fusion Pilates”…

Before cardio came with neon tights, protein smoothies and instructors yelling “FEEL THE BURN, PEOPLE!”…

India already had the greatest fitness ecosystem ever created.

It was called: “Go play outside and don’t come back till the streetlights turn on.”

 

No subscriptions.
No Meditation apps or app updates.
No Bluetooth syncing.
Only survival. Meets gay abandon.

 

An entire generation was forged through dust storms, scraped knees, emotional damage, neighbourhood politics and one permanently angry aunty( Mrs Achuthan) whose window glass was always collateral damage.

Our childhood games weren’t games.

They were:

Leadership workshops.
Military training.
Cardio.
Diplomacy.
Negotiation.
Emotional resilience.
And occasionally, attempted murder.

 

Welcome to the golden era of Indian childhood…

Where Lagori was WWE with architecture.
Pakda Pakdi was ace the race.
And Snakes & Ladders(or Saap Seedi it’s shady vernacular equivalent) quietly prepared us for corporate life.

 

Let me paint you a picture

 

It is approximately 4:17 PM on a weekday. The homework is “done” (it is not done, at least in my case it never was). The school bag has been hurled into a dark corner. The mother has been informed — via a disappearing act of Olympic calibre — that the child will “be back before dark.” The child is lying. The child will be back when the streetlights come on, smelling of mud, triumph, and somebody else’s tears.

 

This child — this unshowered, scab-kneed, completely feral child — is doing something that the modern wellness industry would bottle and sell for ₹6,499 a month if it could figure out how. They are playing.

 

While you are currently paying a gym trainer named “Flex” to yell at you on a Tuesday at 6 AM, and while corporate wellness programs are serving you ‘resilience workshops‘ with kombucha, let me take you back to the original boot camp. The one with no fees, no instructors, no protein shakes — just raw ambition, a pocketful of marbles, and the terrifying possibility that Paithankar from the next building might beat you. Sujit, are you listening?

 

Gilli Danda: The MBA Nobody Talks About

Long before cricket academies and IPL auctions, there existed the street-side Harvard of hand-eye coordination:

Gilli Danda

A tiny wooden missile called the “gilli” was launched into orbit using a danda by children who had absolutely no helmet, no insurance and no fear.

One kid would scream:
“OUT Re!”

Another would say:
“Not out bidu, rebound!”

A third fellow, who had contributed nothing to humanity till then, suddenly became ICC umpire.

Gilli Danda taught:

  • Risk-taking
  • Precision
  • Reflexes
  • Negotiation
  • Conflict management
  • How to run when somebody’s dad comes out angry

 

Modern equivalent? CrossFit with legal complications.

 

Kancha (Marbles): India’s First Stock Market 

Marbles aka Goatee aka Kancha.

You squat in mud, flick a glass marble, and try to smash another marble out of a circle. High stakes. Low hygiene.

Tiny glass spheres.
Massive emotional volatility.

You could lose:

  • your best marble(no pun intended),
  • your dignity,
  • and your entire week’s self-esteem…

…within six seconds.

Every child had:

  • one lucky marble(Haider from Navy Colony would call it ” neeli waali tapp“),
  • one “foreign marble,”
  • and one fellow who claimed he had “imported” marbles from Kancha Cheena.

Kancha sharpened:

  • aim,
  • patience,
  • strategy,
  • geometry,
  • gambling instincts,
  • and the ability to accuse others of cheating with complete confidence.

Wall Street traders today call it:“portfolio diversification.”

We called it:“Bhai touch mat kar, shooter hai mera.” Ever wonder why Indian CEOs swear by “gut feel“? Blame Kancha—it wired our brains for high-stakes gambles.

 

Lagori: Demolition Derby Meets National Emergency 

Lagori was simple.

Here is a game where one team throws a ball at a stack of seven stones to knock them over, and the other team has to reassemble the stack while the first team tries to pelt them with the same ball. Read that sentence again. A regulation projectile. Being thrown at children. Who are trying to calmly rebuild a stack of rocks. Under fire.

The ball used in Lagori had one mission:To discover kidneys.

This is not a game. This is a military training exercise for nine-year-olds.

Lagori built team strategy at a cellular level. The rebuilder needed cover. The cover-runners needed to draw fire. Somebody needed to be the decoy. Somebody needed to be the closer. We figured all of this out, unprompted, at age eight, in the afternoon sun. No PowerPoint. No ‘team charter.’ Just pure, screaming, instinctive collaboration — with the occasional bruise to confirm that the stakes were real.

Every Lagori team had that one kid who would “strategise” from a safe distance the entire time and then sprint in for the final stone looking heroic. He grew up and became…you guessed it right…a consultant.

Six rounds of Lagori = a 45-minute HIIT class + a leadership seminar + a lesson in how not to freeze under pressure. Total cost: zero. Total equipment: seven stones and an old rubber ball(from Hitesh Stores) that smells faintly of regret.

Pakda Pakdi: The Original HIIT Workout 

No treadmill in human history has matched the terror-fuelled acceleration of hearing:

“AYEEE PAKAD LIYA!”

Children achieved Olympic sprint speeds merely because touching meant social humiliation.

Fitness influencers now say: HIIT- “High Intensity Interval Training.”

Indian mothers already knew.

They simply said: “Go play outside.”

Calories evaporated.
Lungs expanded.
Knees dissolved.

Character was built.

Kho Kho: Chess Played At 40 Kmph 

Kho Kho looked innocent. Butter wouldn’t melt in it’s mouth.

It was not. This game involved:

  • explosive acceleration,
  • ninja-level directional change,
  • tactical deception,
  • and the flexibility of an octopus escaping taxation.

One wrong “Kho!” and your entire team looked at you like you had betrayed the nation.

Today people pay premium gym memberships for agility drills.

Our childhood gave them free…along with dust inhalation.

 

LANGDI( not to be mistaken for Lungi Ngidi, the cricketer) aka “The Original Balance & Stability Protocol”

Langdi asks you to hop on one leg and tag the entire opposing team. Which seems manageable, until you realize the opposing team is running at full speed and your job is to hop after them — on one leg — through sand, gravel, cow pats, and the psychic weight of your own dignity slowly leaving your body.

Your physio is charging you ₹2,400 a session to improve your “single-leg balance and proprioception.” Tell them about Langdi. Watch their face drain colour.

Takeaway: True balance is not achieved on a yoga mat with incense. True balance is achieved when twelve screaming children are running away from you and you must hop after them with the grace of an irritated flamingo. That is functional fitness.

 

SACK RACE · TYRE RACE · SLOW CYCLING

aka “The Holy Trinity of Winning by Doing Everything Wrong”

 

Sack Race is officially the funniest thing humans have ever invented. You climb into a gunny sack. You hold it up around your waist. A whistle blows. You try to move forward by hopping, which makes you look like a confused kangaroo with commitment issues. The person who falls the fewest times while maintaining forward momentum wins. This is, accidentally, the most accurate metaphor for a startup in Year Two.

 

Tyre Race — rolling an old automobile tyre ( we used cycle tyres) with a stick, maintaining speed and direction across a field which was certainly NOT level playing — sounds insultingly simple. It is not. The tyre has its own opinions. It will lean left. It will accelerate downhill and become a genuine public menace. It will suddenly decide to go horizontal for no reason. Tyred and tested doesn’t mean anything here. Managing a tyre with a stick over fifty metres is managing chaos with minimal tools. Half of all middle managers I know are still struggling with this. Tyre racing across gullies was Formula 1 for children with unlimited stamina and questionable braking systems.

 

Slow Cycling is the most wickedly counter-intuitive game ever devised. Last person to reach the finish line wins. Which means: you must go as slowly as possible on a bicycle without stopping or putting your foot down. Every instinct in your body says “GO FAST.” You must override every instinct. You must become a monument of stillness on two wheels. The wobbling is spectacular. The falls are legendary. The winner is always that unnervingly calm child who becomes an anaesthesiologist or a Buddhist monk later in life. The same person who redefined ASAP  to be As Slow As Possible.

 

Sports Science, Uninvited: Slow Cycling builds core stability, balance, and the specific kind of frustration tolerance that no meditation app has yet managed to replicate. Your mindfulness coach should be taking notes. Then crying.

 

Snakes & Ladders(Saap Seedi, its shady vernacular equivalent): India’s Earliest Lesson In Corporate Politics 

You climbed gracefully to 98…feeling like destiny’s chosen child…

…and then a snake sent you back to prehistoric sadness.

Promotion cancelled.
Bonus revoked.
Spirit broken.

This game taught:

  • humility,
  • unpredictability,
  • resilience,
  • and how life occasionally slaps without prior notice.

Frankly, it prepared us better than most MBA programs.

 

Carrom: Diplomacy With Powdered Violence 

Every Indian household had:

  • one Carrom board,
  • missing coins,
  • and one cousin who blew powder like he was seasoning biryani.

The striker flew with terrifying intent. Fingers developed sniper precision.

Arguments erupted over:
“Double touch.”
“Rebound.”
“Queen cover.”

Carrom built:

  • patience,
  • angles,
  • strategy,
  • emotional discipline,
  • and passive aggression.

Essential skills for adulthood.

Every Carrom board I have ever seen was slightly warped and covered in boric acid powder, which tells you something about the conditions under which excellence was achieved.

 

Ludo 

 

This is where families went to test whether they actually liked each other. On normal days, we like each other. On Ludo days, when someone’s token gets sent home for the fourth time, we discover the truth. The “safe house” squares were where tokens could rest without being captured — the only place immunity existed. In actual life, this place is called “your mother’s house” and the rules are identical.

 

The Boardroom-to-Board-Game Pipeline: Ludo taught emotional regulation — when your token gets knocked off for the 8th time and you cannot upend the board. Carrom taught precision under pressure. Saap Seedi taught equanimity — the ability to lose 80 squares of progress, say “okay,” and roll again. The boardroom requires all three. Simultaneously.

 

Lattu / Bawra: The Bladerunner With Anger Issues 

The Spinning Top

Children would wrap string around a wooden spinning top with the seriousness of nuclear scientists.

Then came the launch.

If it spun beautifully:
You were a legend.

If it flew sideways into a parked scooter:
You vanished for three days.

Lattu taught:

  • hand coordination ( haath jaali anyone?),
  • patience,
  • timing,
  • persistence,
  • and how to pretend “I didn’t do it.”

Today’s mindfulness workshops charge ₹7,000 for focus exercises.

Meanwhile 9-year-old Dilip achieved Zen mastery in 1981 beside a vada paav stall near Amar Dairy Farm.

 

Kabaddi: You Take My Breath Away

Respiration Meets Violence 

Kabaddi was basically:
Wrestling.
Chess.
Lung capacity.
And chaos marinated together.

One child inhaled deeply and entered enemy territory chanting:
“Kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi…”

The remaining players transformed into gladiators.

Kabaddi taught:

  • courage,
  • breath control,
  • teamwork,
  • anticipation,
  • resilience,
  • and survival under pressure.

Corporate workshops now call this: “Strategic penetration into hostile environments.”

 

Name, Place, Animal, Thing: The Entrance Exam For Overthinkers 

This innocent-looking notebook game exposed:

  • vocabulary frauds,
  • spelling disasters,
  • and fake confidence.

Everybody froze when the alphabet was:
“Q”. ” Kyun- I am still trying to figure out”.

Suddenly humanity had no animals.

No places.
No professions.
Nothing.

Yet this game quietly sharpened:

  • memory,
  • speed,
  • creativity,
  • and the ability to bluff academically.

Basically LinkedIn.

 

The Beautiful Truth

That the wellness industry has buried under fifteen layers of branded activewear( or Athleisure): we didn’t need to be taught fitness, teamwork, resilience, creativity, spatial intelligence, emotional regulation, or competitive drive. We played our way into all of it — barefoot, unscheduled, largely unsupervised — in streets and parks and backyards that have since been replaced by apartment buildings and parking lots.

 

The games we played were not simple. They were sophisticated systems of human development that different communities across this vast, chaotic, glorious country had evolved over centuries. They encoded negotiation (deciding who’s “it”), rule-making (every game had local variants argued over intensely), conflict resolution (the endless “out/not out” disputes), recovery (from losses, from falls, from embarrassment), and the pure, irreducible joy of moving a human body through space with complete, unadulterated freedom.

 

We ran without tracking our pace. We jumped without calculating our jump height. We caught our breath without a respiratory coach. We fell, stood up, and kept going — not because we had read anything about “growth mindset” but because the game was still happening and we were still IN it.

 

In Closing

 

So the next time your smartwatch congratulates you for doing 8,000 steps — steps that your seven-year-old self would have completed before the afternoon snack, in pursuit of a rubber ball, without looking at anything except the game — smile to yourself. You were built in a gully. Finished in a gym. But built — magnificently, irrevocably built — in a gully.

 

Go find seven stones. Stack them up. Then knock them down. Then build them again. That’s Lagori. That’s leadership. That’s life.

 

And tell Sameer I still have his favorite goatee/kancha. He knows why.

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below: