I spent a sleepless night arguing with myself and losing.I woke up early and decided to take the job. A year or two, I told myself. I can always walk out later. That was the plan. Ten years is a strange way of keeping a one-year promise to yourself.
We joke about our spouses all the time. Nobody jokes about the day the joking partner is gone, and the whole house turns very quiet, observes Binu Alex.
Comparing the two states is comparing an apple to an orange. I ate apples for years. Then I felt I needed some citrus, and I moved to oranges. That doesn't make the apple a lesser fruit, reflects Binu Alex.
Their stories will go unheard, filed somewhere in the banal footnotes of history. Unwritten, untold, undocumented, notes Binu Alex.
Some decades are worth remembering exactly as they were, unfiltered, because that's the only way the people who survived them get to be seen at all, points out Binu Alex.
We check horoscopes. We check family background. We check whether the boy has a 'government job' or the girl 'knows how to cook'. Somewhere in this elaborate audit, nobody thought to ask: Hey, are you both healthy?
Security in most of India is a facade, discovers Binu Alex.
If that name means nothing to you, you're not alone. It meant nothing to most people we met that day either. Including, as it turned out, some of them standing right next to his tomb.
We raid restaurants for cockroaches but never raid the roadside. Public hygiene runs entirely on faith and fumes. Even after so many years of being a free nation, points out Binu Alex.
'Chal bhai, uth.' Get up. He said it to the politicians like they worked for him. International press has come, he announced. Rotters, BBC, Newsweek.
My family produced a Malayalam movie in 1986. It had big actors in it. The songs were sung by K J Yesudas himself. The film starred two newcomers as the lead pair. It bombed.
Families don't really break apart in a single moment, they just quietly stop fitting under one roof, notes Binu Alex.
Every day, the older men running our politics keep pushing Gen Z voters further away, observes Binu Alex.
The CEO said Saharashree was like a father to them. On his own wedding day, he touched Saharashree's feet before his parents'.
The Internet only wants to sell you the winning part. The masterclass, the framework, the seven habits. Nobody sells you the story of losing.
As they say some doors open because of who you know, and some, it turns out, open just because of where you're from, recalls Binu Alex.
This is the great tragic flaw in how we handle medical emergencies. The golden hour is wasted. People get a chest pain and they call their family doctor. Or they drag the patient to a small local clinic that doesn't have the equipment. What people don't realise is that in an emergency, you don't need advice. You need a large hospital.
At a function in Anand, ministers and the chief minister all in attendance, Varghese Kurien called the IAS lobby termites.
Some doors, it turns out, you can knock on for years and they still won't tell you what's really behind them.
Prohibition never stopped anyone from drinking in Gujarat. It only made the stories that come after a lot more interesting, recounts Binu Alex.
