Micro 73 – Italian connection
I reached out to four of my professional friends through Linked in and checked how they were with their family. All four responded and they all shared and one particular one was a long response which went like this, ” I am fine and so is everyone in the family. As you will know already, we are in “lockdown”. We must all stay at home and have as little contact as possible with other people. Supermarkets, pharmacies, and other essential services are still running normally. As info from China appears to be showing, once transmission chains are broken, the sickness can be brought under control. It is still to be seen if we can obtain the same results. Let me just say that this is NOT just the flu. I hope you and your family are all well too. Thanks for your message and interest.
Let us all take precautions and not panic and enjoy the time with books, movies, chats with family and much more. Also, look at the creativity around memes.
Micro 74 – Exam Fever
It was a Saturday morning when we went to drop my elder daughter for her board exam. It was a sea of cars and we were initially struggling for parking. Then we got a parking place and as I looked outside, I saw in each car how students were sitting and waiting for the school gates to happen. I am sure each parent had the above thought about the exam. My daughter is waiting for 18th March at 1.31 PM to go berserk.
Micro 75 – Women’s day special
I dropped and picked my younger daughter and her friend on women’s day from dance class. While they were getting down, I wished them ” Happy women’s day”. Both of them smiled and it felt like recognition as they were only 8 years old. Later my daughter along with her friend picked up all the fallen flowers and made a gift and offered it to my wife. They say, ” Sincerity is the highest compliment you can pay and then they would pay with sensible tokens of their love“.
Micro 76 Collaboration
My 8-year old daughter’s class had to give a five-minute presentation on the various phases of the moon. They were divided into groups of three. Her team had to present on the gibbous moon. Neither my wife nor I had any idea what that was!
Over the weekend, one of the kids got her mother to create a Whatsapp group. The girls were on google finding all the information. Soon they were on video chat showing off the project materials and deciding which colors to use and finally how they would wear the chart around their necks. Next, they got busy prepping up their speeches. One of them wrote down the speech with cues for who would speak which part and sent the picture on Whatsapp. Next, they had an online rehearsal of the speech on video chat.
Validation came when the teacher complimented them on their delivery though my daughter wasn’t very happy with one member of her team who read out his cues!
This whole experience got me to think about how we can re-imagine workplaces. I wonder if these digital natives would ever work together in a brick and mortar workplace.
Micro 77 – Kindness Multiplies
We knew were getting late to enter the park. As we scrambled ourselves after getting down from the auto and ran towards the gate it was closed. We checked with the security guard. He said it is closed. We turned back and then we heard a voice, ” Please come in and use the child play area for not more than 10 minutes”. Our daughter had a great time with the swings and others. I thanked that nice guard on our way out. I told my daughter how he went out of his way and seeing you gave the chance to play in the child area. It stuck with her and she liked it. Moments later she told me, ” How I wished I helped that old man crossed that road”.
Micro 78 — Meant to be
As soon as my wife and the younger daughter went to pick my elder one from the school after the 10th exam, on FM this song ” meant to be” came on. I was reflecting on what happened in the last hour. I had just walked into an electronics stored and swiped my card and got a karaoke set.
We were driving around in circles searching for a cafe. My wife said, “stop looking for it and we will find it.” Finally, we decided to search on google. Soon we reached the destination as per google. There was no sign of a cafe. There was only an electronic shop. I just dashed in and told him that we had come for some window shopping. In front of us was this shiny new karaoke set. We goaded our daughter to sing a song. She was not ready. The sales guy encouraged her to give it a try. I saw her unshackling herself and then taking the mike and singing two songs. I thought, “These moments don’t come by just like that.” I remembered how my RICH Dad had shopped for a color TV, refrigerator, and cycle in the early ’80s and I bought it. Sometimes in life, we have to just go with the intuition and make a decision.
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