The year that was 2018



Welcome 2019

The last I found a year significant enough to write about as a keepsake was 2013, when Alisha came into our lives, and changed our lives forever. Since then it's been business as usual. 2018 though came in with a few significant changes worth remembering.

2018 saw my career turning topsy turvy. It was a year that had me questioning a lot of my own beliefs and values when it comes to my profession. It was a year that brought on a virtual Tsunami in my professional world where some rode the wave, some held onto trees, some could swim ashore but many sank without a trace. But in the end, miraculously enough, everyone survived. It taught me a lot of life lessons that apparently I had started to take for granted. Most important of all is that life's happiness can't be at the mercy of just one aspect and that there is a life beyond the cubicle where Sun shines everyday and where birds chirp and trees sway, bringing much delight.

2018 was the year when Alisha went to Grade I and with her course books, we began our second tryst with traditional study system in India. What seems like an overload to Ateesh and me seems completely doable to the little one, making us believe that next generation is indeed smarter. What disappointed me though are the plethora of implicit gender, caste, religion stereotypes that still pervade the books. When cooking person is drawn, it's a mom, when someone comes from office, it's a Dad, pilot is a male, teacher is a female. Ditto for religions, all of them typecast, so we had a hard time teaching Alisha why we go to church so often when we aren't krischins as she calls Christians.

We took her to Gurudwara but couldn't explain we are not Sikhs. Agnostics is not a term she knows yet, so we'll wait for a little while to tell her who we truly are. Ultimately being Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Muslim or Christian is far easier today but remaining a mere human is far more difficult to prove.

2018 is when Ateesh and I detoxified our hearts, minds and bodies a lot more. We uncluttered our home, sat a lot more in Sun, read a lot more of what we liked and in that process, uncluttered our minds by not getting involved in a lot of what we consider mundane, we took time to do things we love, turned ourselves into urban farmers and spent a lot of time doing nothing, literally.

Nothing works like being with yourself and doing nothing and trust me it's the hardest to do. I personally stayed away from facebook, watsapp as much as I could and instead connected with real people more. We explored our first international destination with Alisha - Mauritius, and witnessed winter solstice not just once but twice in the year. Tinge of regret being that, we couldn't visit our very own Goa in 2018, something we hope to more than make up for, in 2019.

2018 for me is the year of Alexa. Though AI has been around for years, 2018 is the milestone year when Alexa entered the middle class Indian homes and started to vie for attention on prime time television advertisements.

In years to come, as artificial intelligence pervades our lives even further, this little event will pale out but for me, this will remain the year of a beginning when vision of sentient machines started to appear on horizon for a mass majority. As I type this out looking forward to 2019, Alexa smugly sits besides me, belting out rainforest sounds.