Anuradha Sridharan

 As someone who is fascinated by the idea of learning, I always wondered about how one builds up expertise in a particular skill. Through experience, I realized the power of a very important tenet - INTUITION. Let me explain with an example. I started to learn cooking sometime in 2005-06. By going through a couple of cookbooks and by observing my MIL (for a couple of weeks when I visited her), I slowly started understanding the nuances. But the real experience came in when I kept making new dishes over the weekends - following the recipes to the T, varying a few ingredients here and there, trying new methods of cooking, etc. As I practiced more and more dishes, a new dimension opened up, which I believe is INTUITION towards cooking. This intuition now helps me to multitask more effectively in the kitchen, use the right amount of spices and cook just the right amount needed for my family. I also realized that this same intuition prevents me from being effective at transferring my co...

Sometime in Sept 2020, I had written an article titled " How to slow down? ". In this article, I had mentioned my priorities in life in a particular order. What 2021 has taught me is that such priorities can never be carved in stone. Life forces us to readjust and realign our priorities. To give you an example, when my dad was in a critical state, I couldn't focus on my health and wellbeing for nearly 4-5 months. I was in that crisis mode and ended up feeling exhausted on all levels - physical, mental, and emotional. Yoga practice went for a toss, sleep was disturbed, stress levels were high because of the uncertainty. Simple, homecooked food and regular walks were the only habits that I managed to continue during this timeframe. Thankfully, that helped me sustain my current state of health. From a priority point of view, those 4-5 months looked like this: Dad D and K Spiritual practice (prayers) My health and wellbeing Hobbies and interests Professional work As things ar...

All of us have 24 hours in a day. How we spend that time determines the quality of our lives. How much time we invest in continuous learning determines the level of impact we create on ourselves and in society. I firmly believe in this phrase " Learning doesn't stop at school or college ". To be honest, I started enjoying learning only after I finished my formal school and college education. I used to study well during my school/college days, but the motivation was mainly due to extrinsic factors - grades, marks, competition, campus placements etc, rather than the sheer joy of learning. As I stepped out of my college, I realized this - when the motivation to learn is more intrinsic, learning becomes super joyful. Why does it become joyful? Because we are not bound by a syllabus or a textbook Syllabus free learning - a space where our curiosity decides the syllabus and not an educational institution. In the past few years, I have become curious about the subject of nutriti...

  Most of the books I have read so far this year belong to the spirituality/philosophy/self-help genre. I wanted to shift gears and pick up a few books from other genres in the last 2 months of 2021. Peter Thiel's Zero to One has been on my reading list for a while. It is a concise 200 pager without a lot of unnecessary fluff. As a result, it leaves the reader with a lot of important questions to ponder over related to building a startup bold, new, unique ideas and not incremental improvements importance of having a vision, a plan, and deliberate design to achieve the plan instead of a lean, iterative approach importance of sales and distribution and not focusing only on the product focus on durability and relevance instead of short term growth The book poses an interesting argument on how monopolists drive progress, both internally as an organization as well as externally for the industry and society at large. The chapter "You are not a lottery ticket" - one of my favor...

 2021 has been one of the most challenging years of my life, on multiple fronts. Every challenge has invoked multiple questions about life and its workings. The Universe has been supporting me immensely in facing these challenges, by providing the right answers through multiple sources. One such source is this thought provoking book " Karma - A Yogi's guide to crafting your destiny " by Sadhguru. Part I of the book talks deeply about the nuances of Karma. The very first chapter breaks the commonly held myth - that Karma is a mechanism of reward and punishment. Rather, it is a system of creating the blueprint for our lives. Whatever we do with our body, mind or energy leaves a certain imprint. The book then explains how Karma is dependent on our volition and our memory (imprints/impressions accumulated over time). It was so fascinating to read about the different types of memory we carry, the nature of collective and individual karma. The short anecdotes interspersed thro...

Human Life goes through the following stages - birth, childhood, youth, middle age, old age and death. Some might skip 1-2 stages and face death in the case of a sudden eventuality. Some sail through old age and hit the final stage in a matter of hours. Some are destined to go through "Sickness" - a temporary phase between old age and death, a phase with intense physical and/or emotional pain that needs to be experienced, when death seems to be elusive. Inevitably, the reason our mind conjures up is that there is some unresolved karma that needs to be cleared before we move onto next stage. As I thought about this a few weeks back, the question that immediately hit me was "Why not clear those unresolved karmas in the 40s and 50s? Why go through all the pain and suffering  in the 70s and 80s?" These questions have led me to go deeper into understanding about karma. I don't have a clear understanding yet. But reading Sadhguru's Karma is bringing in a lot of cl...

  Having been researching packaged foods and their ingredients for the past 5+ years, this book was meant to come to my attention one way or another. Thanks to a friend, I came across this book " Salt Sugar Fat: How the food giants hooked us " a few months back and I knew I had to read it to understand the history and evolution of processed foods in the US.  The book is divided into three sections - a section each for Salt, Sugar, and Fat - the three essential pillars of processed foods. It has been a fascinating and eye-opening read with multiple takeaways. I stumbled upon many new terminologies - bliss point, sensory-specific satiety, vanishing calorie density, stomach share, etc. I also learned about the multiple roles of these three ingredients apart from their obvious role of taste.  The author has taken the effort to go deeper into the two aspects that make processed foods addictive - formulation and marketing. He has provided multiple examples and case studies that...