Observations from my Frame of Reference

“This is the story of how a little courageous boy helped catch the thief. Remember fear lies only in your head. Fear is a greater foe than the object of its origin.  Those who can overcome it achieve great things in life.” - As Mr. Mohanty (the literature teacher) finished reading a prose, the school-bell rang declaring the end of today’s school. - “I want all of you to write the answers for the questions in this chapter. Write it in your own words …” - Impatient Bunu could not hear further. He and his backbencher friends had their bags packed and ready. They were waiting for the teacher's signal to run to the playground.  To Bunu’s dismay, the front benchers started assembling around the teacher to ask doubts, delaying dismissal of the class. While coming back from the playground with Amit, Bunu saw Siba, Priyanka and Ritu arguing about something. Amit and Bunu approached them. “Hey you guys!! Siba here is boasting that he had met a ghost near the village graveyard. His cycle

     Govind threw his bag on the floor and sat down in a chair on the veranda. Frustration was quite evident on his face. He called out to Bharati for a glass of water. He called out again, after a few minutes, for there was a delay in obeying his order. Still, there was no response. He went to the main door and found it locked from the inside. He went around the house, a bit more annoyed, to discover the cause of the disobedience. The back door was open, his two years old daughter was sleeping on a mat, and their dog was guarding her. Bharati was attending to cows in the backyard. She could not have heard Govind. On a usual day, Govind would have found a reason to initiate a quarrel, but today he was occupied with some thoughts. He had a glass of water and went back to the chair and his thoughts.      Govind was a peon in a newly formed private college in their area. Well, we can safely, considering the average age of educational institutes, call a ten-year-old college a new one. The

     The corridor was long, stretched infinitely on either side. The ceiling, the floor, and the walls were painted bright white except for the red doors on the walls, resembling the corridor of a hotel room. I knocked on the door, whose nameplate read ‘Debaki Rani Acharya’. My heart filled with nervousness and excitement. A woman in her late twenties opened the door. She greeted me with a smile and asked me to come in.     My presumptions of the size of the room diminished as I stepped in. Like magic, the scenery completely changed. I was standing in front of a cottage.  Everything appeared familiar as I looked around. It was my village, just not the way I remembered it. The house was the predecessor of the one I grew up in. A few mango plants, each not more than a man’s height, were planted near the fences. My earliest memory remembers them, fully grown, seventy-eighty years in the future. In the summers, my sister and I used to be woken up early by grandfather.  We would go to the g

        My younger self, in its solitude, once did something which could be considered taboo in society. I was staying in Bangalore for my job. I spent most of my weekends sleeping, procrastinating, going to movies with friends and occasionally reading a book. I had a long weekend for four days, Thursday to Sunday, owing to Rakshya Bandhan (a Hindu Festival) and some other occasion, I do not remember. My two friends with whom I used to go to the movies and my flatmate were not in Bangalore.     By Friday night, I was sufficiently frustrated by my boredom. Rain in Bangalore circumscribes my motivation for going out. On Saturday, after lazily browsing through youtube and watching some documentaries, its suggestion algorithm led me to some videos, video-journals on the plight of sex workers in cities like Delhi and Kolkata. Disdain of the society towards them dribbles down on their children as well. Lack of health care and education enhances the gap in social inequalities, forcing the gir

      I work in the Seller Growth team in Flipkart. We help them improve their business by showing them different metrics and recommendations based on their and their peers’ performance on our platform. Some days back, our product-manager came up with a concept, a central page, where we would be surfacing an aggregate view of all the recommendations personalized for the sellers. We already had our backend which generates various recommendations based on different cohorts. They had to make a new system to give sellers new goals and benchmark them on the basis of their performance. This page had a beautiful UX. We implemented shimmers, animations, and confettis to be shown when the seller achieves his goal and has a benchmark upgrade. This page had to be mobile responsive to be supported both on desktop and mobile browsers. Also, Flipkart’s seller app should be able to open this page inside the mobile application instead of building a page of their own. We are constantly trying to build

       “Guddu, I am leaving now. I have to reach early today.” My father woke me up. I got out of the bed, closed the door behind him, and went back to sleep. My alarm was scheduled to ring at eight.     I am fifteen years old, studying in ninth class. I am staying with my father in a small one-bedroom rented house in Bhubaneswar. I study in a school where my father is also a teacher. He is the shift in charge for high school, a rank just below the headmaster. Today is the nomination day for the school election. In our school, a small election is conducted every academic year to choose the student cabinet. The election is held for four posts, the President, the Secretary, the Sports head, and the Cultural head. Being elected into the cabinet is one of the coolest achievements of school life. High school (eighth, ninth, and tenth standard) students get to vote in the election. Tenth-standard students are not allowed to file nominations because they are supposed to invest more tim