The Five People I Meet in (My Walking) Heaven

I must have been walking since I was a toddler. Of late, however, I rediscovered the joy of putting my feet forward one step at a time.

It has been almost two years since I revived the good old habit that most elders in India still swear by: the morning walk. Each day, at slightly varying times as the sun rises, I pull myself out of bed, freshen up, and head out to the nearby public park. There, in the company of fellow walkers, birds and squirrels, I walk—first in a rambling, easy manner, and then at the brisk pace advised by doctors to diabetics like me.

There is a certain heavenly freshness and vitality during the morning. The quality of the breeze amidst all those plants and trees is indeed something else. 

My walks have once again brought me closer to nature and allowed me to take a bite of this divinity—before the devils of everyday living claim the remains of the day.

In these morning walks, as I move along the footpath that goes across the park as well as encircles it (‘enrectangles’ it, rather), I notice scores of people walking, jogging or just wondering what brought them here. Some of them do make me curious. 

After months into my routine, I began filtering out the “regulars” from the “occasionals” and the “not-seen-befores”—even as I made no conscious effort for this mental segregation. These things happen on their own, no?

And then, gradually, among the regulars, there emerged five souls that particularly caught my attention.

Initially, for a few days, I just ignored their presence. But as time went on, I couldn’t help but notice their peculiarities. Now, they have become as much of a habit as my two-speed walking ritual.

Let me introduce you to each of these five people I keep meeting in my walking heaven. 

The speechless soul

At first I thought there was no one behind me and it was an illusion. But there he was, when I stopped for a moment and allowed him to pass me by: a thin middle-aged hint of a man walking quietly and slowly. When I again encountered him in one of my rounds, I saw his face. I think I noticed a quivering movement of his lips but no words came out. He had a slight grayish stubble and a patch of cloth was sewn on his shirt, around the chest. It had a mobile number and an address. 

It is possible that this speechless soul has dementia or something and is prone to forgetting where he has to go after he finishes his long, quiet tours of the park. I often thought of asking him about the patch but couldn’t bring myself to do it. I just let him be.

And as if in a quiet token of return appreciation, he allows me to pass by so that I can pick up pace if I so wish.

Lady first, lady second 

There are two ladies that do their “conversational rounds” in the direction opposite mine. I often catch phrases such as, “Aaj main gobhi banaoongi” (Today I’ll cook cabbage), “bahut zyada kha liya” (ate too much) and “Meri kahan koi sunta hai?” (But who listens to me?) 

It took me a while to figure out that most such phrases escaped from the jaws of only one of the dames. The other lady would mostly nod or speak in monosyllables. And the more she would listen, the more our chatterbox would let loose—primarily complaints and recipes of a bewildering variety. The lady who claimed that nobody listened to her indeed had an ear tuned toward her at an optimal frequency each morning.

The always-on talker

Then there was this boy—must be in his early twenties—who would pace a particular portion of the path while talking on his mobile. He had so much to talk and so little to walk (on). Each day, I noticed, he would choose a particular spot, pace back and forth for about 20-30 feet, and go yakking into his beloved device. 

Sometimes, as is the habit of a lot of folks in India, he would put that part of the phone where the speakers are, close to his ears and listen for a few minutes—then he would put it to his lips and speak for another few minutes. And he would go on doing this alternately for countless number of times. 

Once in a while, he would stop pacing and find a place to sit down. But his phone talk would go on uninterrupted.

I think he is a morning talker.

The bucket buddy

Among the five, he is my favorite. Each morning I see this guy wearing pajamas and carrying a bucketful of water to fill up the small earthen pots kept underneath certain trees. These are meant for the birds of the park but usually get depleted by the end of each day. Our man would repeatedly fill his bucket at one of the taps in the park and walk around, looking for empty pots. One by one, he would refill them until each had sufficient water for the chirping thirsty.

I often thank him silently on behalf of our winged friends and admire his commitment to do this simple act of goodness, day after day.

I haven’t really “met met” these five people. But I do greet them in my mind when I see them in our shared space—and continue to be amazed and amused with what I end up observing.

Now, did I just see a red-vented bulbul flit past, mocking me with a curious song as it landed on a twig?

I guess so :)

Will AI help companies deliver better CX in a multi-experience future?

Image: Freshworks

Customer experience (CX) may mean different things to different companies but it means only one thing to customers: whether they liked what a company offered or not in a given context or setting. And whether they are going to have that offering again—and, yes, whether they would grab anything else the company wants to sell them. Perhaps they would also spread the good word on the product or service used.

Alas, in most cases, it is the bad word that gets thrown around—often wildly and out of the company’s control into the ruthless arenas of social media.

For the past several years, most organizations have responded by throwing back more and more technology to fix their CX efforts. According to research firm Gartner, global spending on customer experience and relationship management (CRM) software reached $48.2 billion in 2018, a growth of 15.6% over the previous year.

But, despite the rising expenditure on tech and the best intentions of companies, the struggle to get a handle on customers and delight them with exceptional support and service continues. So, what is going on here? What challenges are companies facing in putting together a complete picture of their customers and serving them better? Whatever happened to the promise that up and coming technologies such as chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI) were supposed to hold in equipping organizations with the wherewithals to delight their customers (and do so at lower costs)?

We spoke to a few industry analysts and experts to dig deeper and see what gives.

One of the fundamental problems, they say, has to do with the ability to use the right data to get a comprehensive view of the customer. “After all these years, having a 360-degree view of the customer is still on the agenda for companies. One of the issues here is, what do you understand by a 360-degree view? Is it an electronic Rolodex? Is it an extended set of data about the customer, something that different vendor tools are now increasingly exchanging? Or is it something else?” says Brian Manusama, a senior director analyst at Gartner.

On his part, he offers a simple, functional definition. “If you ask me, it is the right data in order to serve your customers well. It can have just two or three components or even hundreds of components, including different metrics such as customer sentiment or behavior,” he avers.

There are other aspects to this challenge. According to Ray Wang, principal analyst, founder, and chairman of Constellation Research, “On the one hand, most companies don’t have access to all their internal data. This lives in siloed departmental systems that rarely talk to each other. On the other hand, most companies now rely on more external data which is often seen as not secure, not as safe, and in different data formats. The last part is that data often does not tie back to business processes or journeys—which means it’s hard to determine a recommendation or next best action.”

The ‘recommendation or next best action’ typically refers to suggestive responses provided by the AI engine that is increasingly getting embedded in chatbots, CRM, and other business software. Such recommendations are based on a knowledge repository comprising standard answers mapped to frequently asked questions, previous customer interactions, etc. It is now common industry wisdom that for better recommendations, it is necessary to have a rich data repository and a finely tuned machine learning model.

Wang points to a basic flaw in how most organizations have traditionally dealt with customer experience. “Most [customer] journeys have been designed for internal efficiency, not external efficiency. Customers don’t care what department you are in and this means the design point must revolve around the customer,” he says. To correct this anomaly, a lot of organizations are now “retooling” to support this from an internal process and technology point of view.

Another big headache for companies is to make their disparate CX systems talk to each other and work as an integrated solution. Today, there is a dearth of holistic solutions that can manage the entire customer lifecycle—from acquisition to retention to life-time value (LTV) management. “There are different piecemeal offerings from different solution providers. For example, there are a lot of sales analytics companies out there who help sales teams optimize their processes; likewise, there are a lot of marketing attribution and automation software that have AI capabilities to help marketers spend their budgets more optimally and so on. Similarly, on the customer success side, there are tools for churn prediction and other areas, but the overall customer journey stack is broken,” says Swaminathan Padmanabhan, director of data science at Freshworks.

According to him, it will be of fundamental value to customers “if we can tie all these capabilities together.”

A multi-experience world
Customers are now interacting with brands through a complex mesh of interfaces and touchpoints—physical as well as digital. “Do you know how many different ways one can order pizza from Domino’s? Twenty four!” says Manusama by way of an example. Such ordering ease includes the use of phone, text, social media, and voice assistants, besides showing up at physical stores and giving the order over the counter.

“We are moving toward a multi-experience world with three different modalities of customer experience across multiple digital touchpoints—gesture, text, and voice,” he says. At Gartner, analysts now call upon tech leaders to get ready to serve ‘the everything customer’—one who requires conflicting things at the same time: to be treated like everybody else but served on their own unique terms, to be connected yet sometimes left alone.

When it comes to customer experience, companies are compelled to move from a reactive way of working to a more proactive way. And while this complexity is generally good for customers, as it gives them more choice and hands them greater control over how they want to be served, it leaves companies in a constant state of flux.

The growing role of AI
Analytics and AI are playing a more important role than ever in improving customer experience, according to Wang. “We are moving from gut-driven to data-driven decisions and this requires a ton of analytics to quantify and anticipate customer needs and requirements,” he says. The rising capabilities of AI offer hope to organizations. “Over time, machine learning will support precision decisions, which means better personalization, fraud detection, and customer  experience,” says Wang. He doesn’t hesitate to call AI “the biggest shift” in CX.

Padmanabhan refers to a six-layer maturity model of AI to lay out the path ahead for customer engagement. In increasing order of sophistication and capabilities, these layers are Data Representation Layer, Knowledge Layer, Ranking and Relevance Layer, Forecasting Layer, Recommendation Layer, and Autopilot Layer. In his opinion, most companies and systems today are operating at the Ranking and Relevance Layer.

“For example, when a customer query comes up, the bot ranks the different solution artefacts and suggests the best solution artefact. Similarly, when you have a bunch of sales leads, the lead scoring system ranks them according to their probability of conversion,” he explains.

As the AI system matures, one can expect AI-based recommendations such as “increase the ad budget by 15% to 20% for a 10% increase in customer acquisitions” or “use this workflow to optimize customer experience” and other actionable insights like these.

The pinnacle of AI capability, according to Padmanabhan, would be realized in the Autopilot Layer. As the name suggests, at this level, AI can replace some common functions performed by service agents or other team members. Rather than recommend something to be done, an AI can execute it as well.

 Not that AI will possibly replace humans fully—nor is that the direction taken by companies or recommended by experts. “Today, we don’t say that we are going to completely replace human labour but say there are a lot of repetitive tasks that are involved in the support workflow or the sales workflow or the customer success workflow which can be automated. So the agents’ time can be better spent by using AI,” says Padmanabhan.

Keeping the human element in customer engagement while still using AI is “actually a question of service design,” says Manusama. What customers want are four things in how they are served: effortless, quick, convenient, and seamless across different channels. “Many companies are discovering that they can do this through self-service. However, for more complex situations, having the human touch will often be more relevant or appropriate. Basically, companies need to answer this question: Where is the business value getting generated for my customers?” he adds.

Another trend he sees is customer service vendors consolidating their solutions into engagement clouds. “Silos that existed previously are getting broken down,” he observes.

Wang’s bet is on a future built around “ambient experiences”. What we have to ask ourselves, he says, is this: When do we automate, when do we augment with humans, and when is something a pure human interaction.

The role of engagement clouds or customer engagement platforms assumes greater significance in this context.  “We need common data models, great integration, and very good journey orchestration. You can do it in platforms or you can do it with really good tooling. I’m betting that the platforms will do 80% of the work and the tooling will carry the other 20%,” says Wang.

Whichever way organizations tilt, AI is likely to play a greater role in a multi-touch, multi-experience world. Now, depending on how they are able to lend a helping hand—through automation with a smile or by being pesky or ‘unintelligent’—customers will choose to give them a thumbs up or thumbs down.

(This blog post, which I wrote as a lead editor in the corporate marketing team at Freshworks, first appeared on www.freshworks.com.)

How to be One with Nature—Really

Each day as I drive to work or roam around the streets of Delhi I come across tens of thousands of enlightened beings. Humans have given them a simple, elegant name: trees.

No matter how crazy the traffic or hopeless the mess in the city, trees bring not only a breath of fresh air but a sense of calm and serenity.

Wasn’t it the poet Joyce Kilmer who wrote “But only God can make a tree”?

Well, this post is not about God but about nature—though for many, perhaps for me as well, the two ideas are inseparable. And the most immediate, intimate symbol I think of, whenever I think of nature, is the tree.

Recently I came across the phrase “to be one with nature” for the umpteenth time. And lo and behold, the image of a magnificent, lush, life-giving tree sprang to my mind.

But what does it really mean to be one with nature? And how do you do it, especially in a world where, increasingly, people live in concrete rather than green jungles?

First off, I thought I would say something about the origin of the phrase “to be one with nature” and sought Google’s help. Several combinations of keywords later, however, I realized that the search giant was as clueless as I—although I must thank it for the rich harvest of articles mentioning the phrase my search turned up.

Never mind the origin. Let's talk about its prevalence and effect.

I suspect most of us intuitively know what we mean when we want to be one with nature or hear someone express this wish. But have we tried describing it? And do we all experience it in the same way? What happens in that moment, really?

The most obvious, and perhaps most awesome, way to be one with nature is to go on a nature trail in a pristine forest. Where the greenery is thick and the scent of dew permeates the atmosphere. Where the sun's rays play hide and seek with the leaves. And where the sound of water gurgling in the brook next to you lulls you into a peace you never knew existed.

In such a serene backdrop, being one with nature possibly means the feeling of freshness and quiet and connectedness to everything alive around us.

Yes, I've felt it, this right-in-the-lap-of-nature kind of being one with nature.

But there have been other occasions as well, when I think I have been touched by that oneness without the luxury of being wrapped in nature’s majesty. 

I recently spent a year in Mumbai, working for a media company. There was a nice terrace, overlooking the railway lines, on the ninth floor of the office building. In my tea breaks, I would often stand there and watch black kites circling nearby. Once in a while, they would spot some prey on the ground and swoop down to catch it in their talons. But mostly, they would just swim around in the air, making spirals from high up to down below and then up again. Their motion was graceful and their outspread wings magnificent. I sometimes stood motionless, admiring their skill and poise.

A similar feeling of oneness fills me when I watch children play. Children are at their natural best when they laugh—and nothing brings me more joy than a bubbling bunch of kids laughing together. When I was in school, I often got punished for making other students sitting around me laugh. Needless to say, I never minded the scoldings.

I remember there was rain and hailstorm a few years back in Delhi when I, along with a few other office goers, caught myself scampering for cover. I took refuge in the colonnade of Connaught Place’s inner circle. There, I saw four or five boys in their preteens making merry in the downpour—completely in the buff. But they had no awareness of their naked bodies, drenched as they were in their natural tendency to extract happiness from whatever life brought them. Impulsively, the most adventurous of them slid down the ramp around a lift built for Metro passengers. The others soon followed suit, sliding down the smooth, granite-paved surface with an abandon only children know. My heart skipped a beat and a smile appeared on my previously somber face.

Sometime in high school, when I took to the more serious pastime of reading, being one with nature had an echo in me through the beauty of the written word. It still does—when the words of an author resonate in my mind long after I’ve finished a passage or a book. Sometimes, I wonder who wouldn’t be moved to ‘oneness’ reading or hearing such beautiful prose or poetry. Sample below some of my favorites:

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

- Albert Camus

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

 - John Keats

Siddhartha listened. He was now listening intently, completely absorbed, quite empty, taking in everything. He felt that he had now completely learned the art of listening. He'd often heard all this before, all these numerous voices in the river, but today they sounded different. He could no longer distinguish the different voices—the merry voice from the weeping voice, the childish voice from the manly voice. They all belonged to each other: the lament of those who yearn, the laughter of the wise, the cry of indignation and the groan of the dying. They're all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.

- Hermann Hesse

To say “I love you” one must know first how to say the “I.”

- Ayn Rand

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

- Ernest Hemingway

And then, there are several tiny little things that can lift my spirits into that wholeness, that unity. 

Listening to a piece of soulful music is one such. When I listened to Blue Story by Deep Forest for the first time for instance, and I mean really listened and not just play it casually on my playlist, I felt a tributary of calm flow inside me that went meandering alongside its soothing notes. I felt fulfilled. Rejuvenated. Eased. The song has stayed with me ever since as a constant companion of quiet happiness.

Another is sipping tea or coffee, either in the quietude of your personal space or even amidst the white noise in a cafeteria. You sit down in comfort, holding the warm cup snugly. Then you put your face to it, smelling the aroma and letting the little clouds engulf you and mingle with your mood. And then you take the first slow, deliberate, lasting sip. The sweet warmth fills you with sheer joy. What more can one want in life?

A lot, apparently :)

That’s why most of us spend the major part of our life running after and acquiring things we may want but not necessarily need.

And sometimes, smack-dab in the middle of all that stuff, we overhear ourselves say, “What would I not give to be one with nature?”

As for me, I sit down every single day and explore what I think is possibly the best way to be one with nature—and oneself. It’s a ritual that’s been done and refined over thousands of years as practiced by novices, experts, Buddhist monks, and (true) spiritual gurus: meditation. Not only does it allow me to enter a unique realm of peace and quiet, it often uplifts my spirits high enough to feel drunk on the nectar of life.

Meditation, I feel, is a walk in the garden of spiritual delights. Call it my daily dose of being one with nature if you will. 

May the force of nature be with you.

Be Curious to be Creative: Marcus Engman, former Design Head, IKEA

When we at Freshworks reached out to Marcus Engman, the former head of design at iconic furniture maker IKEA who now runs Skewed, and told him about our initiative, Indian Democratic Design, he said he was “happy” to see Democratic Design — as envisioned by Philippe Starck and perfected by IKEA — “growing into a global movement.” 

Indeed, he went a step further and agreed to share some key insights from his IKEA stint at Refresh19, our recently held gathering of customers and partners at Las Vegas.

One of the first things Marcus mentioned was the word Älmhult. It means little when you first hear it — but transforms into something highly significant when you realize it’s the name of a little place in Sweden where IKEA was born. Yes, that’s where 2,000 new IKEA products are developed each year — the ones for which 900 million people flock to the company’s stores. These products also bring about 2.5 billion click-happy visitors to the IKEA website.

Marcus went on to share four practices that have made IKEA successful and that still keep it going the way it does, the Democratic Design way. Here are edited excerpts from what Marcus said in his keynote at Refresh 19.


Number one, I think [it is important] to be a company with a vision and a business idea which is not all about business or making money or selling stuff — but which has a vision with empathy at the core. And IKEA’s vision is to “create a better everyday life for the many people”. So everybody has to strive for this every day; no matter how good you are, you could always become better. So I think this is like one of the major tricks for IKEA and everybody knows this vision within the company as well.

Curiosity is key to creativity
Secondly, I think that most people regard IKEA as quite an innovative and creative company. To be creative you need to be curious first because if you’re not curious you’re never going to be creative. So to have a curiosity-driven approach for everybody working within the company is really, really important. And how do you do that? One of the things is to be extremely interested in your customers like Freshworks. What we did within IKEA is not just rely on normal research from other big research companies. We went home to people every year — everybody within IKEA does this: no matter where you work within IKEA you do home visits where you interview people, where you actually live together with people in their homes to get to know [them], to make them share what are the problems, because problems are the business ideas of the future.

I remember when we started out in India a couple of years ago, we actually did more than a thousand home visits to India just to learn what’s different. How do we adapt to India in a good way? What could we learn as IKEA? One of the things we learned, which I think is kind of funny, is the way people wash or clean their homes in a lot of places by using a lot of water. And of course, IKEA furniture was not designed for that kind of cleaning environment. So what we needed to actually do to make our furniture better was to encapsulate the legs of everything, to invent new lacquers and new foil techniques to be able to do that. And then, if you would have been a normal company you would have stayed with those things within India because that’s typically for the Indian market. But we saw that bringing that to the rest of the world would make IKEA pieces of furniture better in the rest of the world as well. So taking learnings in different parts of the world and making them global — that’s one of the ideas and is part of the curiosity-driven approach.

Democratic Design as a language
Now, if you want to be a design-led company — and IKEA wanted to be a design-led company — then you have to find ideas that you could come together about. Democratic Design was actually introduced more like a tool for product development from the very beginning but what we understood along the way was that this is not [just] a tool. It’s actually a language. It’s a common language around design that makes design important for everybody within the company no matter if you work with sales or if you’re an engineer, a designer, or an interior designer. You could talk about products in the same way. The way we talk about it at IKEA was those five pillars [of Democratic Design]: form, function, quality, sustainability, and low price. And of course, you can see that the different pillars attract different parts of a company. It makes people come together to solve that impossible thing, the impossible task of making a product which contains all five.

I’ll take you through an example. This is one of my favorite products — a water carafe. It doesn’t look like much but it is so good. First of all, the starting point for this water carafe was not to make a water carafe. It was actually to make people use more tap water instead of buying water in bottles. So that was the starting point for the project. If you look upon the form of this one, most water carafes have a narrow neck just because you want to have that, you know, [traditional] cluck-cluck sound when you pour water because that sounds nice, but there are many drawbacks to that. Usually, it makes the body a little bit more fat. What we started doing was actually how could we make people use more tap water: in most countries except for China maybe you want the tap water to be cold. So you have your water carafe inside of your fridge and in the fridge you have it mostly in the doors. That’s what we saw from all of our home visits. So what are the sizes of the doors? We researched all of the door sizes of fridges all around the world to get the right kind of diameter that made the shape of this carafe. On top of that, then, you have the function. Function, if you’re a Scandinavian designer, goes very well together with the form always and the shape is also actually from out of the function. We saw that one of the problems with not using water carafes and buy bottled water is actually that it is hard to clean a lot of the water carafes. So could we make one which is easy to clean? And that’s all about the neck, to widen the neck a little bit and to make the height right for being upside down in a dishwasher.

When it comes to quality, we said from the very beginning that we want something which should be long-lasting and age in a beautiful way. So glass is a super good material. It’s also sustainable and on top of that, what would make the perfect stopper that has been used as a stopper for all of those years? Cork, of course. Everybody understands that cork is a stopper and cork also happened to be, from an IKEA point of view, a really good material at the time since all of the wineries had started using plastics or screw corks and there was too much cork in the world — and the cork industry didn’t harvest the cork from out of the trees as they should. If you don’t harvest the cork from the trees, every six-year or so the trees will die and you will not be able to harvest at all. And, of course, since there was too much cork out there, the prices were low and IKEA loves low prices. Sustainability wise, too, cork is a really good material since it is a natural material and you could reuse it over and over again.

[Now], if you have such a great water carafe or such a great idea in terms of design, you want to make it accessible to the world. And we have learned over 70 years or so within IKEA that the number one thing to actually solve if you want to work toward accessibility is to lower the threshold for people. Make it possible to buy good design.

Design and communication work together
There’s a saying that marketing is dead. I also believe that marketing is kind of dead in the old way. I believe in sharing. I believe in transparency instead and telling it how it is. So instead of, you know, [first] doing products, then the product developers and designers brief some kind of marketing department about what the intents were with this product and then the marketing department briefs an agency…Some kind of a whispering game, you know, and everything happens afterward when everything is ready.

What about starting from the very beginning? Sharing what you do and, say, design and communication going hand in hand? So when you start off doing your design development and your communication, you actually start off sharing from the very beginning. And we have five different phases we talk about. A common starting point where you actually agree upon what you want to do, then we talk about claiming the idea, that is, to tell the market from the very beginning we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this in this way, we haven’t done it yet. What’s good with that is if you say that you’re going to do something, you have to do it. So it makes the organization deliver and deliver faster. Then we share the process. Take them along to all of the trips to Vietnam or to the United States and the production sites or meet the designers…actually, have your collaboration partners or your external designers talk about how good the process has been and how good it is to work with IKEA and how good this product is and the idea behind it is — and then you launch it.

This means it’s actually six times that you talk about the product instead of once when you just launched it [straightaway]. This means that you ramp up the interest before your sales start and this means that you won’t need as much marketing at the end.

Not just make things — make things better
Now, in the next phase of my life, I work with democratic designers and I work with those tools every day. I have my own agency, Skewed, and what we do is actually three different things: one part is an agency, another part is a small media thing, and the third part is our own brand. We say that we’re not in the business of making things: we’re in the business of making things better — that’s a huge difference. I’m not interested in products; I’m interested in change. I want to change stuff. Sometimes, change comes out of products. Sometimes, it comes from other ideas. Among others, we’re working with a company called Unyq and we’re rethinking stigmas through how to design prosthetics in a completely new way, building a value chain that is totally digitalized. Everything is done with generative design tools and by actually cooperating together with the end-user. For instance, we use this generative design tool that uses biometrics and turns that [material] into a brace for scoliosis — which is really a big stigma for young girls in the world. And it looks beautiful at the end of the day. (Editor’s note: scoliosis is an irregular curvature of the spine.)

We are also taking that line of thinking into gaming gear as well, to tackle the huge ergonomic problems that gamers face. Another thing we’re working on with Democratic Design thinking is actually fish. You know, one of the biggest shifts in the world is going to be the protein shift and everybody is talking about vegetables. But one of the most efficient ways [of getting protein] is fish. So to find new ways to introduce fish to people and to package it in a more sustainable way is also something that we work on.


[Note: I wrote this blog post as a member of the corporate marketing team of Freshworks and it was first published here.]

How to Sustain Your Meditation

(Image: Ralf Kunze from Pixabay)

Sometime back, I had written a post titled How to Sit Down in Meditation. Well, I tried following my own advice – and discovered that I was able not only to sit down in peace but do so for a longer period than before.

I understand that a lot of people do take the plunge into meditation but find it difficult to sustain their poise. They either get distracted easily, become fidgety after only a few minutes, or exhibit downright impatient behavior. Yet others, who can sit down longer, feel bored and keep wondering if they are indeed progressing in their meditation practice.

Before I proceed further, a disclaimer is in order: I’m no expert on meditation and do not advocate any particular type of meditation. What I’m sharing here is based on my own simple practice – one that I have been experimenting with and self-checking on for the past six years or so. Sometimes I wish I had a guru who I could look up to and who was accessible to me for accelerating my own path – and since I don't, I content myself with taking guidance from the inner light each one of us has.

Maybe this post will nudge some fellow seekers and practitioners to offer their own tips and suggestions.

As for me, I have usually observed three phases to my meditation routine. The first one is indeed sitting down quietly and comfortably (to the extent possible and that you can accept in your heart). In this phase the focus is on kind of “settling down” amidst the turmoil around – and within – you. In my experience, this phase can be as little as a few seconds to as much as five or even ten minutes.

The second phase, or the middle phase, begins with longer, steadier breaths, accompanied with fewer and less distracting thoughts.

Here, let me take a little detour into the human mind that is like a non-stop factory of thoughts: before you’ve dealt with one, another thought emerges. Even in sleep, our mind keeps fabricating all sorts of thoughts in real and surreal scenarios. So it’s quite a feat to “empty your mind” of all thought.

As such, the “strategy” I personally adopt is not to vigorously fight the onslaught of thoughts. Doing so makes you unnecessarily agitated, making the quietude of meditation even more slippery. Instead, what I do is “engage gently” with the thoughts. Why did such and such thought occur? Why now? What does the thought “want” from me? Can I lay it to rest without dwelling too much on it? Such “thinking about thinking” often takes me to the root cause or a better understanding, allowing me to retire each thought to a gentler, rather than violent, end. Alongside, I also bring my attention back to the process of meditation – sitting comfortably, and breathing gently and deeply.

Sometimes, I just let the thoughts be and merely nod or smile internally in their direction: gradually, they become fewer in number and fade away of their own accord. Perhaps they realize that there’s no further nesting ground for them “in here”!

This middle phase is rather tricky and may take up a significant portion of your meditation time. My personal goal has been to keep it within 10-15 minutes – but sometimes a rogue thought or two get the better of “me” and keep me in their tangle much longer.

Let us now come to the third phase – perhaps the whole point of why we are meditating in the first place.

In the second phase, you have a fairly good awareness of and, possibly, concern about your environment. A noise here or there bothers you, the thought avalanche has subsided but the mind is still fizzing in its Ego-bubble, and your body demands to be adjusted every now and then to ease out any discomfort. However, the third phase of meditation is when you surrender yourself wholly to the beauty of your being. At some point of the second phase, you hear a voice in your head: “Now is the time – to stop time in its tracks, as it were.” Somewhere inside, you realize that your mind-body-soul is ready to go deeper in its meditative state.

So you say goodbye to the last approaching thought – of bodily or mental discomfort, of your social life, of your surroundings… – and turn completely to your inner, here-and-now reality. Sitting. Breathing. Unthinking. Even the image or mantra you were using to concentrate should ideally dissolve into what I can possibly call your “meditative consciousness.”

At this moment, your senses become keener and your awareness, clearer. A feeling of peace and deep love begins to spring forth from every atom of your being. From deep within you, a realization sweeps across your arteries and veins that this state is where you have always wanted to belong: it’s your innermost natural tendency, to be shorn of any pain or attachment or fear. You want to remain in this peaceful, meditative state for God-knows-how-long.

While I have tried to describe this third phase, words often fail. And I must admit it without any reservation that reaching and sustaining the third phase continues to be challenging. Body-mind aches or erstwhile-overcome distractions often make an unwelcome appearance just when you think you have nailed it.

The reality is, there is no nailing; there’s only scaling – the ever-subtler, ever-peaceful, ever-joyous heights of what’s come to be known as meditation.

Keep at it, my dear meditator, keep at it. I know I will :)

(Also read – Beyond Asana: Yoga, its Ancient Roots…)