2016
Her eyebrows are mysterious
like the winding roads hiding their destination
It is only when you move further down South and look into her eyes
Do you realize that you are LOST FOREVER
The best teacher I ever had
A long time ago when I was in school in India, I was scoring in the ballpark of 70 out of 100 on Math tests. This was considered fairly average in India. My mother thought I needed some help and so I started taking classes with a math tutor who lived in our building. Her students fondly called her Aunty.
After my first week at her class, she immediately recognized that my problem with math was lack of practice and attitude more than anything else. She assured me that if I practice a certain set of exercises from the book, I would have no problem at the annual tests. I took her advice to heart and solved not only the exercises that she recommended but every problem in the book. My solutions to all the problems proudly occupied around 50 pages in my homework notebook.
Next week I shared my solutions and she was extremely delighted and genuinely happy to find out that I had solved all those problems. She was always encouraging and helped me form what Carol Dweck now calls the Growth mindset.
As I lived in the same building as her, sometimes my mother or me would run into her while running errands. She would always tell my mother that I would not have any problem doing anything I put my heart into. She gave me this confidence that I can do anything that I work hard towards. This changed my attitude beyond what words can describe.
Always smiling and encouraging her students, she was extremely smart and knowledgeable. She recently passed away and Dhairya (her son) has a heart-touching account of her daily life after suffering from brain metastases. My deepest sympathy to Dhairya and family. I will always remember her as the teacher who changed my life and the best teacher that I ever had. May her soul rest in peace.
P.S. - FWIW, I scored 94/100 in Maths that year and till date remains my highest score in any math-related test I have undertaken.
“If the going ever gets tough, I will be there for you. If it rains, I will hold the umbrella for you!” @starprncss3 and @altheadvocate looking so cute together ❤️
Association
When experiencing a product, the experience is not just the product. Its also about the association that you make with the product. Its about the feeling of familiarity that comes for free with it. The stronger the association with that feeling, the more incapable you would be of actually having an unbiased opinion about it. One example that comes to my mind is when I ordered a fancy soap bar after reading its description - it smells like sweet vanilla and orange. In this case its not only about liking the smell of the soap, its also about the association that you would make with the smell. The moment I started using the soap, it reminded me of a detergent used to wash clothes in India. So it was not the actual product itself but my association of it with something repulsive that ruined the experience for me. If you want a product to be acceptable to a global audience, it becomes important to work with people from a diverse set of backgrounds so that they can make different sets of associations with the same product. It would leave you culturally more informed and prevent you from committing product experience faux pas.
feel the heartbeat
words can lie,
eyes can lie,
expressions can lie,
body language can lie,
but a heartbeat never lies!
