Can I wish you a happy new year and also call bullshit on ‘new year’? Wtf is a ‘new year’ anyway? It’s a way to mark both the passage of time and its cyclical nature. There are many ways to do that and today is just one. The year 2023…

This Christmas Eve, with my palm nestled in my beloved’s, I watched ducks bathe in the marsh as the sky above caught flame. Overcome by the elements manifesting themselves so magnificently, I called out to them, “Thank you so so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Then: “How can…

In March 2020, after many meetings providing detailed feedback, I posted the following essay about my disturbing experience at the previous year’s Women in Management (WIM) banquet at Stanford’s business school. Despite prior approval to post, I was asked to take down the essay which I agreed to do temporarily…

Sometime in the mid-2000s, my cousin and I called each other excitedly during a Superbowl: Did you see that Indian guy in the Budweiser ad?! We felt we had finally arrived: to be included in something as American as beer and football! While I empathize with Hari Kondabolu’s campaign against…

In 2006, I spent a few months in India to help launch Google’s sales offices. It was a thrill to return as a professional to the homeland I’d left when I was nine. One day, I was excited to see a street vendor selling a favorite childhood snack. He charged…

I have surprised myself with my steadiness amidst the troubles of this year, of which the COVID-19 pandemic is the latest and obviously worst. I recently journaled to unpack what is supporting my steadiness so I could use it more consciously. I’m sharing the process I doodled as my journal…

Something is alive in me. The fluttering in my heart is not its own beat, it’s the desperate wings of a baby bird, soft and yellow like a duckling, trapped in my atria. It pecks at my heart constantly, its clawing and thrashing a maddening irritation. All the time, I’m…

I don’t know why I paused on this video in my feed but idle curiosity kept me watching. A previous colleague, now CEO of his own company, offered tips to sales reps on dressing for success. …

While waiting to meet a friend, I came across this wonderful essay on the new Black Panther movie. Even the abstract cut into me and immediately brought tears to my eyes: Ryan Coogler’s film is a vivid re-imagination of something black Americans have cherished for centuries — Africa as a…