lockdown tales

Lockdown for me has been a very interesting journey , but now that  we are finally moving to normalcy – I thought why not reflect on how transforming the past year has been.

Staying at home gave me so much time to think , think and overthink every decision I’ve made in my life , few of them I was proud of and a few decisions I wanted to slap myself for.

However , the same overthinking made me realise that no matter how much I cringe when I think of those decisions , I wouldn’t have been the same if it wasn’t for those.

And for a person who barely stays at home I made some crazy decisions and did some very unexpected things during the lockdown. 

Around May, June our house help also left for a while , so my dad and I ended up doing all the work in the house – my dad mopped the house and cleaned  the bathrooms while I cleaned the dishes & put the clothes for wash , the rest of the stuff that needed to be taken care of basically was forgotten about.

Appudu anipinchindi , Naveen Pollisetty was 100% right when he said “ maa panimanishi yadama ki oka gudi katali anipistundi “ annapudu.

I even tried cooking – when I say go big or go home I mean it.

 I was at home ; but I definitely went big. 

Normally when people start cooking they start with making rice or an omelet , but I go big so I started with paneer kebab ( which I found in the trash the next day morning , so you know how that went )

And while all my friends started learning the guitar and the ukulele I sat home watching Netflix.

However thanks to Haripadma Atha and my back pain I started doing yoga!

And trust me I cannot emphasise enough on how much my life has changed ever since , waking up and taking a bath immediately felt weird after 5 months into lockdown but it did incorporate discipline into my life.

I can’t sleep in the afternoon so waking up early gave me so much time throughout the day – that I started doing online courses , I even did a masterclass by tan France on styling and I realised how much I enjoy doing that ; and now when I’m bored I just pick out clothes from my closet and style them.

Furthermore , towards the end of the year I had finished reading two amazing books:

The power of nunchi & The secret 

These books introduced me to such new and beautiful concepts like manifestation. Which I slowly started to believe in.

And finally on new years day I read this one write up which sums up everything about last year , the ups , the downs , the mistakes and the realisations.

Now read the next few lines ; let it sink in your heart and live in your head.

“It has been one of the greatest and difficult years of my life. I learnt that everything is temporary. Moments. Feelings. People. Flowers. I learnt love is about giving. Everything. And letting it hurt. I learnt vulnerability is always the right choice because it is easy to be cold in a world that makes it so difficult to remain soft. I learnt all things come in twos. Life and death. Pain and joy. Salt and sugar. Me and you.it is the balance of the universe. It has been the year of hurting so bad but living so good.  Making friends out of strangers. Making strangers out of friends. Learning mint chocolate chip ice cream will fix about everything. And for pains it can’t there will always be my mothers arms. We must learn to focus on warm energy. Always. Soak our limbs into it and become better lovers to the world. If we can’t learn to be kinder to each other how will we ever learn to be kinder to the most desperate part of ourselves?” -Rupi kaur

Now I know we are already two months in to this new year but it’s never too late to wish for the best right?

YOGA…PULSAR…HOMEO

Towards the end of 2019 my dad shared a video of Rajiv Bajaj with me, 

Normally I wouldn’t have watched it but for some reason that day I did.

And it’s safe to say Rajiv Bajaj is now one of my biggest inspirations.

With every talk of his he took me closer to the business world.

No actually he showed me that business is not a separate world.

In a way he pushed me to learn about the nuances of business.

His speeches answered a lot of my questions while giving me new ones to work on.

He might not have taught me everything I know , but he is the reason I even tried to learn everything I know about business.

One thing that I have learnt from Rajiv Bajaj is discipline , in the way he conducts himself.

He says yoga and homeopathy are his passion. And that coming from a person who is the managing director of a motorcycle company is what fascinated me to learn more about him.

So I wrote a paper about him.

About the way Bajaj thinks.

In one of the conferences Rajiv Bajaj attended , he compared Bajaj with soda.

Sounds bizarre?

Let me explain.

The market leader in two-wheelers in India is Hero Honda.

• So coke – in motorcycle business is Hero Honda.
• Bajaj was once Pepsi when they launched Discover.

 It had very few differences from the model hero Honda    launched.

• And next in line is sprite – and their strategy is to make everything except what the market leader makes. Absolute opposite.
• And finally Bajaj became Red bull ,when it created it’s own category with the Pulsar.

The reason I think he compared motorcycles and soda is because we have all tasted it.

To get a better understanding we need to know what it feels like and to make that happen he compared it to something that we consume very often.

And in another one of his videos he spoke about the nine dots that make a product sell.

These are the best marketing tools by themselves.

After watching a lot of his speeches and analysing the nine dots  I can finally say that marketing is not just about how good the advertisements are. It is about how the sales person in the shop connects all these nine dots and informs the customer in one line.

And in my point of view the two most important dots apart from the product itself are credible story and tangible experience.

If these are put to me in an emotional way then I think I would buy the product.