The person who receives it, may not want it. You may not have enough of it. But the most precious gift you can give anyone is your time.

It’s Monday.

Like me, you probably have a lot of things to do this week.

Like me, you’re probably busy with a job that didn’t exist 100 years ago.

Like me, you are probably a descendant of one of the few hunter-gatherers that survived the trip out of Africa.

With that perspective, the work-week doesn’t seem as urgent or aggravating anymore, does it?

When someone offers praise: “you outdid yourself,” what they really mean is you exceeded their expectations of you. We are capable of more than others expect of us. All of us have great possibilities.

The rest of the day may be for architectures of concrete. The morning and the evening are for geometries of light.

Every nanosecond of life is more miraculous and more inexplicable that all of our made-up stories.

The universe is large beyond comprehension, cold, and hostile. Against all odds, even getting up in the morning is an incredible act of defiance.

I saw this in Beijing a few years ago (on this day). With Germany in a must-win match today at the World Cup, it all makes sense now!

England are up three goals over Iran in their first match of the FIFA World Cup, but the scoreline isn’t what I’ll remember.

It is very clear that the goalkeeper of Iran suffered a pretty bad concussion in the first few minutes of the match. Why was he allowed by FIFA to stay on?

Remember the 2014 Final in which Germany’s Christoph Kramer kept playing after a concussion and asked the referee, “Is this the final?”

There are things that are bigger than sports. It is very sad to see that not much has changed.

If you are having a bad day, think about this— 100 years ago, no one knew what DNA was. 100 years ago, astronomers thought the universe ended with the Milky Way. 100 years ago, modern medicine didn’t exist. 100 years ago, racism, homophobia, sexism, and mistreatment of those with different minds was accepted as mainstream.

If you need your life to be well structured, or conversely prefer it completely chaotic, you should think hard about being a parent.

Being a parent is structured chaos.

I saw the Tamil movie Ponnayin Selvan-I yesterday. I’m not a Tamil speaker, and so I had not read the source material, but I could sense the greatness of the historical novel by Kalki. The casting, set design, sound, and cinematography are brilliant. It is definitely epic in grandeur. The film was enjoyable, but felt a bit disjointed and difficult to follow though. I wish the characters and their motivations had been explained earlier to set the stage for a visual medium.

Your thoughts?

My experience is that you can know people for years and not know much about them when everything is going right, but you will find out a lot about them very quickly when something goes wrong.

This applies both to personal relationships and to workplace interactions.

Exactly four years ago I was in Varanasi. How the world (and my life) changed since then!

This is a wonderful long-read on the carnivorous Nepenthes plant: www.wired.com/story/nig…

I think we can assume that those who complained about Twitter for years, will be the last to leave it. So, instead of telling folks how awesome the alternatives are, the way to get them to switch is to tell them that they’ll have a lot to complain about if they do.

If there can be mushroom risotto, then why can’t there be king oyster mushroom khichdi? Try it. It’s delicious!

Since it is late on Saturday, I’m under immense pressure to demonstrate my talent in the dying hours of this week.

My boss brought back some coffee for me from a microplantation in Antioquia, Colombia.

I wish you could smell the aroma of the beans which have a hint of chocolate and bourbon. And taste the smooth finish of a freshly brewed cup!

There’s nothing quite like succulent fruiting bodies of fungi sautéed in a little bit of olive oil.

It was dreamy this morning.