I must have been around 8 or 9 when I contracted jaundice. It was awful. I can still remember the horror of watching my eyes and skin go yellow, watching everything I touched stain yellow, feeling feverish all the time, unable to sleep, unable to relax.

The internet is a treasure trove of incredible empowerment. In April last year, I read about a boy, whose brother was working as a sweeper on India’s trains, who got lost and separated from his mother in 1986, when he was five. He found her. A quarter of a century later. Using Google Earth.

'First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. And then you win.' That’s one of my all-time favourite Mahatma Gandhi quotes. [But it doesn't displace the No 1: When asked what he thought about Western civilisation, Gandhi replied "I think it would be a good idea"].

If you haven’t had a habanero mango salsa dosa, you haven’t lived. But then again, if you had a habanero mango salsa dosa, you may not have lived to read this. It’s lethal.

Yesterday I spent some time thinking about how advances in transportation technologies affected the very fabric of village and town society, and about how advances in communications and computing technologies are helping us recreate the village structures we had lost.

Peter Ferdinand Drucker has influenced a great deal of my thinking, particularly about management, about about organisations, about all of business, but in particular, about the customer.

I spend a lot of time thinking about sharing, and sharing what I’m thinking. Why? I don’t quite know. Maybe it comes from having been born in Calcutta. Or maybe it’s because my father was a journalist as was his father, while my other grandfather was a professor.

The way we work has changed fundamentally. Workflow is a bit like trains and every company had its own train set. Little engines and carriages and cabooses; perfectly formed lines and switches and signalling; miniature stations and marshalling yards. The whole kit and caboodle. And trains “flow” around the system. Always on the lines. Linear. Well-behaved. A system entire of itself. Isolated. But no matter, especially if you operate a monopoly or near-monopoly. What was important was that the trains ran on time. Safely. Sometimes.

Enjoying work is not a crime. But sometimes it can feel that way. In some companies the visible manifestation of enjoyment — a smile, a laugh — is frowned upon. Heigh-ho-ing and singing on your way to work is considered not done.