Deep Adhya, PhD

Happy holidays. Liberty building, London. The Christmas break can be quite an ordeal. When you are in a serious monogamous relationship with your work, like I sometimes wish to believe, moments arise when you want a break from it. I look forward to sleeping in till noon, and watching endless TV shows. I look forward to not having to deal with uncomfortable conversation, or any conversation at all, not having to send emails (and survive the anxiety afterwards of an uncertain feeling in the gut that I surely must have written something inappropriate in it), and not having to shower and get dressed in the layers of clothing required in the cold weather. Then the break arrives, and I am in heaven. For a couple of days at least, as I get to check all the boxes on the list of to-dos (or lack thereof) that I was holding off till the break arrived (like writing what I felt about it). But humans are slave to their habits, and I am human for sure, I think. It starts to go downhil...

Back in the day when Clarkson, May and Hammond were still an item on BBC, they did city challenges where the three used different modes of transport to go from point A to point B. The modes of transport were usually a car, public transport and if the city had a river, a boat. The challenges were also accompanied by maps with moving GPS trackers to show how they were progressing. It was exciting because you always knew that the underdog, such as public transport had a fighting chance to win. However they never tried walking as an option. So here’s my Top Gear inspired bus vs walking challenge. Let me start by giving a little background. My morning commute to work entails taking the 381 to Peckham Bus Station, then taking the 345 from Peckham Bus Station to work. I have been doing this commute for the past year, five days a week, and I have been through every possible scenario. The optimum scenario, the unremarkable, not stressful one, is when the 381 arrives within 5 minutes o...

The ‘JOMO’ (the Joy Of Missing Out) movement has started. I have to admit I didn’t know much about the ‘FOMO’ (the Fear Of Missing Out) movement that it is trying to replace. FOMO has always been a thing among competitive people even before the internet. If you recall those pesky kids who used to eavesdrop on your private conversation then later gossip about it, or those who copied your homework just because you would do a better job (so why bother making an effort to do it themselves), that’s FOMO in action. Some sections of the human race have always been obsessed with the lives of others, not out of curiosity but out of a need to enrich their own lives. Now we have a name for it, thanks to the internet. When doing things became so easy that we could do all things we desired by just sitting on the bed in our undies, we thought, “Woah!” What were we missing out on all this time? So the race began. Everyone wanted to experience as many things as possible in their ‘short’ ...