Nivedita Das Narayan

Who walks with me in those crucial minutes? Who walks alongside my heartfelt attempts? Who takes charge when it gets precipitous? Who ran with me that day? That day when the pulse had slowed down,  breathing came in heavy;  when the mind teased to abandon my spirit,  the body felt heavier than a chestful of weights? Who did I see appear by my side like a wisp of breath? Appear as a soft sudden whiff of presence right beside me, tingling the soft hair of my neck and arm on my left? Who were You? Who was it who deftly clasped my palm and whispered 'I am with you, I will run with you;  right till the end .' 'I will see you through it however slow, however clumsy it is; right till the end .' Was it You? Is it possible to have felt your presence so raw, so bodily? Because I did feel you in every folding of my leg, each leaning of my body. You were there, right beside me;  right till the end . Because soon enough my spirit soared trus...

When I say I don't miss you, or that I've got used to the void of your absence,  I Lie. Because I do miss You a lot, I miss you and me and the certain kind of us that we were,  together and apart. I miss a lot of those small things more than the big, noisy, visible ones — like the whiff of debate and disagreement arriving ahead of our chats,  many such after the morning newspaper or the evening news ritual; Or that lull throbbing with the hope of hearing your firm, small voice  across the phone-line  as Ma got you on the  line to talk during my daily catch up calls, filling up time imagining the peculiar shuffle of you feet  to rise from your age-old armchair  as you got to the phone, as I'd try to gauge an  understating of your  degenerating health. (I never did tell you though what your weak, feeble voice of some days did to me!) Or the sound of silence that lurked around and between us...

Met an Executive Coach the other day who expressed a different perspective on Life coaching from how I saw it till then. {A disclaimer at the very outset : I have a stake in both life and executive coaching and my win will surely be if both grow bigger in the individual and organizational consideration-set as immensely valuable, effective and result oriented interventions that can lead to measurable growth and improvement} This senior internal Executive Coach of a leading technology services organization described Life Coaching as ‘feel good’ coaching. Her views on Executive coaching, ( as compared to Life coaching ) was that it is more structured, quantifiable and hence measurable. While the Coaching industry in India goes through its adolescence and tries to rid itself of the image of its intangibility, let’s try understand this better through this very example. Let’s imagine a scenario in the case of this technology services behemoth – How will it be if Executiv...

Meanwhile, life happens. A postscript from this morning Some years back I said hello and introduced myself to a fellow gym-goer after months of smiling and nodding at each other in the midst of our individual fitness attempts. She reciprocated and introduced herself,  'Hi, I am a marathoner.' Insisting, I sought, 'You are…?' She continued 'I am a marathoner, my name is...’ Till date I draw a blank when I try to drum up her name from my memory duct. I’d stopped listening right there at the beginning of our first hello. My memory is, however, vivid with the kind of shaken I felt that morning. My confounded self could barely make sense of this label-laden introduction by this nice girl who I was looking to befriend. A matchless encounter with one who seemed to  define herself by what she must hold highest in the pecking order of her fitness-feathered cap. If you are wondering what happened beyond that promise of a hello – well, no surprise! Till date our...