Hardik Rajgor

A rtificial Intelligence  will soon be out there to take our jobs. But as the popular Internet  meme  goes, machines can’t take our jobs… if we become machines. And so,  working crazy  is primed and stress has become a currency to flaunt. Taking a breather is for losers, real men take a paracetamol and email the project file at 3 am on a Saturday night. The gulag-like slavery and peanut-sized paychecks are so mainstream that if you leave office at 6 pm, people ask you if you’ve taken a half day. And do you dare ever ask for leave? Going on leave is so demonised in  Indian office culture , that employees feel guilt and shame even asking for a few days off — about as stressful a question as asking your boss for his daughter’s hand in marriage. He looks at you with the same level of love  Arvind Kejriwal  reserves for  Narendra Modi ; the tension could be cut with a knife. Every leave application turns into a leave negotiation that would...

E lon  Musk  has managed to float an electric car in space, we’re transplanting animal organs into human bodies, and we have even achieved recreating  meat  in the laboratory. We have all of this technological progress and finesse at our feet, but there is a final problem we still don’t have the solution for: the office air conditioner. That seven people in a co-working space can’t agree on a mutual AC temperature must surely be one of the biggest questions of this age. In a world where  Google  can provide the answer to every question, why does the air conditioner stand in the way of complete collegial harmony? One reason could be that we can’t get the language right. If you really look at it, “temperature kam karo,” is an ambiguous command, open for interpretation. Does it mean yanking up the warmth? Does it mean that your colleagues could do with more chill (they almost always do)? Lloyd has come up with an  AC that has WiFi  and AC remot...

I grew up in the suburbs of  Mumbai  and  apun  ka childhood was really  fatte . Kids would do a lot of  bol bachchan  on the ground   but then had to back their  shanpatti  with  kadak  football skills.   Those merely engaging in  bhankaas  were taken to the  khopcha  and given  kharcha paani.  One couldn’t go home and do  panchayat  about the  lafda  that happened on the ground because no one wants to be friends with a  phattu  who complains to mom. Also, because your  bantai  log wouldn’t be pleased, and  tereko dho dalega . We believed in being  bindaas  and settling our  nalla  problems  sumadi mein. As we got into  school , I turned out to be an average student who ended up scoring below average marks in  Hindi . “ Tereko  kitna aaya?” I would ask my friend who also barely managed to scrape through. ...