How do you maintain work life balance?
There are just so many things to be done that it can get a little overwhelming at times. To reduce stress and improve mental and physical well-being, it’s essential to strike a balance between work and personal life. ApEx spoke to three workaholics to find out how they strike a balance between their personal and professional lives.
Naba Raj Lamsal, poet, writer
Being a poet, I try to find rhythm in life that suits my creative process and personal well being. I usually take a break before writing poems. For creativity, I engage in different activities by reading books, exploring nature and by spending time with my family and friends. Also, I try hard not to mix my personal and professional life. Sometimes, when I’m stressed I talk to my wife and it really helps. So, I would say, I prioritize self care which naturally motivates me to create meaningful poetry.
Padam Jung Kunwar, founder, Cooker Coffee
As an entrepreneur, I’m aware of the challenges balancing work and private commitments. I start my morning with a workout and a nutritious breakfast to refuel myself for the day. After going through my to-do list, I assign tasks to my team and use the calendar system to set up my schedule. Brainstorming on a new business plan is my refuge as well as outsourcing and going to events that are related to work. Additionally, I schedule time for both social and business networking. But most importantly, I try to make time for things that matter to me.
Kuber Adhikari, educator, tutor, Public Service Commission’s examination
I’m a strong believer in establishing boundaries between work and personal life. It can be quite challenging to balance all your responsibilities as a teacher, including being fully present in the classroom, paying attention to students, preparing, grading, and other tasks. I make an effort to stick to a proper daily routine. Also, I have a passion for teaching and it feels really good when students appreciate my efforts. But I make it a point to schedule time for gym. I also like to spend quality time with family and friends as well, and that helps me recharge. I believe it’s essential to take care of one’s mental health and for that you have to find ways to relax and rejuvenate.
Good reads
Chitralekha ko Chaurasi
Prajwal Parajuly
Fiction | Contemporary
To commemorate Chitralekha Nepauney’s Chaurasi—her landmark 84th birthday—Chitralekha’s grandchildren are traveling to Gangtok to pay their respects. Agastaya is flying in from New York. Although a successful oncologist, he’s dreading his family’s inquisition into why he is not married. Joining him are Manasa and Bhagwati, coming from London and Colorado respectively. One the Oxford-educated achiever; the other the disgraced eloper.
All three harbor the same dual objective—to emerge from the celebrations with their grandmother’s blessing and their nerves intact, a goal that will become increasingly impossible thanks to a mischievous maid and a fourth, uninvited guest.
Everything I Know About Love
Dolly Alderton
Memoir | Romance
The wildly funny, occasionally heartbreaking internationally bestselling memoir about growing up, growing older, and learning to navigate friendships, jobs, loss, and love along the ride Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humor, Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age—making you want to pick up the phone and tell your best friends all about it. Like Bridget Jones’ Diary but all true, Everything I Know About Love is about the struggles of early adulthood in all its terrifying and hopeful uncertainty.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Ottessa Moshfegh
Contemporary | Mental Health
A novel about a young woman’s efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it’s a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.
Essential feminist authors
Feminism demands equal political, social, and economic status for women compared to men. But there are many social conventions that pull women down and put men on a pedestal. Feminist authors attempt to draw attention to women’s issues and their unfair treatment by addressing them in their writings. But who can be considered a feminist writer? It can mean different things and the definition has changed over time but for this list, we mean writers whose works have highlighted the plight of women or the social issues they have struggled with. Here are some notable writers whose works have a strong feminist viewpoint.
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was a 20th-century poet, screenwriter, and activist. She spoke out about women’s oppression, especially of African American women, through her work. ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’, published in 1969, describes the author’s young and early years, including her sexual abuse, and addresses racial discrimination and sexism. Angelou was the first African-American female director in Hollywood who wrote award-winning screenplays that addressed the oppression of women, particularly women of color. In 2010, four years before her death, she won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her indomitable stance against racism, injustice, and rape has resonated with people from all walks of life.
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood has long been hailed as a feminist icon. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (published in 1985) and the sequel, ‘The Testaments’, shed light on the patriarchal and discriminatory practices of today’s world. It also reflects the state of women’s rights. The Handmaid’s Tale tells the story of a near-future dystopia in which the main character and narrator, a woman called Offred, is enslaved as a handmaid and forced to bear children. But Atwood’s relationship with feminism, at least publicly, is a tricky one. Throughout her career, she has been unwilling to use the term to refer to her own work, although it’s often used by others. Atwood has made it clear that she aligns herself with feminism founded on equality between men and women. She has stated explicitly that she doesn’t believe that “women are always right”.
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and modernist who explored the stream of consciousness as a narrative device and pioneered the idea of women as liberated individuals. In ‘Orlando,’ she explored the idea of gender fluidity whereas in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ she argued that female writers need to have equal opportunities to express themselves artistically, including private physical space. Creative thought, she said, comes from that freedom and privacy. Virginia Woolf theorizes that the voice of female writers has been silenced throughout history and that women writers must fight for the right to be heard. Woolf was a victim of sexual abuse and suffered from mental illness but she produced work that continues to inspire people years after they came out.
Simone de Beauvoir
French writer Simone de Beauvoir had a significant influence on the modern feminist movement. She is known for her groundbreaking ideas on feminism. Her 1949 treatise ‘The Second Sex’ outlined the ways in which women had been oppressed throughout history. It was also where the ideas of sex and gender were separated for the first time in literary history. In the book, Beauvoir argues that women, throughout history, have always been subordinated and treated as the ‘other.’ She says their existence has no individuality and they were made to play a secondary role to that of a man. In her work, she highlights the problems inherent within patriarchy and capitalism.
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath is known for her confessional poetry writing and her autobiographical novel ‘The Bell Jar’. In the book, she draws attention to her own struggle with mental illness. Her poetry highlights the oppressive and dogmatic nature of patriarchal society in post-Second World War America, where women experienced limited personal freedom, and were deemed ‘cute but essentially helpless’. Plath’s normalization of female anger and expression and her demand that women and men have the same rights made her a feminist. She won the Pulitzer Prize after her death.
The Moon rush: Stampede on the Moon
It was 53 years ago, on 21 Nov 1963, that a small rocket brought on a bicycle took off from Thumba village on the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram, India, announcing the birth of the modern space age in the country. The sleepy palm-fringed village soon came to be known as Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launch Station (TERLS) and later became Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC).
Till 1963, the Thumba village in South India’s Kerala province would not have merited a second look. A quintessential fishing hamlet with thatched huts, coconut groves and calm sea, it was an unlikely setting for a rocket launch station. However, it did have something that caught the interest of Dr Vikram Sarabhai, the father of India’s space programme—a small church dedicated to St. Mary Magdalene that was located on the earth’s magnetic equator (most ideal for space missions).
Dr Sarabhai with fellow scientists went to the village to talk to the then-bishop. They were interested in acquiring the church and nearby land for their first rocket launch. Instead of giving them a definite answer, the bishop, Reverend Peter Bernard Pereira, asked them to attend the Sunday mass where he would put the question to the parishioners.
Thanks to the bishop’s efforts, the permission was granted. The paperwork was done and the villagers relocated to a new site with a brand new church in just 100 days. The bishop’s home was converted into an office, the church became the workshop, and cattle sheds served as storage houses and laboratories. Undeterred by the little funding and few facilities, a handful of enthusiastic young Indian scientists began assembling their first rocket.
Back then, even rocket parts and payloads were transported by bullock carts and bicycles to the launch pad. It was in these unassuming settings that India staged its first launch—a Nike-Apache rocket supplied by NASA—in 1963.
Sixty years later, Thumba is the hub of all space programs of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre at Thumba has given India launch vehicles, geo-stationary and finest remote sensing satellites.
The little church, which helped India reach for the stars, now houses a space museum replete with a fascinating array of rockets, satellites and other astronomical equipment.
A space race between India and Russia-China?
It is widely accepted that India and Russia (supported by China) were in a race to become the first country to land on the South Pole of the Moon. India launched its moon mission, Chandrayaan-3, on a leisurely five-week trajectory aiming to land on 23 Aug 2023. Russia launched its Luna-25 mission after India’s launch and targeted to land on the South Pole of the Moon three days ahead of India’s mission. Luna-25, equipped with powerful rockets, could reach lunar orbit by using a shorter trajectory. Unfortunately it crashed into the moon’s surface, after an engine firing, intended to fine-tune its descent, went awry. The Russian spacecraft was aiming to land near the intended location of a joint base that space agencies in China and Russia announced in 2021 and agreed to build together.
Three other countries, the US, China, and the former Soviet Union, have also achieved soft lunar landings, but none has ever reached the South lunar pole, and that’s not for lack of trying.
The moon’s South Pole is one of the harder places on the lunar surface to land because it is heavily boulder strewn, without the wide, flat expanses. Of the spacecraft that have crashed in the South Pole, none got close enough to try to negotiate the boulder fields. ISRO was able to do so, briefly placing Chandrayaan-3 in hover mode above the surface while it looked for a clear parking spot, is a testament both to the nimbleness of the ship and the deft touch of the engineers in mission control.
Is Russia lagging behind?
China sent a delegation to the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East to attend the launch of Luna-25 which was the first Russian spacecraft to attempt a moon landing since the end of the Soviet Union.
In early 2021, Roscosmos—the Russian space agency—and the China National Space Administration signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly establish an International Lunar Research Station by the mid-2030s. But now, behind the scenes, China already recognizes that Russia is of limited value as a space partner. Since the invasion of Ukraine in February last year, Chinese media have downplayed Russia’s role in the lunar base.
Despite the Luna-25 failure, the head of Russia’s space agency declared a “new race to exploit the Moon’s resources has begun”, and there would be a potential crewed Russian-Chinese mission in the future.
In the Sino-Russian relationship, Russia is now well and truly the junior partner. Its aging technology pales in comparison with the leaps of modernisation we have witnessed in relation to China’s progress in space. Challenging the new rising star in space, India, would also not be so easy for the cash-starved Russia.
The author is Consultant Editor based in New Delhi
