This lockdown, Take a stab beyond what you do !

Never been an amazing cook or a farmer or a writer or ..... let me give it straight, never been one of those cool social-media-viral worthy characters. Didn't drop out of engineer, never founded a company, never quit a job from the blue chip companies to work for NGO or never went to a rural villages to help farmers. Never been a just-do-that-cool-thing kind of person most of my life. When I dig deeper into my history searching for some qualities, I rewind back to my college days. I have always been an impeccable eater, sportsperson and a hard-core rough and tough trekker. Ahh.. wait, I probably got one more plausible quality, one of my friends, on the last day of our college, gave me a postcard that read "may you eat chicken to your heart's content. Be a scientist, hope to hear from you from Stanford". So, I was probably fairly good at maths and science (≈ engineering) for him to say so.

Fast forward ~10 years, I continue to excel at devouring (I have specialized in local foods now), playing anything I can get my legs and hands on and I now can complete trekking to the mountains in one third of the time stated on tripadvisors. And not to forget, my skills on maths and logical reasoning is what has been funding those activities. My skills on science are quite rusted now, just enough that I don't need to browse Google to read scientific articles or to Netflix science based shows. Probably you already know now that, I didn't go to Stanford; but my friend and I do hear from each others and we both are amazed how I turned out to be. I didn't become a scientist - I became an MBA (??); thought to be polar opposite of becoming a scientist. It was a circumstantial choice and I don't regret it. The thing is, you keep doing more of that, it grows on you, you become rugged, callous or outrageously creative (and jugaadu) at it without you realizing. It is like you have developed a pair of separate antennas to sense and master those. But all these starts with "taking a stab" at it.

Taking about taking a stab, I decided to take a stab at few new things during this lockdown. Let me include only the topics of general interest in the scope of this post; viz growing beard, hair cutting and cooking. Beards are nasty; for they itch, they entangle, they grow twice as fast as your hair and they worst of all they need to be combed (for me who has not used comb since birth) else they start looking like the barnacles. You wait for first 15 days to pass by, these are the test of your patience; you feel like they are some foreign body parts forced upon your chicks. But, you do more of it, then you forget that you even have them. You befriend them, you preen them and you caress them every now and then (especially when you are in between the conversations) and they promise never to look or act like the blistering barnacles again.

Cooking and hair cutting are altogether different ball games. Cooking is something I always did because I had to, I never wanted to have to do it. I always did the MVP of it (minimum viable product), in English it is called survival cooking. It saved me time, money health and probably earned some 'likes' from my friends. There were times when my friends did rate my cooking 5*, but I am sure it was not purely the function of the taste. It was rather the function of their hunger, unavailability of other options and them being drunk or stoned. Same thing goes for my hair cutting skills, I did it only for myself using a basic trimmer/clipper because it saved me time and hassles; I could do it at 5am or 11pm while listening to my favorite music in the bathroom or the balcony. I always went for the most basic haircut (my friends called it a football hair cut). But during this lockdown, I decided to take a stab at it, I decided to like these skills and take them to the next level. I decided to cook not to survive, and perform hair cut not to but to promote my skills from MVP to MLP (minimum lovable product).

It was the right time to master these skills, because due to the lockdown people cannot go out to eat; neither can they go out to the barber's shop for hair cut. I am working from home and Saturday and Sundays have never been these free. So, as a rational person, I convinced myself that I am probably already doing things much more complicated than cooking or barbering, so let me break down the entire process into smaller steps and take a stab. I looked up internet for micro skills on barbering while I interned under my sister for some cooking skills. I did have to go through multiple iterations but every output was better than the MVPs. Now I can cook a MLP version of few dishes without having to worry how it will turn out; I prepare complete meals (barring the chapatis) during the weekends. While in the barbering side, I have about 10+ folks from around my home (friends and cousins) who regularly come to my place for hair cut; and market is growing organically as word of mouth is spreading. For every guinea pig, before we start, we Google together to get alignment on the desired hair styles. Then, I create a rough roadmap in my head and proceed. A Mirror is used for real time feedback and the final touch up. I am glad, I get to experiment and learn for free while my folks feel its adventurous and cool to get a haircut from me. Now, I am planning the second milestones of these skills, i.e. teaching hungry and the hairy ones how to fish, how to tackle their problems themselves :D