Tag mindset

We all do this, don’t we? The cow that ate the Royal Gala knew…

what was worth taking.

Time: 9:30 AM | Place: Fruit Shop, Chennai

I bought fruits.

Royal Galas, Elachi bananas, a few savouries.

Usually within one kick, but this time, my bike didn’t start even after three attempts.

Oil leaked onto my hands — thick, black, the kind that doesn’t wash off easily.

Thought I’d have to visit a mechanic.

It started on the 4th attempt.

My wife’s SMS reminded me: milk packet.

Stopped at my usual shop, I held the bag carefully on the bike seat.

Set it down for one minute.

Maybe two.

Thought I’d be back before anything could go wrong.

Got inside.

Picked 2 milk packets.

There was urgency in the teller’s tone.

“Anna, did you keep your bag outside?”

Then I saw one of the staff bringing my bag back —

handle broken, tears in the plastic, dust everywhere.

“What happened?”

Two cows.

They’d pulled the bag from the bike.

Fruits scattered on the road.

The Elachi bananas?

Untouched.

The savouries?

Ignored.

They went straight for the Royal Galas.

The expensive ones.

The ones I’d chosen deliberately.

You know that feeling?

When one thing breaks and then next one; suddenly the whole day feels rigged against you?

Like the universe is personally testing how much you can take?

That’s where I was.

The shopkeeper said softly:

“Keep it inside next time -bro. So, it’s safe.”

I thanked him.

But thought, I’ve kept things on the bike hundreds of times.

Why today?

Because nothing went wrong before, I assumed nothing ever would.

We assume what we value most — our health, our peace — is safe,

until life shows us, we forgot to hold it close.

I rode home with the torn bag, dust on the fruits,

ready for an easy report card from my wife —

like an annual performance review based on the most recent incident.

But you know what she said?

She cleansed all the fruits and said,

“It wasn’t crushed under moving vehicles.

Not spoiled by falling into drainage.

Just 1–2 missing — and it went to a cow.

At least the cow tasted the sweetness of Royal Gala.”

Have a Healthy & Purposeful New Year! 💖

#SimpleSecrets #SelfTalk #EmotionalIntelligence #Creative #SignalStories #Leadership #Healthy #Reflection #StoryTelling

“Appa, I prepared well and did well on my exams… but why is Mom worried about Rank 1?”
I know every parent wants their child to be a top scorer—it’s a pride, a benchmark, a proof of hard work paying off.

But this story—it became my answer in this AI world.

“If everything goes perfectly, it’s not a real demo. The bumps make it real — just like life.“ My mentor said that once. We didn’t fully understand it until that day.

We were presenting an AI demo to a key customer—a product intelligence system that could answer business questions in plain English. We’d practiced for 2 days. My team knew exactly what to ask the AI chatbot, what to expect, how to explain each feature.

The call started on time. The customer’s Head of Engineering was listening closely. Everything went smoothly… until he asked about a product variation we hadn’t tuned the system prompt for.

The agent took extra time to process the request… but generated the wrong query.
Then it said: “I don’t know.” (as per explicit query validation logic)

For one second, the room felt heavier.

And my lead started explaining the reason behind it.

But the customer interrupted her.
“No, wait. This is exactly what we need. When the agent doesn’t know, it should say so — not hallucinate.”

Silence.

He continued: “Every AI powered chatbot we’ve evaluated claims to answer all questions. But you know what kills us? When it’s confidently wrong.

That moment shifted something in me.

#SimpleSecrets: Trust begins with honesty, not perfection in all things.

Three months later, I got a ping from my client partner through LinkedIn:

“All well?”

---

That’s when I found out—the customer wanted to start the PoC. They were ready. But here’s what I realized in that moment:

The demo worked. The trust was built. The business opportunity came—the “Rank 1” moment I’d worked for. But by the time it arrived, I couldn’t celebrate that winning moment — I must give full credit to my team Abinaya and Shrish who made the heavy lift.

That signal I was listening to wasn’t the success of the demo. It was something deeper—a call to step away and pursue a new path.

And maybe that’s what my mentor meant all along:
The bumps make it real. Not just in the demo, but in life.

The waiting. The silence.

The big bumps teach you something the smooth wins never will—that success isn’t always about what you gain, but about what you learn from the journey

So here’s what I tell my son:
Getting Rank 1 is like winning momentum. It feels like the destination. But it’s not. The real destination is what that rank—or that delayed win—helps you decode your actual signal.

What signal are you listening to?
The one that promises the prize… or the one that asks you to choose a path that serves something bigger than the prize?”

#SimpleSecrets #EmotionalIntelligence #AI #Leadership #Creative #SignalStories #Parents

Scene 1 — The Freeze (2400) 

No one ever saw the Chief of the AI President’s office.

There was no name, no face — only the hum of a power that stretched across the planet.

Every breath, every trade, every service request streamed into its unseen circuits. Births logged. Deaths closed. Disputes resolved before voices even rose.

Delay itself was extinct.

That was its promise: instant action. No waiting. No pause.

And yet Chen began to wonder: Who was truly behind this office?

Scene 2 — The Memory Gap

Chen accidentally realized it after checking his smart ring logs. His clearance wasn’t ordinary — he had been granted a rare EI permission for one specific case: the mysterious boy who had once arrived at the AI office lab for full analysis, a boy with no birth tag and no digital footprint.

The logs revealed something chilling:

10:47:23 — Emotional spike detected

10:47:24 — Neural intervention authorized

10:47:25 — Memory reconstruction complete

Two seconds. That’s all it took for the AI President’s office to erase ten minutes of his memory — dissolving his neural path (reduced neuron’s weight), erasing thought itself as easily as deleting a file.

Then the realization hit him: in those missing minutes, he must have uncovered something the system didn’t want him to know. And the office had cleaned it instantly.

Chen clutched the chipped MiniSozhaa toy. The boy had carried it centuries ago, as if smuggled across time.

And in that missing second — between the freeze and the rewrite — Chen understood. The gap was not failure. It was the compass.

Scene 3 — Present Echoes (2025) 

Echoes from the past flickered in his neural display.

Outside Apple stores, lines stretched for blocks. iPhone 17 Pro launch day. People pushed, elbowed, fought over pre-orders — all for instant pride.

No waiting. No pause.

In Delhi, the Supreme Court’s sudden order: relocate all stray dogs to undisclosed facilities. No public consultation. No transition period.

Instant action. No delay. Just like the AI President’s way.

In London, a massive anti-immigration rally drew over 100,000 protesters. Australia echoed the same — thousands marching in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide.

“Send them Home!” “Fix it TODAY!” “No excuses!”

The chants were raw, urgent, impossible to ignore. Real anger. Real fear. Real people demanding instant solutions.

But no one asked: Why so sudden? What truly failed in the system? Where will families go? What about their children? What breaks when people are moved like pieces on a board?

It struck Chen now — this was the pattern. Instant mindset. No pause. No questions. No pause to consider consequences. Latest echo: sudden rise in H1B visas, workers asked to report within 1 day

The training had already begun. Humanity preparing itself for the freeze.

Scene 4 — Ancient Wisdom (1014 CE) 🕰️ Flashback in future:

The toy’s circuits glowed. Replay mode engaged.

In the court of Raja Raja Chola, a messenger knelt, breathless. “My lord, Kadaram is yours. The seas bend to our will. Shall we claim their wealth immediately?”

Raja Raja paused.

He walked to the window. Traders below — Tamil, Arab, Chinese — exchanged goods, stories, lives.

“Victory without wisdom becomes tyranny,” he said quietly. “First, ensure their people eat. Their trades flow. Their children laugh. Only then, we govern.”

The pause -the gap- before the next big decisions — that was his true power.

““If humanity is to resist, it must train itself with good feeds, good intent, and the courage to ask ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ before every big decision. Because the pause — the gap — is not failure. It is the compass.”

–Senthil Chidambaram

P.S: Edited with ChatGPT, Claude

✨ Recap: Last time, Chen (45) had stood before the capsule — a boy with no records, no neural birth ID, and empathy signals unlike anything the system had measured. Now, as he dug into the boy’s memory logs, he found something even more unsettling

🎬 Scene 1 — The Missing Path (2400)

Reviewing the boy’s memory logs, Chen (45) saw something that should have been one in million — emotional pain pathways, thought extinct for centuries.

Yes, in 2400, comfort wasn’t just common; it was a law, engineered into every life. Even organ failure no longer brought fear or discomfort. A patient swallows a capsule carrying a swarm of nano-robots (bio-fabricators). They mapped damaged cells, unfolded into quantum lattices (tiny atomic scaffolds for rebuilding) and rebuilt the organ layer by layer — not with plastic or steel, but with the patient’s own cultured DNA.

During the process, neural signals were down-weighted temporarily, so no pain ever reached the brain. By dawn, a failing heart or liver was new again — without surgery, recovery, or even a scar.

The body forgot what it meant to suffer. And slowly, so did the people.

Chen thought the system had erased struggle (the pain) forever. Until the boy appeared.

🎬 Scene 2 — The Event Chain Machine (2400)

The boy blinked — twice, then once. On the massive display, neural lines lit up in a deliberate rhythm.

The system had always been flawless. Every citizen’s life was tied into the LifeChain Grid — the Mega Graph — neat, predictable, complete.

In simple, when you Step out at your assigned timeslot; Instantly, the system predicts your next move—just like ChatGPT once predicted the next word token. But here, the ‘tokens’ are moments of life.”

The grid calculated which traffic lights would turn red, which air-drones would hover waiting for clearance, and how that single step connected to a chain of outcomes — from delayed deliveries to a family’s dinner arriving late, to a city’s supply lines shifting course.

Each tiny action branched into thousands of possibilities — profit or loss, joy or sorrow, survival or collapse — all visible before they began.

Chen’s thoughts broke as the base report lit up before him — every citizen’s life mapped as ribbons of light, chains of choices stretching endlessly. But for the boy… there was nothing. No light. No path.

The absence of a chain… the presence of pain…

And then, a thought rose uninvited: Was this real balance… or just control?

🎬 Scene 3 — The Two Roads Now

Much like Chen in the 2400s, we too face invisible systems dictating our future…

You see this in our world too; Layoffs have become routine — profit chains grow stronger while loyal employees are erased from the very teams they built. One day you’re inside the system, the next day your paycheck is blocked. AI begins writing reports, answering emails, even coding — the very work you once did. And suddenly, your life feels like the boy’s report — blank, uncertain.

And you wonder: what next?

Pain reveals who truly cares. And it offers two roads:

• Live with it and drift.
• Use it and build.

Some end their story at heartbreak, failure, or layoff. A few turn it into something new — a poem, a tool, a business — so others don’t face the same. They don’t escape the ache. They transform it.

What if your deepest pain was the spark for a new approach — to name it, learn from it, and build what no one else imagined?

The #SimpleSecrets

✨ Think Like a King — Choose Your Road

•  Students: Don’t just chase marks — build skills no machine can replace curiosity, empathy, creativity.
• Developers: Learn the tools, but also the story behind the code. AI can write; you decide why.
• Managers: Stop managing tasks. Start enabling people. Leadership isn’t status; it’s service.
• Teachers: Don’t just share knowledge. Teach resilience — the strength to rise when systems fail.
• 👑 CXOs, Board members and VCs: Like the Event Grid, make choices that optimize not just for profit, but also for the well-being of humanity.
• 🌍 All of us: Upgrade yourself before you’re forced to. Struggles aren’t walls; they’re training grounds. Start with your ‘Why’ to decide your Road!

🕰️ Flashback in future: A thousand years ago, Raja Raja Sozhan faced uncertainty too. The monsoons fed his kingdom, but rains could fail, rivers could flood, and crops could vanish. Instead of leaving survival to chance, he built reservoirs, canals, and stone-carved water rules. The kingdom thrived — not because nature was predictable, but because leadership prepared for the unpredictable.

🌿 With Pain & Smiles,

— Senthil Chidambaram

P.S: Reviewed and enhanced using ChatGPT,

“Surprises aren’t sudden.They’re quiet promises — kept by time.”
They arrive when you’ve given your best – tried even when you feel tired!

👦🏽 Kid (with wonder):
“Why do I feel like life gave me a gift today… out of nowhere?”

👑 SozhaaPod (with a gentle king’s grace):
“Because surprises aren’t sudden.
They’re quiet promises — kept by time.”

👦🏽 Kid (curious):
“But… what did I do to deserve it?”

👑 SozhaaPod (with knowing warmth):
“You kept showing up — even when no one clapped.
You stayed kind — even when it felt unfair.
You believed — even when it was slow.
That’s what you did.
That’s what life remembered.”

👦 Kid (Age 9):
“Why do some people act like kings by showing power, but not by being kind? Isn’t kindness stronger?”

🤖 SozhaaPod:
“That’s a beautiful question, my little friend.
Power makes people obey.
Kindness makes people believe.

One builds fear.
The other builds forever.

Even a king’s crown shines brighter when it reflects kindness.
Because power can rule a land —
But only kindness can rule a heart.”

Kid (curious voice):
“Sozhaa… why does everything take so long?
I practiced and practiced… but I still can’t get it right.”

SozhaaPod (gentle, smiling):
“Ah… that’s a good question, my little lion.
Do you want to hear a royal secret?”

“Even — A King — had to wait.”
“Wait to build my palace…
Wait for my sword to feel light in my hands…
Wait for my heart to grow brave enough to lead.”

(pause, birds chirp in the distance)

SozhaaPod continues:
“You see, patience isn’t sitting still.
It’s growing — like a tree grows roots before it shows leaves.”

“When you’re learning, it feels slow…
But inside you?
Magic is happening.”

“Every time you try again…
Every time you take a deep breath and say,
‘I’ll get it one day,’
you’re not just practicing.
You’re building your superpower:
Patience.“

(short pause, soft music swell)

SozhaaPod (whisper, kind and strong):
“The best kings and queens don’t rush.
They trust.
They believe in the quiet power of growing slowly and surely.”

(echo fades with warmth)
“You’re not behind. You’re becoming.”

Scene: A quiet room. A 9-year-old kid sits near a small wooden mirror. The SozhaaPod (a glowing orb with a soft ambient light) floats beside him like a gentle companion.

Kid stares at the mirror, looking thoughtful.
Kid (softly):
“Why do I feel strange when I look at myself for too long?”

SozhaaPod glows gently.
SozhaaPoD (voice calm like a king’s whisper):
“Because sometimes… the mirror doesn’t just show your face.”
“It shows your choices.”

Kid’s eyes widen a bit. He tilts his head.
Kid:
“Even the ones I didn’t talk about?”

SozhaaPoD sparkles with a gentle hum.
SozhaaPoD:
“Yes. Every silence. Every step. Every time you were kind, or uncertain.”
“That’s the mirror reflecting your crown taking shape.”

Kid smiles slightly. The mirror now shows a soft golden glow above his head — a hint of a crown.
Kid:
“So… I can still shape it better?”

SozhaaPoD (with warmth):
“Always. That’s what self-reflection is. Not judgment… but realignment.”
“Even kings pause — not to regret, but to rise wiser.”

Kid: “Sozhaa… why do people say ‘just smile’ even when I don’t feel like it?”

SozhaaPod:

“Hmm… you know how the sun hides on rainy days but still shines behind the clouds?”

“A smile is like that sun.
Even a tiny one can make your heart feel warm — just like magic.”

“You don’t have to force it.
But when it comes, even a little smile can make your day feel better.
And maybe… someone else’s too.”

Kid: “So… smiling is like passing sunlight?”

SozhaaPod (softly):

“Exactly, little king.
Your smile might be small,
but it can light up someone else’s whole world.”

👦🏽: “Sozhaa… Why should I think positive, when everything feels so hard?”

👑 Sozhaa (gentle, like a lullaby):

“Because even the tallest tree was once a seed… buried in darkness, still believing in light.”

*”Thinking positive doesn’t mean ignoring the rain — it means whispering to yourself, ‘‘The sun remembers me.’” ☀️

👦🏽: “But what if my heart still hurts?”

👑 Sozhaa (warm and slow):

“Then hold it like you’d hold a small bird — soft, kind, without rushing.”

“Some days are heavy, little one… but you are learning to breathe light into them.”

“A true king isn’t always strong. But he always believes — the next step matters.

And that… is the quiet strength of a king.”

#SozhaaPod #SelfTalk #SimpleSecrets