If there is one thing everybody excels at (and I’m also guilty of this one) it is giving advice. From tips on how to save your outdoor plants from the torrential rain to how to become more productive, there is a lot of advice that is thrown at you (or that you throw at others) on a daily basis. And much of it, as I’m sure all of you already know, is useless chatter – words carelessly uttered to fill in the gaps and sometimes also to overpower and dominate. If everybody knew everything, why aren’t our lives perfect?

Tomorrow, the habit takes hold again. And tomorrow never comes.

The most strained relationship in the history of mankind is the one between a daughter-in-law and her mother-in-law. This age old tussle is, perhaps, the only thing that hasn’t changed with time. It’s the stuff jokes as well as tragedies are made up of. My own relationship with my mother-in-law is a strange one. We definitely aren’t friends, but we aren’t enemies either. We don’t like each other all that much, but we don’t despise each other either.

A friend of mine had some trouble at work recently when she was late for a meeting. She was 15 minutes late for a meeting scheduled at noon and had informed her immediate supervisor 15 minutes beforehand that she had just come out of a meeting and might be a little late. She had asked him to inform the other participants of the meeting as well and requested that they start without her and that she would rush to join them.