"CEOs can't wait to read Sunny Bindra's articles every week."

It can all seem too much. Perhaps you have problems in your extended family. Perhaps people are squabbling, disagreeing, agitating. You do your best to intervene, but there are entrenched positions and big egos in play. Old grievances are being nurtured. You want this to end, but there are too many variables. It feels easier […]

I read 80 books in 2019. That was surprising. My standard target is 50, which I always hit quite easily. But 80? That’s a lot of books, by any measure. Was it worth it? Could that number now be in the realm of TOO many books? But first: reading any number of books is no […]

There is nothing more awe-inspiring, breathtaking or majestic on this planet than nature itself. Nothing created by humankind even compares. All our achievements – the targets we hit, the numbers we clock, the reports we file –  are mere pastimes. They don’t touch the soul.  All our material wealth, our accumulated riches and trinkets, our […]

Here are the best books I read in 2019. I read a lot more books this year – at the time of writing it looks like I’ll clock 80 books. My regular target is 50 per year, so this is unusual. But it does mean I had a lot more good books to choose from, […]

Last week’s column about the ‘Education Express’ raised some questions – and some eyebrows. I made the case, obliquely, that our education system is in severe need of an overhaul. It functions like an old-fashioned train service: it runs the same way it has for decades on end; it runs on fixed tracks; and not […]

Last week I started a discussion here about the meaning of work – and how rare it is to find work that lends meaning to our lives. Most of us get our first jobs out of sheer economic necessity, and don’t have the luxury of wondering about the worth of what we do. Later on, […]

Our newly released census results show that Nairobi keeps growing. With nearly 4.4 million people, this is one huge collection of humans. Not on the global scale, of course; there are several megacities with more than 20 million people; one of those may breach 40 million soon. Revered scientist James Lovelock thinks we follow the […]

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss is just one of the finest novels anyone will ever read. I picked it up again after many years and found myself mesmerised all over again. It has two words that are repeated over and over, acting as a motif in the life of one of the main […]

Customer: ‘I need a rope.’ Shopkeeper: ‘What’s it for?’ Customer: ‘Suicide.’ Shopkeeper: ‘That will be two hundred shillings.’ Customer: ‘What? That’s too much. I’ll buy it elsewhere.’ Shopkeeper: ‘What does it matter to you? You’re about to die anyway! That was a scene from a movie I watched decades ago. I laughed at the time, […]

Photo by Lee Scott on Unsplash A recent mishap with household plumbing brought home an oft-forgotten truth; it is only when you lose something that you realise how important it is to you. In this case, lugging buckets of heated water around brought home the value of being able to have a shower when you […]

The history of nations and organisations is replete with examples of leaders who just won’t let go. Even when their time is emphatically and visibly up, too many just can’t detach themselves from the habits and trappings of power. These stories usually end badly. I explained here last week: there is a time and a […]

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay ‘To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot…’ Ecclesiastes conveyed it so well in the Bible. But who is really paying attention? Do we […]

Image by pasja1000 from Pixabay Do you sometimes wonder why a perfectly reasonable position is often rejected by very intelligent people? You might lay an argument out, back it up with solid facts – and still encounter vehement opposition. Surprisingly, this resistance often comes not from the ignorant or the uneducated, but from those who […]

Image by Pexels from Pixabay My son will be doing his ‘O’-level exams in the near future, and I was recently discussing his subject choices with him. I was trying to understand which subjects he enjoyed doing, and which ones he just had to get through. The aim was to pinpoint what his future might […]

Last week I discussed JOMO – the Joy of Missing Out. You should live your life on your own terms, not caught up in the priorities of others. Many of you then asked me: but how do I say no so often? It can be considered rude to decline invitations. I may lose my friends […]

Image by Eak K. from Pixabay FOMO, we all know, is a thing. In the digital era the Fear of Missing Out is driving lots of behaviour. Social media allows us to keep looking at other people’s lives and activities, pretty much all the time if we wish to. This creates an insidious feeling: the […]

For the past two weeks I’ve been discussing the stories of the mind on this page: the stories that our narrating self propagates and embellishes, in defiance of our experiencing self – the one that records facts and stays objective. The narrating self holds sway most of the time – and that makes us vulnerable […]

Image by cocoparisienne from Pixabay Suppose you are a physically attractive person. You are known for your looks. You were the belle of the school ball, or the hunk on the sports team. Being attractive becomes your identity, your calling card, your unique position in life. It’s what gives you self-esteem. Looks don’t last, though. […]

A few years ago I wrote here: watch out for the stories your mind is capable of spinning. You will easily believe lies are truth, and the truth is a lie. Consider the example I gave you then. You are deep in sleep, and immersed in a vivid dream. A sound from the outside world […]

As a young boy sitting in temples and community halls I would wonder why almost everything had some human’s name on it. A hall, a library, even the folding chairs. Someone’s name would be there, preceded by the words ‘donated by…’ or ‘in memory of…’ Anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote a remarkable book around the same […]

There seems to be something embedded in our natures that impels us to keep comparing ourselves with others. We are constantly looking over the fence, or across our shoulders, at what others are up to, what acclaim they are receiving, what numbers they are clocking. And then we feel that we might be falling short, […]

As we close the year, here’s a thought for you: “Science advances one funeral at a time.” That was stated by Paul Samuelson, the man who taught me economics without my ever meeting him, through his landmark book. Samuelson was in turn paraphrasing the thoughts of the legendary physicist, Max Planck: “A new scientific truth […]

Another year is ending, so let’s do this again: here are the best books I read in 2018. I used to confine myself to telling you about just 12 books every year, but that seems arbitrary. It forces me to knock some worthy contenders out for no reason. So this year I have 14 books […]

When I was a young boy, I would regularly gather my pocket money and take a bus into Nairobi’s central district to buy books. My perambulations would begin at the famous second-hand shop, Toddlers Bazaar, just off Koinange Street. This ever-busy shop was a prime place to find unusual, affordable novels. From there I would […]

Two years ago I wrote on this page that insurance companies have a lot to think about. They face profound disruption. You might think this is for the usual reason – digital technologies – but you would be wrong. Yes, accelerated technological change is shaking every sector up, dramatically; but insurance faces a special problem […]

Last week I discussed why our relationship with money is so toxic: because it is ruled by fear and greed. We are driven to daftness by money because we are afraid of losing it or not having enough. But what if we could conquer those emotions? What if we could quell our fear and shackle […]

Photo by Lucas Favre on Unsplash Money deranges us. We never seem to think we have enough, and the pursuit of more distorts and damages our lives. Yet we persist in our madness. Steven Harrison wrote a remarkable book a few years ago. It was called Doing Nothing. As someone who wonders why most of […]

Fear at work is a good thing, right? If employees are not afraid of you, they will just take advantage of you, no? They’ll slack off work, they’ll run side hustles using your time and resources, they’ll even steal from you – correct? A question, though: many business bosses have been making their employees feel […]