"Mr. About Us" Finds a Template

Early in my career, when we built our very first website at TISS, we were naïve enough to code every single page from scratch.

“Home” was one file, “About Us” another, “Contact Us” yet another.

My then-CEO, Anil, had a wicked sense of humour. After watching me re-craft “About Us” for the fifth time, he christened me with the permanent title: “Mr. About Us.”

Not quite the glamorous badge of honour I had in mind for my career.

The breakthrough came when we realised: why are we rewriting the same thing again and again?

Headers, footers, navigation bars… all just noise that could be tucked neatly into one template. One master, many pages.

Suddenly the work flowed, and I could finally retire my dubious “About Us” crown.

Here’s what I learned later: this idea is not just for websites.

Think of religion.

On the surface, each faith comes wrapped in rituals, symbols, and ornamentation.

But peel those layers back and you find the same reusable blocks: compassion, humility, service, forgiveness.

In essence, humanity. Different markup, same template.

The Tamil phrase Anbe Sivam - “Love is God” - says it best.

And once you see it that way, life and work both start to look different.

In software, templates mean fewer bugs and fewer late-night fixes.

In life, they save you from reinventing yourself at every turn. You start leaning on your own trusted templates: integrity, empathy, persistence.

The page may change, the foundation doesn’t.

And the best part?

More templates mean less time firefighting and more time to build, to create, and yes, to live.

Strip away the styling, and love is the one template that holds it all together.

So whether you are debugging code or trying to make sense of life, the question remains: Am I fussing with the decorations, or am I building with the template?