Thursday, April 28, 2016

Day 119

I did write posts on days 114 and 115 which I never could post for internet reasons, but I will be posting them tonight. For today, there's not a whole lot to say. I have an important work day on the 12th of May, similar to the one in January from which I had put a picture up on the blog. I do think I'll put a picture up from this time as well, unless I'm in a really bad place after the event, or, if I'm looking shabby. Soon after that day, I've taken a couple of days off adjacent to a weekend to go to San Fransisco, just to chill out. This sounds like the kind of thing which if I read someone else write a few years ago I would have concluded he's a wierdo, if not a full scale asshole. But how things are, is how they are.

I think I have an unhealthy capacity for self-reflection, and continually run an internal feedback loop. The main goal of the feedback loop is to become a more able, more helpful, and healthier person tomorrow, but the by-products of the loop are revised views of the same, unchanging past, and revised views of my past selves. One of the consequences has been a revised view of the role and importance of relationships. While last year I believed that relationships, especially romantic, are an indispensable part of personal growth, I am not so sure anymore. I still hold that relationships goad you on to become better, but my newly acquired conviction is that they goad you on to become better is certain set ways, and inhibit exploration of the infinite other unseen dimensions, an exploration that is as necessary in liberating you as it is rare. Note that I merely use the word inhibit, and not something stronger like cease, because of course it is still possible, only more unlikely.

In another news, I've decided to work out intensely until my CFA exam on June 5, just to do something counter-intuitive. Through late 14 and early 2015, I used to work out a lot, both cardio and strength, and then sometime in late April last year (yes, exactly 1 year ago) I stoppped, because I had to dedicate myself to preparing for the CFA exam a month away and who has the time to waste on working out, or so the warped reasoning went. It is characteristic of me to skip even showers, let alone work outs, in the days of intense preparation preceding exams. Part of the reason is I start very late, but that's only part of the reason. The bigger part, I believe, is that I convice myself that by skipping this and that I am somehow being more "serious" about the exam. But of course that is self-fooling hogwash, the kind that we realize is bullshit and continue to subscribe to all the same. So, to get out of this self-fooling tendency, primarily, I've decided that in the 35-40 days left before the exam, I will not only be not skipping workouts and showers, I'll infact be doing more of it. More exercise, more showers, ironing my clothes everyday - basically everything I would have ordinarily avoided I will amplify. Let's see how this experiment goes.

Friday, April 22, 2016

Day 113

Today was an odd day. I ate a lot as soon as I woke up. Like, a lot.

Something has thrown me off balance a little bit. I don't know if it is the incessant, unnecessary hullabaloo in my family surrounding getting me married, or, whether it is the seeping realization that my mom is clinically depressed, or whether it is something more endogenous. I got myself steeped in eastern spirituality and meditation last year, and had finally come to a state of balance that was not so transitory. I had thought it was for real, not a fluke peacefulness that hits you intermittently one way or the other. I still hold that it was, for the balance did last me fairly long, but maybe I had overestimated its longevity when I naively assumed it will last my lifetime. There were signs of it going astray in January, but I was able to quickly set it right before giving imbalance a chance to set in more solidly, and then it was back to good times. Besides, I took on so much work back then that there was little time for peacelessness. But the trip to India, it changed something.

Now I'm back, and I'm going to try to salvage the project that had begun last year from disintegration, and hopefully it'll work. Maybe my impatience to make it work is the thing coming in the way of making it work.

A fair bit of the day is yet to go, but I'm posting already. It's not as though something mind-blowing is going to happen, anyway.

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Day 112

My sleep cycle has been a little twisted since I came back. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a jetlag, though. I sleep at around 9 and wake up at 4 AM. For some people who do everything by the book, these might even be perfect sleeping hours. For me, it's just a consequence of having moved from India. In any case, I seem to like it. Maybe if I woke up at 5 instead of 4 I'd like it even better, because at 4 it's dark so I can't really head out right away. I wait an hour (how do I wait? I surf facebook and quora, reply to emails and messages, watch the youtube videos of my subscriptions. Yes, how I wait is pretty uninspiring) and then get my camera and walk out into the breezy, chirpy spring mornings that bless us here at Princeton these days. There's a good chance of running into the most unique, colourful birds, even though getting a picture of them is challenging all the same. But there are squirrels out aplenty even if you miss the special birds, and they're guaranteed fun. They're better captured on video than in pictures, but I don't make videos of them, because they are best captured by the naked eye, not by eyes behind lenses. I've loved squirrels since back when I used to go to morning walks with my grandfather in the very early nineties. When I first moved to the US, I thought gosh the squirrels in the US are so big, no no no. But it's just a matter of getting used to them and then they're fantastic again, I guess, because on my trip to India earlier this month, I was equally surprised by how little India's squirrels were. Other than this, I'm particularly fond of American spring, when the flowers start budding and flood the trees, and the ground starts turning lush, lustrous green, and the sun is out just the right amount - not too hot, just sunny enough to help you smile like a fool. If I had my way, I'd lie in a park near my house from sunrise to sunset - standing up only to play cricket in the evening and for going up to the taps to drink water. But, I have to go to work. Which is also cool. Being employed is pretty cool. I say so because I've known the contrary, and it sucked like a miele vacuum cleaner.

Maybe I'll put some pictures up one of these days, but most probably I won't. I don't want to promise more than I can deliver, since that's a habit I've got to kick.

I don't know what else to say. I'm getting kind of bored of the whole blogging thing, and to a large extent I've been continuing only because I decided to do this at the beginning of the year. I'm unsure how long my obedience to myself will last, for the price of disobedience is pretty small when you're as close to your master as I am to me. I guess now I'm just droning on, so I'll go.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Day 110

I don't know what I'm doing with my life.

Monday, April 18, 2016

Sisyphean wish

I have sought you for years.
And now if you'd yield,
It'd be of great value.
And if you don't,
invaluable.

On my mysterious liking for Mad Men

Mad Men is one of my favorite TV shows, and I don't even know why. It doesn't keep you on the edge of your seat the way Breaking Bad does. It does not betray the caustic, clever brilliance of House. It has not the comic genius that makes the commonplace become the source of everyday laughter and joy for your soul, like The Office has.  In fact, I can only talk of Mad Men in terms of all the things it is not, than the things it is. Because of what it is I have little clue.

Many of its episodes just linger, like life, without a set goal or aim. Like an afternoon spent without knowing what to do or who to call.

Unlike my other favorite shows, which I watch with rapt attention whenever I watch them, with Mad Men I often find myself drifting away, zoning out, and realizing it 10 minutes later, at which point I scroll back to wherever I last was with the show, and watch again. Reviewers of the show tell us that it is about the feminist movement, about the changing social mores in the 1960s USA, but I've never bought it. I like the show because it doesn't pretend to know any answers, propose any theories. Because it is interested in different kinds of people, its characters, without painting with a heavy hand exactly how their stories should look and be interpreted. Because it is more interested in knowing than in telling. I like the show because it has the spirit of someone who knows they do not know.

Don Draper, the lead character of the show, is one of my favorite TV characters. Media reports extensively on his looks, his womanizing habits, his affairs, as though that is what Don Draper is about. Don Draper, if you ask me, is about trying to feel meaningful the possibly meaningless, about trying to act like stuff matters, day in and day out, when he doesn't know if it does. And that is why I like this character. 

Mad Men is a show I really like and never recommend to others, not only because I'm not sure they'd like it, but also because I'm not sure what I could say to recommend it convincingly. My feelings about Mad Men are very similar to my feelings about John Banville, the novelist.

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Day 108

It's already day 109, woah! Days have a way of passing you by like credit card bills, furtively, smugly furtively.

I came back to the US in the wee hours of the morning today, and spent the day chatting and watching TV and driving about and eating with my brother. It was like we were doing all of these things simultaneously, all of that time. Although of course we weren't.

I didn't feel any heaviness of heart while leaving India, the way I used to feel before. I don't know, maybe I don't want to say much other than saying that I don't want to say much.

There's the CFA Level 3 exam in the first week of June, for which I'll start studying in a few days. Probably only next week.

And I've got to start running and playing a little bit from today, after gorging on everything edible with reckless abandon for 21 days.

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Delhi 2016

I am in your town again,
which was once mine too,
until you, happened.

Now there are no towns that I call my own,
there are towns where I work, where I'd grown,
there are towns of my friends, of my mother.
But not mine, I go from one refuge to another.

Don't get me wrong, I love them all.
I love them, but they're not mine.
Towns are like people, and that's fine.

I'm in your town now, but I don't feel its beat.
I do probability for a living, and yet, naively, I
expect you on every once-friendly street.
Faces that resemble yours in faint ways, say 'Hi',
as they see me solving their contours, and that's also sweet.

Thursday, March 17, 2016

Day 77

Coffee is a big part of American culture, sort of like tea in India. Except that coffee in America tastes like shite. The fact that it's the most awfully tasting coffee I've had anywhere (granted the only other places I've drank coffee are Toronto, Brussels, Vienna and maybe 7-8 towns in India) makes it all the more remarkable that it is celebrated as much as it is. But then, Donald Trump is on a winning streak as well.

I slept early yesterday (for fear of having to drink that coffee to stay awake, perhaps?) when I shouldn't have slept at all. I do that every now and again, I think it's an escapist tendency. By way of analogy, it is not too different from laughing at a question paper you know will leave you with a Fail. In the spectrum of performance anxiety, both extremes are dangerous -- escapist and over-anxious -- and I think I tilt a wee bit towards the former.

I traveled to India last March and it was much fun. I'm not one for celebrating my birthday, but my parents wanted to, and it drew a lot of my relatives and cousins and everyone looked good and was chirpy. It is eerie what a difference a year can make. Compared to last year's visit, my grandfather, one chachaji and one mausaji aren't around now. Another mamaji, and a cousin sister, are now very ill. Another previously high-flying uncle has gone bankrupt and am told is battling severe depression. My closest chachaji, who has for all intents and purposes actually always been a real elder brother to me, his business isn't doing well either, to put it mildly.

My current trip to India, due in 8 days, will also find me 20 pounds heavier than my last one, which limits my possibilities in flirting with hypothetical random girls in hypothetical wedding functions I might hypothetically attend.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Doors

Here, this is the day
of many knocks
on your door.
I made sure
that I have locks
on my doors today.

Day 76

The thing that halted my blogging isn't over until the 20th, but I have resumed already. I am not sure that I will be able to complete what I set out to, which is not to say that I won't continue to try. My mom asks me on the phone if I will be able to finish the thing off in time, and I say "I don't know". My mom knows that I don't say yes, unless I am sure.

She has asked me over the years if I would qualify for this college, secure that job, pass that exam, and she knows that I rarely said that I would, even when I did end up passing those hurdles. It is not the case that I decide to be conservative for fear of making a fool of myself. 'How would it be if I turn out to be wrong' is never at play. What is at play is only saying things I can also say to myself without feeling like I'm fooling myself (and I am the easiest person for me to fool).

Last year when mummy came to stay with me for the summer, it was the happiest period of my life in many, many years. We weren't having rollicking fun, but I suppose I've outgrown the charms of rollicking fun some time ago. I used to take her to the usual places - temples, Gita discourses, and, of course, shopping, which, with her, is invariably grocery shopping. I loved it all, which I guess doesn't bode well for my romantic success with girls my age, who, I'm told, hate bloody mumma's boys.

That aside, grocery shopping reminds me of a particular trend that I find a little annoying, although perhaps no one shares my opinion on this. I'm all for using technology to make our lives easier (in fact, what I've been working on fits the description) but when I see one startup after another making apps to get your groceries to you, I have to stop and wonder: where are we going?

Call me a lunatic, but grocery shopping, I think, is one of those integral parts of life that make us who we are. So much of my growing up days was sometimes being excited about grocery shopping because I'd secretly sneak in that other thing I also want, and sometimes being so unwilling to go for it because its such a chore and "I have more important things to do" but then getting over myself and doing it anyway. And then there is the time when you're actually getting stuff, waiting in lines, waiting for your turn, being careful about discriminating between two similar looking but significantly different products, learning how 1000 rupees don't go a long way and altering one shampoo for another as a last minute decision, and so on. Grocery shopping was at least as formative for me, if not wildly more, than reading Camus, Frankl, Wallace and Nida Fazli combined.

Now I've grown up, but grocery shopping is still a part of life I don't want to relegate to an app. It has its value for adults, as it brings us to appreciate and engage with the daily, the nondescript, the commonplace, which is what real life is, once you get past the concoctions of grandiosity. It is one thing to use apps to ease our lives, and it is another to invite them to substitute our lives. For this reason, and I hate to say this, those of you making grocery-delivery apps, I hope you don't succeed.

Evergreen song......


Monday, March 7, 2016

My loving grandfather passed away today.

Friday, March 4, 2016

Kanhaiya Kumar is not my hero. It takes a lot more than good oratory to get that spot.

I will continue this post later, as I get more time. Will try to finish it over a month or two.

Saturday, February 27, 2016

Quick update

I am well aware that I'm shamelessly ignoring my resolution to post every day. It is just because I've been working on another thing; and if it didn't require so much time that blogging would feel like "wasting time that's better spent elsewhere", I would definitely try and post every day. It is what it is.

I'd been teaching a couple of Gurgaon back office guys some quantitative finance and data programming on my own time, and given that I've started doing this other thing, I've had to abandon that too. So yes, that's another thing I've get back to when I can.

This other thing that I refer to is a software project I've to work on and try to finish by a deadline. It's not related to my career, and I likely won't be making any money from it either (not that I make any money from blogging or from teaching Gurgaon folks in the evenings) but I thought that it would force me to learn something new in a couple of weeks which one would otherwise take, I don't know, 6 months or something to learn. I guess that makes it worth the plunge. And because it was about learning, it was able to push to the backseat, even if probably temporarily, both blogging and teaching, which at some level, are, to me, also about learning (although these 2 are about re-learning, or consolidating my learning, as opposed to fresh learning).

The third thing that it has unseated is my attempts to stay fit and active, and that part I'm not so unequivocally OK with. Let's see, I already have posted something, maybe I'll go to the gym too today, even if only for a short bit.

Yeah, and I booked my tickets to India for late next month, and I'm pretty excited about that too. I love Delhi, I love walking on gullies I've grown up wandering aimlessly on, going to shops I've stopped daily at for banta drinks after cricket filled evenings, and being around people who've nurtured me with love and fondness and forbidding amounts of mind corrupting, tongue seducing, tasty food.

Friday, February 12, 2016

One of life's big milestones

is to forgive someone who isn't sorry and, what else, doesn't need your forgiveness.

It's a pretty hard thing to do, it needs character and forces you to build character to be able to do it. But in the end it is worth it, and you feel grateful for it.

Sunday, January 24, 2016

Day 24

I failed to update the blog for several days in a row as I was not feeling well. But I'm better now and so will resume the exercise, and hopefully starting tomorrow also study more and have more to report in my daily posts. But for today, I have no such productive work to report.

I've been thinking lately of ways to return to India. When I first moved here, I was pretty clear I wanted to come back. In five years, I told everyone, I'll be back. It's been three and a half years now, and I'm beginning to think how best to script the return. What will I do once I'm back there? 

One option that figures highly in my mind is to run a book shop. Why? Basically because I can see myself doing that for the long haul, without worrying too much about why I'm doing this. That's not entirely true though - there is, if I be totally honest, a latent conceit of intelligence in me, that makes me ask this question to myself a lot: "you could have done this with far less intelligence and skills than you possess, so aren't you wasting your talents doing this?" Partly, it is true, for running a bookshop needs not great smarts, but mostly, it is just conceited, for I imagine I am so much more intelligent. I have to confess I do harbor these ideas, even if somewhere I know they are crazy. All said, I can still see myself doing that for a long time, just because I think I enjoy being surrounded by books. In any case, if I do decide to follow it, I still have to save aggressively over the next couple of years to be able to set it up.

Another option is to work in the social sector. That work can be meaningful, yes, so that box is checked, and there is enough scope to be creative so that you're not left thinking you're doing dumb work. The rub here is it pays peanuts. So either I save so much over the next one and a half years, that I'll get by fine anyway, or do it in a way that pays enough for me to afford rent and a car and petrol, other than of course food and AC. How how how.

The third option is to go back and work for some investment bank in Mumbai or Bangalore - money will be decent, yes - but it would score so low on the meaningfulness front that I would be sure to question the point of moving back. If I had to do this anyway, why wouldn't I do this in the US while taking in much more money, with much better convenience of daily living, and much higher opportunities for making it big? So yeah, this option is pretty much ruled out.

A fourth option is to work on a start-up. India is growing, I have the coding skills, some ideas, so why not try it out. The only rub here is the risk of losing everything accumulated thus far. This option is exciting, but is it too late? I'm almost 30, will probably add dependents pretty soon, so do I want to take the risk? In a way, this goes back to the social sector option - as long as I'm able to save a fortune in the next couple of years, maybe I can do that, but again, how how how.

In the end, every option will have its share of rubs, and it will come down to which of the rubs I'm willing to take for the upside bearing those rubs might afford. I think about it everyday. Maybe one day soon I'll wake up with the answer. Till then, one thing seems clear: for as long as I am here, I need to earn aggressively, and I need to save more.

Saturday, January 16, 2016

Shadow

You always praised my memory, as I sat
bloated, and yearned for more of that.
I wish now that you had praised my heart,
and in yearning, I may have learned the art
of loving, not fueled and fooled by ego;
of being at home, wherever we go.
But what choice did you have in the matter?
I gave you no chance to praise the latter.
I worked for more of what I got
(I can not lie, I loved it a lot).
For years apart, it's clear as hell
that I had memorized you well.

[January 16, 2016 | Princeton]

Friday, January 15, 2016

Soulicitation

Call me some time. It will very likely be awkward, yes,
but just a little. Tell me what work is like, what you do,
and I'll respond with measured interest, no more no less,
crack appropriate jokes - some old ones, but mostly new.

Important things hogged all attention, and time has shot.
Yesterday, I loved your taste, and you loved Wodehouse
and Rumi, who have grown on me, and Eliot, who has not.
Recommend a book, maybe, or stuff on the web to browse?

So much of life is hard work, and planning for tomorrow,
and that may be how it ought to be, by jove, for all I care!
But of that precious ticking time, I'd really like to borrow
a tiny bit of listening to any words you'd like to spare.

[November 30, 2015 | New York City]

Day 15

I'm a little tired tonight. It was a long day, and quite unremarkable.

I did not read any book today, but just the poems I've written in the last 11 years on my blog. I expected to be embarrassed, as I usually am by my previous deeds, but actually ended up feeling pleasantly surprised. Most of them, I think, were certainly better than what I can manage today.

That's it for today, really.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

Day 14

Today was the annual review and bonus day. Although mine was nothing stellar and certainly below what I would have guessed it to be a priori, I got a sense that it was maybe better than my teammates, because they all looked pretty pissed off and were in a palpably bad mood through the day (some unpleasant emails were written, apparently). Alternately, it could be, although unlikely, that I am just stupid and therefore not protesting enough. Either way works for me.

Part of me wished that I knew Mandarin, to really know what people in the team were discussing (yes, they switched to Mandarin for today), but part of me is really happy I don't. It leaves me free, and limits just how unnecessarily tense I could possibly get. I personally think it is quite telling that year after year, this day of very possibly the biggest single cash inflow to your bank account that you'll see that year, coincides with the day you're especially unhappy and overly hostile.

On day 2, I wrote about the awesomeness of going to have a tea, after doing it for the first time. I now think much of the awesomeness was about it having been the first time, because I've done it four more times since, and it is only half as awesome now. It's a busy place that I go to, so a lot of what I enjoy is people-watching, more so because it is an Indian jaunt and I see a lot of Indians. Yes, the masala chai is very good too. They also serve vada pav, which I have every alternate time I'm there, and while it is nothing compared to the those served outside Siddhivinayak temple, or those outside Gokul's, or even Kanjurmarg's Balaji vadapav, let me not recall all that and get wistfully greedy. What they have here is good enough for me to be unable to resist it for long enough.

Over the last few months, I've listened with rapt attention to whatever Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev had to say. I'd been skeptical of Spiritual gurus before, but what he was professing made a lot of sense to me. In fact, let me not understate. It had a great impact on me, his lectures accessed a part of me I had lost access to as I had grown older. In a way, they helped me reconnect with the purer, happier parts of me. So let me not belabour how much gratitude and respect I have for him, because the more I write the more susceptible I am to an inaccurate depiction of it.

For this reason, it was hard for me to write the following comments on one of his recent videos. I'll paste the video as well as my comment here, and on this occasion I would invite any readers of my blog to share their views on the video and my comment. It was a big step for me, challenging the views of someone whose wisdom and intellect I deeply respect and consider far above my own, so I'm naturally a little iffy.

So here's the video:

And here's my comment:

"I've learned a lot from Sadhguru but I have to differ here.
One, the fact that slaughter of cows for export of beef is continuing is not enough reason to not be worried about animal cruelty in Jallikattu. This argument is akin to saying that if you can't climb the Everest yet, don't climb the hill near your house. Real progress is a step by step process, you fight for what you can get when you can get it, and then try for more. Two, whatever valour might be for a man or beauty for a woman, it is not bigger than what dignity and safety is for an animal, another 'piece of life', as we might call them. Besides, valour doesn't cease to exist because you can't express it by toying with an animal. Three, the point about no animal ever having died in this game even as men have died during it is not a valid defence (even if we assume it is a fact) for the simple reason that men who died during it made the 'conscious' decision to play this game, while the bulls that are injured (the videos I've seen of the game being played bear this out amply) did not choose this, they were forced to. I've learned from Sadhguru how what you do consciously is beautiful, while that which is not lacks any pleasantness, so I was surprised by this omission. I've learned a lot from Sadhguru and will continue to do so, but I think that I differ on this and just want to express what I really feel. Perhaps it seemed as important to me as valour is to men."

Thanks.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Day 13

I finally got some studying flow going today. Read a couple of papers on rates, inflation and unemployment by Cochrane and Noah Smith, and a few articles by various economists, of which I particularly liked this one, by our RBI governor Raghuram Rajan. Not sure if I'm ready to fill a post with my own thoughts; it would  be wrong for me to claim support to any one among this cluster of diverging views that modern day macroeconomics has become, before I dig some data to convince myself.

I got ready for bed a couple of hours ago, and just read 50 odd pages from "The Road to Character". The profile of Frances Perkins is great and left me impressed with the writing as well as with Frances Perkins herself. I've always believed that the true import of any reading is if at the end of reading you know something you did not read. Along those lines, one takeaway for me that was not alluded to in the book, was that even for worthy virtues such as modesty, kindness - it is much better to have that virtue be conscious rather than compulsive. When it is compulsive, it is easy to lose all sense of proportion, of balance. And of course we all know how too much of a good thing can be bad.

Then there was a profile of Dwight Eisenhower. I'll be honest, he did not appeal to me as anything extraordinary. Peculiar, original, yes. Extraordinary, no. Anyway, that's just what I thought.

My diet is a mess, and has been for a while because I don't feel like cooking, and eating out everyday is not that great. I've got to fix it soon, but how, how, how. Off to sleep.

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Day 12

Home from work, I resumed reading 'The Road to Character' by David Brooks, and I have to say, it is a very fulfilling, nourishing book. I'm still reading that book, and looking forward to going back to it after posting this entry.

What else, I had a big dinner today. It was one of those "I'll eat heavy today because anyway I'm going to lead a spartan life from tomorrow until time's end" days. Only such days have been coming a little too frequently these days.

Monday, January 11, 2016

Day 11

So I did watch The Revenant today, right after work. Inarritu and DiCaprio, among several others, have to be credited for going to extremes to bring their movie out with a level of purity that astounds. There are some great performances, and if you go watch the film watch it for the performances, and for the moments where it forces you to examine a past human life, which was a life in the pursuit of survival, just like the animals yet so indelibly like humans still. At the level of plot, it may be called a revenge movie, but if you must watch the movie at the level of plot, you might as well skip it.

After the movie I stepped into the Barnes and Noble next door, after maybe a couple of years, and was looking at those elegantly handmade leather-bound notebooks with recycled paper. When I was new to the US and first saw those, I was quite enamoured by them. I remember thinking how I could've pleased my then girlfriend so much if I gifted her one of those, but I ended up not buying anything because I was pretty broke. It is just as well, because we broke up shortly after and if I had bought them I would've had to keep these beautiful things on my table and never write on them.

I picked up "The Road to Character" by David Brooks from the store after reading about 15 pages sitting there. I was already riveted. I came home and read a little more until Rohit called and we ended up talking about the young generation.

When I was a kid, or even when I was collegiate, the distinction between us and the adults was pretty clearly etched in my mind. There were those of us, and there were those of them, the adults. You couldn't mistake any of us as adults, or any of them as us boys, even if you only interacted with them by mail or phone, such that you had no way to infer by physical appearance. Even on a behavioral level, in our conversations, views, and preoccupations the difference was crystal clear. We were another people, with another set of things that we deemed important in life. As I've grown up, I've held on to most of the same preoccupations and a largely same world-view as back then. And so for long stretches of time I latently believe that I'm still a boy, just the same as I was 10 years ago, even 15. In the demarcation between boys and adults, there is no reason to assign me to the latter category.

Not quite. It is easy to crush this notion with simply an hour spent with a 15 or 20 year old of today. And then you see that there are those of them, these kids, and those of us. And perhaps that's the whole difference between boys and adults. It is not as if our elders underwent fundamental changes on reaching a certain age that made them different from us, made them adults. In all likelihood, they were just as they were when they were 20 year old young boys, only that they remained the 20-year-olds of 1980, which seemed rather 'adult' to us 20 year olds of 2006. And similarly, even though I feel the same inside as I did in 2006, I talk to a 20-year-old of today and can immediately see that we're different. It is another thing that I think they're a bit fake, but didn't our elders think the same?

Sunday, January 10, 2016

Day 10

Yesterday (Day 9, for which I did not post anything) and today were both very lackluster. I slept a lot. I didn't study. I think I was doing a lot better in 2015. 2016 has mostly found me out of my elements. My apartment is a mess, everything is lying around and I keep putting it off, the cleaning up, for a tomorrow that doesn't seem to arrive. I haven't been in high spirits either, which is a big departure from most of 2015 which was plenty blissful. Let's hope for a turnaround pretty soon.

In another news, two people who in all likelihood came to know of each other because of this blog will be getting married soon! That's some achievement, I suppose, for this blog at the tender age of 11 years. What a precocious kid. I must have written at least 15 meta-posts during these 11 years where the blog talks about what its purpose was, why it exists, and I have to confess that I've painted various conflicting pictures while tackling this subject, pictures of varying levels of authenticity. Hopefully, with this, that shall happen no more, for anyway it is somewhat presumptive of me to pretend that I know why this blog exists - maybe it did only for these two to find each other.

With my previous paragraph I have maybe romanticized the love and marriage business a little more than I genuinely believe. So to make up for that I'll go watch The Revenant. Will write a post about the movie tomorrow.

Saturday, January 9, 2016

Day 8

I watched the documentary series "Making a murderer" till the wee hours of the morning and was very moved by it. I highly recommend that others watch it too. 

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Day 7

Today was another really busy day at work, the third one of back-to-back long days. This was the end of it though, at least for the next 5 or 6 days. I haven't been able to get a lot of studying of my own done this year. At work, one of my teammates has left and I am covering for her until somebody else is hired. On top of that was this presentation to one of the founders of my company that I finally got done with today. It went well, a couple of things garnered his commendation.

Many of the early career quants that I talk to find it rather intimidating to present to him. I did too, until some time last year. I think that whatever little initiation I've had into yoga, meditation and vedanta has really brought about a major transformation in how I approach everything in life, and being mostly relaxed even when presenting to such big-wigs, I think, is a direct consequence, or one of the manifestations, of that transformation.

One of the changes I've brought about is while earlier I used to take extensive notes of everything I would say, and almost memorized my presentations to the level where even phrases like "and for that matter", "so much so" and "let's turn to the top left part of the page" were not spoken naturally but were part of a thoroughly planned script, I let things flow almost entirely conversationally now. It has maybe added a few extra uhmms to my delivery, but from watching a recording of it, I felt that the overall feel of the thing was much better, much more real than the linguistically flawless but emotionally robotic nature of my older rehearsed presentations.

Of course, I could only make the switch from a super cautious to a more relaxed, natural delivery because via vedanta and mediation I was able to overcome to some extent the fundamental things that underlie nervousness and cause feelings of intimidation. All said, I'm still no good at workplace small talk, except with friends.

I also did away with the tie.



Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Day 6

No post tonight. Really tired. :|

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Day 5 - (ii)

So I just got off work, it's almost 11, and I thought before I leave I'll write another post. Mostly because, well, it's my blog, and who will stop me?

Yeah, that was just lame, what I just said. But so what, it's my blog, and I can be whatever way I want, and who will stop me.

Now that was really, really dumb, what's the matter with me? I think it's either because I'm stupid, or because I'm a Delhi boy.

Either way, I get to drive back home now, because it's my car, and who will stop me?

Day 5

Today is a long day. It's 9:30 PM and I am still at work, and likely to be here for maybe a couple of hours more. Tomorrow promises to be similar.

I have this compulsive habit of running up stairs. Normally, I'm a little lazy, but when there's a flight of stairs in front of me, I almost automatically start running in leaps of two stairs at once, and at great speed. My desk is on the 4th floor, and that is just as well, for any higher and I couldn't have kept up with this madness. As weird as it is, I don't even try to consciously change this habit, because at some level I think it's good for me. I may be erratic about exercising regularly, but I go to work everyday, and each day I'm at work I walk down to the cafeteria on the ground floor about twice, which means there's at least this physical work-out I'm bound to get, with or without any self-effort to stay healthy.

But why am I talking about it today? Because I fell hard on those concrete steps while running up after lunch, and in this sub zero weather, it hurt a little bad, turned my knee blue, and ensured that I won't go running for some days now. It was only after this that it even occurred to me for the first time that this habit of mine of always turning crazy at the sight of stairs, might not be as unequivocally good as I imagined it to be.

Time to get back to work.

Monday, January 4, 2016

Day 4



Every now and then at work I zoned out thinking of mausa ji.

I chatted with Sambhavi after maybe a year.

A bunch of electronic things I'd ordered in December reached today.

It has got suddenly very cold around here.

I did not go running.

I did not study.

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Day 3

He was an unassuming man with a wry, understated sense of humour that was brilliant. For me, I'd say, he even had glamour, although I suspect that I might be a loner in having this opinion. I say glamour, because I always wondered if I could know him a little more. I always thought that he was definitely so much more than what meets the eye, but I had no way of knowing what that more consisted of.

He ran a shop of bags and suitcases in a busy market, and was known to never miss a day even if it meant taking 3 AM buses from Delhi after an extended-family function to return to his house and shop in Ambala. His shop was a favourite jaunt of so many other shopkeepers of this market, who would stop by to share a smoke and banter with him whenever business would be slow at their own shops, and he would generously give them his time and wit.

Three years ago he was diagnosed with cancer, and had been growing thinner and losing hair in the midst of numerous chemos and hospital visits.

Last March, when I went to Ambala during my holiday in India, he asked me if he could go to the US with me. He said he could help out with my brother's retail businesses in the States, after all he'd been selling stuff for decades! He'd said this while watching a cricket match on the same old small black & white TV in his shop that has been there for as long as I can recall life. At first I thought he was kidding, but when I realised he wasn't, it made me sad in a peculiar way, a kind of sad that didn't tear me up, but still one that I hadn't been before. If he wanted to leave this place, the very air of which, to me, breathed synonymous with him, I couldn't imagine what he must be going through, despite the ever cheerful front. That broke my heart. All of this maudlin business was happening inwardly, in him and in me, because on the outside, this conversation continued in a matter-of-fact and light-hearted way, and was soon broken by a nondescript call for a trivial chore.

He was a particular favourite of my brother for the longest time. A decade ago it used to be one of my brother's big thrills to oversee his shop for little bits of time in his brief absences, and imagine himself a businessman! And since a decade prior to that both me and my brother have always relished his characteristically crisp one liners as he went about his business of selling suitcases. Of course, we also enjoyed the other perks of hanging around there, which was hot dogs, chow mein, paneer pakodas and aloo poori from all the cool places close by. That he would ever say he'd like to leave that and work for my brother was unimaginable to me, until he said it.

A month ago I was told he was seriously ill. I asked my parents about him on our phone-calls every other day, but I didn't call him myself. What would I say, what will we talk about, I thought.

He passed away today. I wish I'd called him and told him that I loved him.

Bye Mausa ji. Hope you keep smiling. Hope maasi and your kids find strength to deal with the loss of you not being around. You were awesome.


Day 2

I planned to run a half-marathon this morning, but gave up after 8.73 miles. It's quite alright though. In fact, it is quite alright if I never manage to finish one. Running is something I do on whims, and save for future whims. I respect people who can run a lot, everyday, but the feeling that always accompanies respect is "why would they do it"? I really am not quite at the point where I really get it, why people do this. So why do I do it? Because they do it. Admittedly, that's not a good reason. And that's why it's totally cool with me if I suck at it.

In the highlight of the day, I called my grandfather after ages. I don't even remember the last time I had called him. I love him, but I'd never called him for so long. I don't know why, maybe I thought I wouldn't know what to talk about with him. He was a little pained, I could tell, when in the summer of 2012 I decided to move to the US for my masters, but he wished me well. He is about 90 now, and although old, he is fairly healthy for someone his age, but has been tellingly lacking color ever since I lost my grandmother in early 2012. That was the first time I'd ever seen him in tears. That did something to me, although I can't quite say what.

My grandfather was very happy to talk to me. Unsuspecting, he had talked to me for a few minutes thinking I'm my brother, who calls him more often, before I told him it's me. At that point, he sounded cheerful in disbelief. I promised myself to call him more often, it's not everyday that I'm able to make someone so happy like that with such little effort, and delight myself too in the process.

In another first, I picked my car and drove to a restaurant just to have tea, all by myself. I don't know why I'd never done it before, because it was awesome, especially in this chilly weather. There was also little bit of harmless flirting with the cashier girl; actually I wasn't even aware of the flirting until she started acting really "flirted". But it was cool, with its share of hahahas. That's never bad.

Alright then. Hopefully tomorrow, on the first Sunday of the year, I'll get some serious studies done. 

Friday, January 1, 2016

Day 1

Yesterday night was spent partying and dancing in Manhattan. I already knew that partying and doing woo-hoo at turn-of-the-year moments was never much of my thing, but I was a little surprised to find that my marginal utility from dancing is also on a decline. Earlier, I used to enjoy dancing a lot, and I guess many a time I was responsible for dragging my friends along to dance at night. I've been doing it a lot more infrequently now, the last time before yesterday was in March of 2015. In any case, I realized that I didn't have nearly as much fun dancing yesterday as I used to earlier, especially back in 2013 and 2014. I still enjoyed it, don't get me wrong, but just a little bit. Mostly I was just happy to get some blood flowing and body moving after the highly calorific snacking throughout the evening.

This morning we roamed about for breakfast but all the "in" places had at least a thirty minute waiting, and who waits for 30 minutes for eggs? So we ate at subway, and then went back to one of our friends' apartments and watched BBC's exploration show "Planet Earth". It is just amazing the level of perfection these guys aim for, and the lengths to which they go to get us the rarest of earth's wonders. Highly recommend! Then we started watching Jim Gaffigan's stand-up special, which was good until I dozed off. When I woke up in the late afternoon, I was getting late for the train back to Princeton, but still managed to eke out enough time to run and grab Kathi rolls with Srinivas. The train ride back seemed shorter than it usually does.

After getting back home, I spent some time surfing the internet, and then remembered about Chinmaya Mission's cultural program for New Years day. So hastily took a shower and drove away to the temple. Some guy was singing bhajans and he was really good. A lot of volunteers had brought home-cooked food from their homes, and I feasted on so many delectable south-indian dishes with great relish. I feel like these guys do their best cooking when bringing stuff for the temple. Overall, the evening at Chinmaya was great. I always have a hard time talking to the resident Swamiji as I feel like he, being so adept at Yoga and mediation, would be able to see right through me to all my myriad faults. So I'm always shy around him, but I wished him happy new year today and he smiled back saying happy new year, which I'll be honest was a bit of a relief!

Anyway, that's it for today. I don't know that I learned very much, except that sometimes I'm nervous about things that are totally imaginary, and it might be worth it to be a little more carefree, maybe.

Monday, December 28, 2015

New Year Resolution

2015 was a great year for me. In terms of outward achievement, there's not much to say here: I'm still working at the same job I was in at the beginning of the year, at the same role, same designation and largely same salary. But on parameters exponentially more important, this was a great year. I think I developed good, healthy habits, was able to exercise far more control on myself, my feelings and my actions, developed a bit of a knack for staying rather happy most of the time, and possibly as a result of that was able to learn a lot about some of my favorite subjects, and about myself.

For the next year, my resolution is to continue on the same path, maybe a little faster. I failed badly in 2015 to deliver on my resolution of updating the blog every day with new things I learned. I did learn a lot about a lot of subjects last year even if not every day, but was mostly lazy about updating the blog. For the next year, my resolution is the same. I will update the blog every day with new things I learn, as well as sometimes taking time to synthesize and organize some the old things as well. I do think that the quality of writing will take a backseat (as you would notice it did in my last post on learning about learning) as making sure to record things takes time, and doing it in well-formed sentences and paragraphs expands that time needed manifold. I just don't think I'm that productive to be able to do that, yet. If I succeed in 2016, that would be the goal for 2017.

And then there's one big project (other than work/career projects): I hope to be able to create a Khan Academy style course on time series analysis. In my own attempts to learn this stuff, I realized that whatever's available online for this is just not that good, and young students do really need and deserve better than what's available. I'm not saying that what I will make will be better, but I will try. I say Khan Academy style because I repeatedly run into lectures elsewhere where teachers just turn one powerpoint slide after another, and that just doesn't work. Anybody who's taken a khan academy course or even learned from a good school/university teacher actually working problems out on the blackboard knows that that way is a lot more effective, but sadly nothing of that type exists for time series analysis.

It already seems a little too ambitious of a plan given my schedule, my work-habits, and my smarts. But I guess if it weren't a little daunting I would never be bothered to try.

Meanwhile my parents are increasingly focused on their own resolution, to get me married. So maybe I'm not taking into account the unknown unknowns, but when can we do that anyway.

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Notes on learning how to learn


If you saw my reading list I posted previously on my weblog, you might know that I'm interested in how the mind works, how we learn. Based on my often chaotic and unsystematic reading on some of the books on that list (The Master and His Emissary, The Use of The Margin, Thinking as a Science, Thinking Fast and Slow) and mostly, some reading and online videos ("Learning How to Learn" course videos), I have compiled the following notes that I'll share in this post. Recall that the last time I reviewed a couple of books, I had expressed my misgivings about "reviewing" stuff, as I feel it would be a little preposterous of me to review people far more learned than myself. The best I can do is synthesize what I learned from them and try to present that briefly on the blog.

Special thanks, in addition to the authors of the books listed above, goes to Barbara Oakley (whom my notes will sometimes copy verbatim) and Terrence Sejnowski who conduct the course "Learning how to learn" on Coursera, which form the basis for a lot of notes below.

A small note: the notes presented here mostly cover the insights on this topic from the perspective of what modern neuroscience and modern psychology have uncovered. I'm also interested in the ancient Vedantic and Yogic systems that have done immense work on these same things following a very different approach, maybe, than what we call 'the scientific method'. But since much of what the modern methods are uncovering had been articulated by these schools rather impressively thousands of years ago, I'm convinced they were on to something, and see great value in their approach as well. In my opinion, there's a lot in that canon that is not yet uncovered by modern science, so it would be at one's own loss to ignore it. However, I will only touch upon my takeaways from the modern works discussed in the books and in the Coursera course in this post. In case you're interested, you can see certain Vedantic ideas on these topics here and here. A Yogic perspective can be found here and here.

So here we go.

1. The Very Basics

- When learning a subject, learn a little bit every day rather than overwork on one day. The rest period is when the neural connections form. The brain works in two modes - focused and diffused. While the focused mode is important to learn new material analytically, the diffuse mode helps form connections between a bunch of separately learned things, and fosters bigger picture and creative thinking. It is important to alternate between focused and diffuse modes. When you put your head down and study you employ just the focused mode. Bring diffuse mode into play by taking a step away from the study table to for exercising, walking, train-ride, or a shower. During these activities what you learned in the focused mode has room to roam around and form associations and consolidate a bigger picture context, and offer 'aha' moments. One caveat: insights from diffuse mode can be forgotten, so carry a notebook.

- Context-switching or multitasking is hard. Human beings are bad at it. Don't. If you do many things, serial-task. But at any given time, focus on one thing.

- Stimulating learning environments are often better than solitude for generating new neurons. If unavailable to you, exercise also provides this benefit.

 - Pomodoro - A simple cure for procrastination. The idea is to make sure to be completely focused on studying (don't do anything else) for 25 minutes, and then giving yourself a 5 minute break (use it to relax, draw a doodle, listen to a song etc) and then go back to another pomodoro, that is 25 minutes of uninterrupted study followed by 5 minutes to relax. Do 4 pomodoros before you give yourself a longer 15-30 minute break before jumping into another set of 4 pomodoros. This has proven to work in numerous studies. To help you stick to this, there are pomodoro device clocks available, or you could just download a pomodoro app on your phone. If you do that, make sure to keep your phone free of socializing apps, and on airline mode or you'll be distracted by incoming calls and messages.

- Know one thing about procrastination: that it is spurred by a feeling of impending pain (intellectual pain in this case, in contrast to physical or emotional pain). Know that the pain is far less once you’ve begun, than when you’re about to begin.

- Practice and spaced repetition make things learned permanent. Caveat, spaced shouldn’t be too spaced.

- When you study before bed and dream about it, it greatly enhances learning by employing the diffuse mode to augment the focused learning you did. Sleep helps retention by removing toxins, and creativity by employing diffuse mode. Salvador Dali and Thomas Edison made use of this.

- Learning by doing is way more effective in deepening and embedding the material in your circuitry. When just reading or listening, try to aim for active listening (vs passive), meaning ask questions, take notes etc.


2. Chunking
Most of us are able to store only about four to seven different items in our short-term memory. One way to get past this limit is to use a technique called chunking. The idea is that by grouping several items into one larger whole, you'll be able to remember much more.

A chunk is a grouping of information sets bound together through meaning or use. To form a chunk is mostly to employ your focused mode thinking to tie together information.

How to form chunks? Steps:
1. Focus your undivided attention on the information you want to chunk - remember that your working memory is very limited. (On average can hold four items/chunks). Quiet, no-distractions.
2. Understand the gist of the thing, the basic idea of the chunk. For this step, it is useful to alternate focus and diffuse modes. Note at this point while you have in a way understood the concept, it is not yet a chunk, or a primitive that you can call seamlessly.
3. Grasping a concept or a solution by reading it ("aha" moment) is not sufficient for expertise. Attempt and solve the problems yourself without external help. This will help you focus not just on how individual steps work but also the connections between the steps. That will glue the steps together to form a chunk. Only doing stuff yourself can create the "mastery" neural patterns in your brain.
4. Context. Not only getting how to use a chunk but also when to use the chunk. Practicing related and unrelated problems helps you see when to use or not to use the chunk. This makes sure chunk is not only firm but also accessible from many paths. Step 4 combines bottom-up "chunking" process (Steps 1-3) with the top-down "big picture" process. Complete learning happens as a result of the top-down and bottom-up processes. One tip here is to skim the whole chapter perfunctorily before you read it in detail, to have context. Also see "Interleaving" later.

Illusions of competence
Importance of recall, mini testing and making mistakes

Simply rereading is much less productive than “Recall what you’ve just read without looking at the book” after each reading. This retrieval process itself enhances deeper learning. (note to self: JEE screening less helpful than JEE main as a learning aid as looking at options did away with the need to recall everything. But that practice is important)

Re-reading is useful only after some space in time, as a means of spaced repetition.

Glancing at a solution and thinking you know it yourself is the most common illusion of competence. Do it yourself to have the knowledge persistent in your memory.

Underlining/highlighting also fools us into thinking we understood the material. Do it carefully, and sparsely. Underline lines that synthesize key ideas, or note those ideas in the margin.

Super helpful way to make sure you’re learning and not fooling yourself with illusions of competence, is to test yourself. In some sense, "recall" does that. If mistake happens, it is a good thing. Mistakes help correct your thinking.

Recalling material is extra helpful when you’re at various places outside your usual place of study, such as while walking in a park, waiting in a line, riding in a bus.

Motivation
Know what motivates you - if you’re genuinely interested in learning something, it’s easy to learn it.

Chemicals in the brain
- Acetylcholine - for focused learning
- Dopamine - controls motivation
- Seratonin - affects social life. alpha males have high. Depressed people have less. Prozac raises level of seratonin. Low seratonin also linked to high risk taking behavior, e.g. among jail inmates.
- Emotions intertwined with learning and memory. Be happy to be good learner.

The value of a library of Chunks, Compaction, Transfer, Creativity, Law of Serendipity

Library of Chunks.

Transfer.
Once you have many chunks. You see analogies between physics and business, language and CS. A chunk is a compressor. Chunking is like winzip.

As you gain more experience in chunking, you are able to create darker and longer chunking ribbons, meaning more expansive chunks, and better embedded in your head. Once you have a good library of chunks, you can easily get to good solutions by listening to whispers from your diffused mode. The more you practice, the darker the chunks. If you don't they're faint and will go away.

In building a library, you're training your brain to recognize not only a specific concept, but different classes of concepts.

There are broadly 2 ways to figure something out or solve a problem or understand a chapter: Sequential thinking using focus mode, and holistic/global/gestalt using mostly diffuse mode. Often, the most difficult concepts are grasped through the latter. Small caveat, solutions provided by the latter are less reliable and should be checked with the former.

Law of serendipity. Lady luck favors the one who tries. Just focus on whatever you're studying, you'll find that once you put the first concept in your mental library, the second will go in a little more easily and so on.

"Serendipity (or what Johnson calls “happy accidents”) accounts for other breakthroughs. He includes dreams, contemplative walks, long showers, and carving out time to read a variety of books and papers that might lead to “serendipitous collisions” of ideas. "- Bill Gates.

Overlearning, Choking, Einstellung Effect, Interleaving.

Overlearning
When learning a new idea/problem solving approach/concept, you may do it over and over again during the same study session. Some of it is useful, but continuing to do it after you've already mastered as much as you can in a session is called overlearning. Overlearning can help produce "automaticity" in playing piano, tennis. The fact that people can talk while driving between complex traffic is because they have overlearned it and "automaticity" has taken over. If you choke on exams, overlearning can be helpful in overcoming that.

But beware of repeated overlearning in a single study session. It can be a waste of valuable learning time. Once you have an idea down, continuing to hammer it down doesn't strengthen it. Using a subsequent study session to strengthen what you learned is just fine, it deepens your chunked neural patterns. Repeating something you already know perfectly well, is, just, easy. (It rarely helps, for example, with hard math). It also promotes illusion of competence that you've mastered the full range of material, when you've only mastered the easy stuff. Instead you should balance your studies by deliberately focusing on what you find more difficult. Deliberate practice is the difference between a good student and a great student.

Einstellung: Blocked thoughts due to your preceding training.
Your initial simple thought, or a neural pattern that you've already strengthened may prevent a better idea or thought from coming, by creating a rut. Inertia. It is important to be able to unlearn your old erroneous ideas while you're learning new stuff.

Interleaving.
Understanding and mastering a new subject means not only learning the basic chunks but also practicing jumping back and forth between problems that require different techniques. This is called interleaving. Once you have a basic idea or technique down, start interleaving your practice with problems of different types or approaches. When you do the problem right after a concept in a book, you already know it's going to use that concept, so it becomes easy and does not let you practice interleaving. That's why it is very important to do end-of-chapter problems. Also, ask yourself, why some problems call for one technique as opposed to another: knowing how to use a concept or technique isn't enough, you also should know when to use it. Interleaving is hugely important when it comes to building flexibility, creativity, or independent mastery. This is where you leave practice and repetition, and get into ‘expertise’.

Learning by teaching, and by doing: very important methods in addition to learning by learning, and more powerful.


3. Procrastination and Memory. 

Procastination & Memory are related. Why?
For committing to long term memory "spaced repetitions" are a must. But you can only do that if you don't procrastinate, otherwise you'll cram at the last moment. Building solid chunks in long term memory, chunks that are easily accessible by your short term memory takes time. It's not the thing that you want to be putting off till the last minute.
Always remember: Good learning is a bit by bit activity.

How procrastination happens and how to tackle it? (other than Pomodoro)
First things first: willpower is hard. Procrastination, on the other hand, is easy, a negative entropy process, if you will. We procrastinate about things that make us uncomfortable, uneasy, things that trigger our pain centers (intellectual pain). You funnel attention onto a more pleasant task and feel happy temporarily. But sadly, longer term effects of doing this can, in fact, be painful. For example, when you put off study for some time, it can become even more painful to think about studying. The daunting thing that led you into procrastination just became more daunting with less time on your hands. Procrastination begets procrastination. Mark this: procrastination ia a monumental, a keystone bad habit. It shares features with addiction: you start to tell yourself stories to justify it.

Now, let's tackle it. This journey of tackling procrastination is one from unconscious living to conscious living. You should be making your decisions, not your unthinking zombies."Zombie mode" means acting out of habit. A habit can be good or bad. "Chunking" is creating good zombies, good habits. Procrastination is also a habit, a bad one.

Habits have four parts:
1. The cue. This is the trigger that launches you into zombie mode. Seeing a text message from a friend is a trigger, a study-reminder is also one. What we do in reaction to these cues is what matters.
2. The routine: the habitual response on receiving the cue. The zombie mode.
3. The reward. Habits develop and continue when they reward us in some way. Procrastination is an easy habit to make, because its rewards are so immediate and easy. But good habits can also be rewarded. Find ways to reward good study habits.
4. The belief. Habits have power because of your beliefs in them. To change your habit you have to change your underlying beliefs.

Mental tools and tricks to inspire and motivating yourself. 

Its normal to start with a a few negative feelings about beginning a learning session, even when you like the subject. It's how you handle this that matters. Non-procrastinators put their negative feelings aside telling themselves "quit wasting time just get on with it once you get going you'll feel better about it".

Another helpful way: Focus on process, not product or outcome. "I'm gonna spend 1 hour working" is a process-oriented goal vs "I'm gonna finish the homework" which is product or outcome-oriented. To avoid procrastination, focus on process, avoid focusing on the product. Product is what triggers the pain that causes you to procrastinate, because it puts you face to face with the question of whether you'll attain the product, leading to fear, escapism, and procrastination. Focus on the process or processes, the small chunks of time you need over days. Calmly put forth your best effort for a short period. That's easier. Focus "on the moment". Pomodoro works because it rooted in the same idea. By focusing on process instead of product, you back away from judging yourself and instead relax into the flow of the work. The key is when a distraction arises, which it inevitably will, you want to train yourself to just let it flow by. Setting yourself up so that distractions are minimal is also a very good idea: think quiet spaces, switched off phones.

Harnessing your zombies to help you. 
Using our understanding of habits to form good ones.

The Cue: Since willpower is hard, let's minimize the use of willpower in the tackling procrastination. The only place you need to employ willpower is where you look to change to reaction to the "cue", that is, when you go from cue to routine zombie reaction. Cues fall into 4 categories: Location, time, how you feel, reactions. You can prevent the most damaging cues from striking you by shutting cellphone and internet while you're doing pomodoro study sessions. For me food is a distraction/cue, understand what puts you into zombie mode and act to fix it.

The Routine: Key to re-wiring your reactions to the cues is to "have a plan". Plan ahead to "leave your phone in your car when you go to class" etc. By doing this, you took care of the hard part where you struggle with altering your reaction to the cue, by doing something easier: making a conscious decision to cut off the cue before it could strike you. Plans may not work right away but keep at it.

The Reward: Investigate why are you procrastinating, for what reward? Can you substitute an emotional payoff even if small: a sense of satisfaction, maybe? Make it a personal game, does challenging yourself to do 4 pomodoros, as though it were a game, work? You could reward yourself with something you value: an episode of your favorite show, a phone-call to some loved one, an ice-cream. A small caveat, here: stopping periodically for rewards can hamper "flow". Don't be discouraged though, since it anyway takes a few days of ‘pomodoros’ before "Flow" begins to unfold.

Tricks 2.0: The better you get at something the more enjoyable it can become. Deliberately delay rewards until you get task done.

The Belief: Most important part of overcoming procrastination. A strong belief that your new system works is what can take you through. Hang out with non-procrastinators, or people trying hard to be non-procrastinators. Friends who believe in these values.

Juggling Life and Work - Practical tips

- Make a weekly list of key tasks to do (preferably process-oriented goals)
- Make a daily to-do list for the next day the evening before and go to sleep (only 5-6 items, mostly process oriented, product oriented only if totally doable. Some of those can be diffuse mode tasks - such as taking a walk. Get a good mix of tasks, let them not all be similar. Be realistic.) Having it written down the night before helps to internalize it while you sleep and precludes the need to carry the list in your limited working-memory.
- Important: In your daily plan, decide quitting time for the day!
- As you go along with this habit, make notes about what works what doesn't.
- ALWAYS make time for healthy leisure time, it's much better for your productivity than working all day! Preferably play, movement oriented.
- Get at least one pomodoro done as soon as you wake up, preferably the most disliked task.

Ways to access your brains most powerful long-term memory systems.

Visual memory
-Tap into your naturally great visual spatial memory system.
- The funnier and more evocative (i.e. using other senses than sight) the images the better.
For something to move from Working memory (WM) to Long term memory (LTM), first, the idea should be memorized, AND two, should be repeated. Repeat not a bunch of times in one day, but sporadically over several days ("spaced repetition").

Index cards
- Hand-writing things more deeply encodes them in your brain. Ever noticed how you learn so much better from blackboard teaching than from teachers using power-point slides?
- Once you have several cards together. Try shuffling them and running through them all to see if you can remember them. This is practicing interleaving. Once you've given them a try, put them away. Wait and take them out again, before you go to sleep. Briefly repeat what you want to remember, for a few minutes each morning/evening. Gradually expand the time between repetitions as you become more certain.
Another interleaving tip: study every subject every day, even if only for 15 minutes.

Meaningful groups 
- Acronymizing lists. and assigning memorable alternates. e.g. in Trigonometry, "Pandit Badri Prasad Sona Chandi Tole har har bole" to remember Sin, Cos, Tan formulas.
- Memory palace is a powerful technique of grouping things, useful for remembering unrelated items: Walking through a place you know well coupled with shockingly memorable images of things you want to remember. The more you do it the better it gets.

As you begin to internalize the key aspects of the material taking a little time to commit the most important parts to memory, you come to understand it much more deeply. The formulas would mean far more to you, and you develop great flexibility in slinging them around, and navigating through them flexibly, when needed.

4. How to become a better learner.

Two basic tips.
Tip 1. The best gift you can give your brain is physical exercise.
Tip 2. Practice makes perfect but only when your brain is prepared. There are certain critical periods in the development of your brain when sudden improvements occur in specific abilities. Expect them to happen and prepare your brain for them. e.g. The critical period for first language acquisition extends up to puberty.

Renaissance learning and unlocking your potential.

1. Visual metaphors as aids to memory. Discussed before.

2. No need for genius envy. Smaller working memory mean less Einstellung problems. Forming chunks may take longer, but once done, you can use it with great versatility. Also, "deliberate practice" makes gifted. Deliberate practice is the idea that you need to make your practice, the problems you attempt successively harder. Deliberate practice is doing everything to avoid illusions of competence, being meticulous about identifying your weaker aspects in a subject/skill and inventing methods to work and test that aspect. Of course, broader planning is necessary to keep this sustained. 

3. Change your thoughts, change your life. One, understand Fixed mindset vs Growth mindset. Two, the ability to change your mind and admit errors is another type of intelligence - the virtue of the less brilliant, as Santiago Cajal calls it. Another virtue to imbibe is taking responsibility of your own learning - referring, by your own choosing, different books and videos for the same topic makes you realize the true reality of the subject has more dimensions than what your teacher taught you. One more advice - with dispassion, know when to cut willful detractors out of your circle.

4. Teamwork. The left hemisphere of your brain, which is responsible for focused mode, analytical thinking, also has a tendency for rigidity, dogmatism, clinging to ideas, and egocentricity. For example, when you're absolutely certain that what you've done on a homework or test is fine, and refuse to check it, it means that you are refusing to use your right-brain, the part that makes sense of the whole, the big picture. Be aware that this feeling may be based on overly confident perspectives arising in part from the left hemisphere. When you step back from a problem and recheck the solution, you're allowing for more interaction between the hemispheres, taking advantage of the special perspectives and abilities of each.
Teamwork is a great way to overcome such blind-spots, as working in teams forces you to use your brain in various different ways - focused mode as well as diffuse mode. But group study sessions shouldn't become socializing occasions, in that case you're best off to find another group.

5. Testing. Take frequent mini-tests. Taking a test you study for 3 hours seamlessly, compare this to how hard it is for you to study with such concentration otherwise!  Checklist before exams: did you make a serious effort to understand the text? (Just hunting for relevant worked out examples doesn't count) Did you work with classmates or at least check your solution with others? Did you attempt to do every problem yourself before working with classmates? Did you participate actively in group discussions? Did you consult with the instructor when you were having trouble? Did you understand all your homework problem solutions? Did you ask for explanations for solutions that weren't clear to you? Did you attempt to outline a lot of the solutions quickly without getting into details? Most importantly, did you get a reasonable night's sleep before the test? Hot tip: Start with hard - Jump to Easy. Activates both the focus and diffuse modes, also avoids Einstulleng.

 

Another important note to myself

Always make sure to check your answers. If you tend to feel too lazy about it and usually skip it, know that you refusing to use a particular part of your brain (as a matter of fact, this particular part resides in the right hemisphere - responsible for making sense of the bigger picture). A tendency to not use specific parts of your brain can lead to sloppy work. You should use all parts of your brain.

"The first principle is you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool". - Richard Feynman

Saturday, December 19, 2015

Antidote

Never do anything for want of vindication.

Things you do for want of vindication tend to happen in fits and starts, are doomed to be inconclusive, and have a way of lingering on like a bad taste. They are a sure shot way to persistent, chronic sapping away of your energy and creative capacity.

Often it is easy to fool yourself into thinking that you're doing something to make past wrongs right, when actually you're just seeking vindication. First, be very careful about deciphering what it is: the former or the latter. If you think it is the latter, tell yourself a hundred times that it is the latter, and stop right away. If you think it is the former or are just not sure, do everything in your capacity to make any probable wrongs as right as you can, and then, stop.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

My wishes for 2016

1. That I can enhance, at a faster pace than before, my ability to just put my head down and study.

2. That I turn insights into habits, by internalizing if-then causal relationships and use it to forego instant gratification*. "Insight separated from practice remains ineffective" -Erich Fromm

2. That humility, that rarest of genuinely held qualities, becomes, at least, ever so slightly more pervasive in the world.

3. That when someone writes someone a letter, it is read by the recipient. I wouldn't go so far as to wish it is always replied to, but that it is read I do wish, even for the most unlikable of senders.

4. That I'm able to avoid all situations where I feel compelled to lie. That if I do face such situations, I stand for truth anyway.

5. That the cockroaches that I knowingly kill forgive me. More importantly, in case there's a provider-dependent schematic in cockroach communities, that their dependents can forgive me. Better still, that my apartment stays cockroach-free.

6. That I'm able to genuinely inspire someone. Inspire by way of being, that is, not by accomplishments.

7. That people who harm themselves, stop harming themselves. That people who harm others, also stop harming themselves.

8. That I exercise regularly (learn swimming!), and eat healthy. That others do so too.

9. That I can link my identity to my over-riding purpose alone.

10. That I meditate regularly.

*Through 9 and 10.


Friday, November 13, 2015

Recent Reading

In breaking this blog's tradition of not delivering on promised posts, I will now write down my thoughts on the books, as some would recall, I had mentioned to be on my near term reading list a couple or so months ago.

(1) "On Thinking For Oneself" (Schopenhauer)

This essay is one I found very, very perceptive. And it's not even that long, so I'd highly recommend reading the essay itself rather than some random blogger's review of it. But in any case, let me restate the gist of the essay: The mind needs alone time. This insight is probably a lot more relevant today than in those presumably simpler times when Schopenhauer wrote the essay. For those who have read Schopenhauer otherwise, it is hard not to notice the patterns in this essay, too, that borrow ideas from Upanishads and Vedic philosophy (or Vedanta, if you prefer that term). He contends that making your mind work too hard and too often can be counter-productive: if you keep studying one thing after another, when do you think in peace about what you've read? The mind needs time to assimilate and mull over what it has consumed; it is only by this process that you internalize concepts to such level of comfort that you can think in an original way about them without distorting the fundamentals, and that is when you really 'own' or 'know' the concept; without it you merely 'borrow' it, or 'believe' it. Upanishads say something very similar when they state that the way to truly 'know' is by going through the stages of 'shravan', 'manan' and 'dhyaan' (in English: reading/listening, mulling it over in your head, and then meditating upon it). Anyway, I'll leave you with that. If you're interested: here's the full essay: http://insomnia.ac/essays/on_thinking_for_oneself/

(2) "Expected Returns" (Ilmanen)

If you're interested in Empirical Finance, this book is what I would call "most value per unit time", and it's no small feat given there are more than 500 pages here. To 'review' it would be rather preposterous of me, for I have studied finance not nearly as deeply as Antti Ilmanen, so all I can say is: I learned a lot reading this book. If you really want to understand at a fundamental level why prices of securities are what they are, and why they move in ways that they do, this I think is the best 'big picture' book for that I've ever read. It's not an introductory text, so if you're very, very new to this stuff, the CFA Level 1 material would be an appropriate pre-requisite for you before you start on this book, although I will say that you'll be surprised how much this book can magnify your understanding with even that little prior background. I would like to think that I have a much more rigorous education in Empirical Finance than what CFA affords, but even for me (and possibly those much more seasoned than me) this book is a treasure trove. There are pearls of wisdom on every other page. The book is probably not as mathematically rigorous as a text-book, but that is because it doesn't aim to be. It aims to develop intuition and understanding, and does an amazing job of it. Mathematical rigor is often more useful later on, once you have the necessary understanding to think of ideas, and are working on "testing" the ideas out. When what you seek is that level of mathematical rigour, a canonical book would be Cochrane's "Asset Pricing". But there's another caveat: To really be rigorous, you will have to get your hands dirty and collect, clean, organize data, write code, and run statistical tests on your own: merely reading Cochrane's book will not cut it for you. And that's nothing against his book: it is just that you can only learn by doing.

* * *

This is all I'm willing to say for now. I've also read 'Efficiently Inefficient', 'Fault Lines' and "Vivekachoodmani' so far, but haven't thought through them enough in leisure that I would feel sure I know something about their contents well enough to comment about them (refer back to review 1 of this post - now you know why I covered that first). I will write something on those books next. I'll most likely add stuff to the two books I already covered above as I 'mull over them' more as time passes. 

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Diwali wishes to those who read this blog

Happy Diwali everyone.

No, really. This is not a post. This is just to wish you guys.

Hope you have a lovely Diwali, and hope you eat lots of peanuts in the winter sun in the coming days. Of course, this only goes for those of you who are in India.

If you're in the US, on the other hand, although I don't think you are, I hope you find a parking spot under some shade so you don't have to shovel everyday to uncover your car from under the snow.

If you're neither in India, nor in the US, who are you and why do you care about Diwali? Let me know. For you, I don't know what to wish, except recount the famous words of the great modern day philosopher and sage Salman Khan: "do whatever you want to do man".

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Important news that the popular media omitted - 1

In the past couple of weeks, there have been developments that IMHO are rather important but that, not all that surprisingly, aren't anywhere to be found on the news channels, even though they do have some modest print and digital representation. I'm thinking since this happens on a regular basis, I'll make this a regular feature on the blog.

So the 2 things I find most under-represented this week are:

(1) India started accepting gold deposits as if it were money, that is, you can earn interest on it. Gold had lost much of its legitimacy as money globally after the abandonment of the gold standard, but it looks like it is making a comeback, and India is at the helm! Now Warren Buffett can no longer say that there is no way to value it (the interest payments take away the abstraction by a great deal), or that 'civilized people don't buy gold'. Well, he still might say that. In any case, it is a very interesting experiment and deserves to be watched closely.

(2) India's states can now issue debt in the capital markets accessible to foreign investors. I believe it opens many doors, though prudence will be needed on the part of the state governments as not every open door should be walked through. I'll be watching closely.

Thankfully, TV channels did report the move away from China's well-known one child policy.

Sort of tangential, but since I'm vaguely criticizing news channels, here's an astute piece on why news can be harmful. Though, unlike me, it isn't quite concerned about errors of omission.