How to be good

Don't be good in order to get favours. It will make you wicked.
Don't even be good in order to get praise. It will make you vain.
Don't even be good in order to get love. It will make you needy.
Don't even be good to get respect. It will make you judgmental.
Don't even be good to get good karma. It will make you fearful.
But be good anyway.

A competition of virtues

Striving for equality is a virtue.

Cultivating generosity is, too.

But whenever the two conflict, choose generosity.

If we choose the former as our policy to break a tie, we will eventually break all ties.

Where will we be when the summer's gone?

I almost feel bad for this blog. Sometimes, it seems to me to be like an old girlfriend: for the first few years you tell them everything about everything, and then there is a long drawn-out period where you are convinced that you still being with them is more than ample generosity on your part. Some other times, it reminds me of aged grandparents who you never think of except sometimes when you are sad.

I was 19 when I started this blog, I am 33 now. But when I think of the days around when I first started writing here, they seem just a short while ago. In between were long periods of depression and long periods of spiritual satisfaction, long periods of stasis and of growth, long periods of turbulence and of boredom. And yet, I am still essentially the same person, closer now to my 19 year old self, than my 23 or 28 year old selves, by a long shot.

Much has changed, of course. Recently, I got married. I am still figuring out how to be a good husband. Some times, in the middle of an animated exchange, I find that my eyes well up. That is as much a matter of respite for me as it is a matter of concern. Respite, because I realize I am still vulnerable to human emotions, something I had become unsure of for many years now. Concern, because I must not fall into the kind of emotion-driven and intellect-devoid patterns of many years ago that I had to then meticulously rid myself of over several years.

More recently, in a large-scale downsizing of the small firm I worked at, I was eliminated. So these days, I am married and I spend my time at this apartment overlooking the Hudson river that I had rented in more economically friendly times.

Tomorrow, I move out of this apartment, back to good old Plainsboro that I had called home for four years prior to coming here. My brother now has an apartment there, and I will move in with him, while my wife and I do the 'long-distance' thing with her job in another city some hours away. Her folks don't know that I am out of work now, so I'll still see her, like a busy man, only on the weekends.

Day after tomorrow, who knows where we'll be.

The enemies of emptiness

The smell of old books

The walking of geese

The dilapidated bicycle

Homework copies marked Very Good

The gossip about other planets

The water fountain in the park

The stains of ink from the fountain pen

The trembling of plants

The bell tolls to end school days

The ineffectiveness of hot summers

The sound of ball on bat

The novelty of all information

The taste of calcium carbonate

The stickiness of Boroline

The ironed handkerchief

The change from the grocery store

The shiny Kiwi shoe polish

The hissing of insects at night

The mother's embrace

अफ़सोस

तजुर्बों में खुद को यूँ घोला तो था, खुद से अमूमन ये बोला तो था
खूब तन्हाई में खालीपन है, खला है, फिर भी बदतर है इश्क़, दूर रहना भला है

था भरोसा हमें हो गए हैं सयाने, नाजाने फिर दिल आज कैसे जगा है
है डरता बहुत फिर भी अपनी चलाता, अफ़सोसन मुझे इश्क़ होने लगा है 

खोज

किसी खोए हुए किस्से के खोए हुए बंज़ारे सा

खोया हुआ हूँ ख़्वाबीदा ख़यालों में इस तरह

जैसे सालों पुराना ऐब कोई खुदबख़ुद खो जाता है

Commotion

On Friday evenings after work,

while walking to the Subway station,

brushing aside pangs of anxiousness,

I stand outside the Rockefeller,

and look at the people

looking at the famous X-Mas tree.

It’s a swarm of selfie sticks.

At every step,

I hesitate.

I wouldn’t want to ruin

anyone’s holiday picture;

“Who’s that in the background?”

It would be a minor shame.

I am not exactly a festive scene.

On 2018

I know we are not through yet, but I have a history of writing end of year posts a fair bit before the end of the year, every year. In these posts I feel impelled to hope as much as to take stock, and sometimes hope for what this year wasn't but could still be in the few days that remain.

Very early in the year, something happened that made me experience the greatest physical pain I have in my life, so far. I was hospitalized for the first time in my life, and my brother came to Princeton to take care of me. It is acute and excruciating in the moment, but in hindsight I think a physical debilitation invariably seems less daunting than a mental one. In the end all that came of it was I started appreciating my brother more than I did before.

Earlier this year, I quit my prior job, a relatively relaxed affair, living in a relatively laid-back town, and started working at a new, clearly competitive place, and with it, moved to a new, clearly fast-paced city. Mostly, I was seeking a change from some sort of stasis and stillness I had started feeling. I cannot say that I am loving the change, but I should also confess I do not quite have a solid conception of what it is that I would love.

The one thing this change has ignited, though, is to seek more change. Although there was another, probably more potent catalyst for that. Soon after I had moved, my parents came visiting me here from India. I would work from early mornings to late nights (I still do, I don't quite have an option, at least as long as I am in this job) and feel bad about not spending any time with them. In my previous job, the two or three months they would live with me used to be the highlight of my year. That 25% of the year in time, I estimate, carried 99% of the year, in terms of meaning. In any case, they did not stay the entire three months. In the second month, my mom was diagnosed with a serious illness, and my parents left for India for treatment, with my brother accompanying them, to take care of my mom. 

He spent four months in India and to be able to abandon his businesses in the US for such a long time, he had to sell them. He returned a week ago to US, my mom's recovery is now progressing well. In the months that he was in India, I felt great gratitude for him. I also questioned deeply what I was doing with my life. Now, he has returned, to what can nicely be called, not much. And again I question what I'm doing with my life. What role am I serving in my family? Why have I been so unable to help?

I still have dreams (literally, in sleep) I do not want to have, those I have had for years now. It is very disconcerting when I think about the fact that I'm still having them, although I have gotten marginally better at not entertaining that thought.

A good and a bad

For the last couple of days, I've started coming to Starbucks for getting my personal coding things done. And so far, it has been so good that I have wondered why I never tried this earlier. True, sometimes, you need the intensity of being alone in the quiet of your room and your bookshelf next to you, but a great majority of the time, you don't, and what's much more crucial is that your practice is more habit-forming. To that end, I think, a kind of quasi-alone state that you get in a cafe where you are surrounded yet by yourself, is a lot more conducive than being in a locked up room. Or so I feel, for now. We'll see.

The other thing I've realized is that good textbooks are a way better way to learn something new, or even re-learn something, than video lectures. At least for me.

I've been thinking a lot about the pursuit of money and what it does to us, lately. I've long held that the utility I, and in my opinion others too in all likelihood, derive from accumulating money tends to zero, even negative, after a certain threshold. The threshold, however, where you feel like you should stop caring about accumulating still more comes much later, and for most, never at all.

I have been thinking about the second stage lately. On the one hand I feel convinced that I do not care about any pursuit the only payoff from which is more money, I think I still have some ways to go before I can say the same about external recognition, even though from what I can tell, it is entirely frivolous, whereas having money (a reasonable amount of it, at any rate) is actually pretty darn important. And yet when I see an old classmate on LinkedIn I've always thought of myself as much smarter and hard-working than, and see that he is head of so and so fancy thing at so and so fancy company, something tells me that I cannot stop running after external recognition just yet, not until I "right that wrong". I know it is immensely ignorant and small of me, but where would I confess it if not here, to nobody and everybody?

Inflection

This is the 15th of September, 2018.
I took a decision today.
I decided to decide.

नयी नौकरी, पुरानी यादें

मई में नयी नौकरी शुरू की थी, तब से दिन भर programming ही कर रहा होता हूँ. ऐसा लगता है की पिछली company में जितनी सवा चार साल में programming की थी, उतनी यहाँ 2 महीने में कर ली है, शायद उससे भी ज़्यादा. पिछली जगह काम थोड़ा subjective था, यहाँ ज़्यादातर बस programming ही करनी रहती है. वैसे अच्छा ही है, दिमाग पर ज़्यादा ज़ोर देना पड़ता है, focused state में पूरा दिन निकल जाता है, अच्छा लगता है.

सुबह आँख खुलते ही काम पर निकल जाता हूँ, और रात घर पहुँचते फिर सोने का ही समय हो जाता है. उसके बाद भी हमेशा deadline की race में थोड़ा देर से ही code ship कर पाता हूँ. इस सब का क्या मतलब है, ये सोचना छोड़ दिया है.

मम्मी को बहुत miss करता हूँ. भगवान् उनको बहुत अच्छी सेहत दे. 

Three things that I initially thought overrated but have with the passage of time come to think very highly of

1. The Mehdi Hassan ghazal: Ranjish hi sahi

2. The Farhan Akhtar movie: Zindagi na milegi dobara

3. The Farida Khanum ghazal: Aaj jaane ki zid na karo

Inflection

This is the 30th of April 2018.
I took a decision today. 
I decided to never be dishonest with myself again. 

Definition

Wishing earnestly for an outcome that you know to be impossible, is insanity. 

Two species of aloneness

On days that I would be alone in India, in the sense of not being around family and friends, I would still run into small, individually trivial but in aggregate meaningful encounters with auto drivers, bus conductors, tea vendors, shopkeepers, ironing guy, vegetable vendors, cows, temple pujaris, street food hawkers, internet cafe owners, and random dudes on the street that I knew from one time and context to another.

On days that I am alone in the US, I am alone.

And then again, days that I'm alone in the US are much more frequent than days that I would be alone in India. And since there is this completeness to the aloneness of the US variety, I'm compelled to intensify my search for what to do with those times.

Mostly, it has helped me explore areas of study, habits of self-sufficiency, and patterns of self-development, that I probably never would have had I continued to live in India, and for which I am grateful, but once in a while, it leads you to a dark place that you either dread in the moment or an escape that you regret later.

Dread alone, and regret alone, too.

Beginnings

It was some time in the summer of 2015 that I started turning to spirituality. Looking back, it was entirely spontaneous and not in the least bit planned, or even something I aspired to at any point in my life before.

True, a couple of months prior to this, my mom had come visiting me for the summer and I accompanied her to temples quite often, and it was one such visit that prompted a great urge, but it's unlikely that the temple visits were what set off this quest. (But quest is what I can call it now; at the time it was more of a refuge for my curiosity.)

A more potent catalyst had already set it in motion, unbeknownst to me, two and a half years prior, when my relationship of more than three years with my then girlfriend had come crashing down. In the year that had followed that, there was a texture of defeated daze to the very air that I breathed. Every waking moment was filled with a kind of uncontrollable self-doubt that surrounds one the foundations of whose well-established world-view are newly shattered, as if a single overarching event swept meaningless all your life experiences, all with a calm, terrifying apathy.

Initially I tried venting out with some friends, but soon realized the futility of that exercise. It became clear to me that the depths of what I felt were unsharable; in speech or text I could at best have created a poor, elementary imitation of the reality within. When I stopped talking about it, my sorrow was complete and pure, uncluttered with imagination of what it made me look like or what its verbal expression to someone might elicit. For the first time, then, I faced my sorrow squarely, with close attention rather than haywire self-pity, and then again, and then again. Every day and every night, for years to follow. That kind of inquiry into the deepest recesses of your mental and emotional landscape does something to you, it transforms you into something new. The word that comes closest to describing it, somehow, is spiritual.

But then again, the very first steps on this path were more likely, instead, those first few steps of my life, when as a toddler I must have found myself focused with all my being on the idea that I was all by myself and it was extremely, terribly important not to fall.

Unfolding

I am aware of you in love with me.
I am aware of you in love.
I am aware of you.
I am aware.
I am. 

Sundays

I came to the library today, like every Sunday, rather aimlessly, like every Sunday, and gazed at people sitting in groups and laughing, like every Sunday, and wondered, like every Sunday, what I was doing here. But unlike every Sunday, wondered also where else might I have been this Sunday such that I wouldn't have had this question, and couldn't come up with a convincing answer, and that is why, I guess, I am, here, this Sunday, again.

Benefits of sleep

That is all very well, but, the problem with sleep is, you wake up. 

Subtle difference

He had thought about every angle of it, from every paradigm possible, in a systematic manner, for a considerable period of time, and was absolutely convinced that committing suicide was unequivocally unjustified, there were no two ways about it. But he really wouldn't mind if a truck ran over him right now making him pulp. That, to be honest, would be welcome.

Rekindlings

They met every other day, although their friendship now was like that of two people who used to know each other years ago, but whose paths had diverged so much that there was little any more to talk about, even if the fondness remained intact, or deepened, even, and now sat awkwardly between them like an empty plate devoid of food they were supposed to share, and while they did now text each other every night, there were hardly any words exchanged, just emoticons of various kinds, at once necessary and inadequate, filling in for that which cannot be replaced.

Time-travel

I sometimes remember, out of the blue, instances from decades ago, from when I was five, playing ball with another tenant's kid on the roof, who remarked that I was playing very well for someone my age, or from when I was six and wanted a cool pencil box like one of my classmate's that opened on the press of a button and had a mini-piano of sorts affixed to its lid, but I never really was able to get one for myself, or from when I was seven, and after much tenacity got my parents to buy me an umbrella that you wore like a headband rather than carry like a stick and which really caught the fancy of the girls in my class, as I knew it would. And when I'm thrown back, without asking, without demand, into these ephemeral episodes, I am five, or six, or seven again, and it is immense. And sometimes, I'm thrown back to being 23, and that is euphoria, but I can't talk about it here.

Waiting

बेक़रारी सी बेक़रारी है, वस्ल है और फ़िराक़ तारी है
जो गुज़ारी न जा सकी हमसे, हमने वो ज़िन्दगी गुज़ारी है

- Jon Elia

(1)

She will have no more

of his impatience.

If he really loved her, 

he needed to learn to wait. 

Wait how much? he asked. 

A lifetime, she said proudly.

He waited.

A lifetime.

[April 2014, Princeton]

(2)

You told me, politely,

to go away.

I did.

[June 2009, New Delhi]

छोड़ो भी

जब हम में था क़रार, मिलती थी हफ्ते एक बार
अब  जो कुछ भी न रहा, अब क्यों रोज़ आती हो?

अब तो फ़िराक को भी गए हो चली हैं मुददतें
ये कोई सलात तो नहीं जो सुभ-ओ-शाम गाती हो !

शब भर मुस्कुरा के कहती हो माफ़ किया छोड़ो भी
आँख खुलते ही मगर पल में चली जाती हो।

No non-sense man

बेमिजाज़ी

जब से तू मेरा ना रहा 

किसी से कोई गिला ना रहा 

नौकरी-पेशा, गाडी, घर-मकान 

हसरतों का ये सिलसिला न रहा 

न रहा शौक़ घर को आने का 

बाहर का भी काफिला न रहा 

झिझक

यूँ हिचकिचा के तेरी तस्वीर फिर उठाई है
जैसे लौट जाता हो कोई शख्स दरवाजे से
अब अगर गौर से देखूंगा, तो मर जाऊंगा

Random Post

I felt an impulse to come write here, even though I have to confess I have only the vaguest of ideas about what it is I'm going to write. It had been a while since I came here, so maybe I should explain my absence - even though there is no real explanation. I just had been busy studying and thought that writing blog posts wasn't the most judicious use of my time.

"Studying for what?", I'm often asked. And I never have a good answer. To be more precise, I don't have an answer that would be good enough for someone who would ask that question, because someone who assumes that one always only studies for a tangible near-term goal -- a job interview, an exam, a promotion -- would probably find it difficult to empathize with where I'm coming from.

I just study just to learn. And I learn because I couldn't live any other way. "But you could just learn from life, like people do, can't you? You don't have to be studying!" I know, I can, and I do, but there's scope for more. I learn to gather insights into things that I find hard. It is not too different from why anyone runs long distances. I'm guessing they do it because it is hard, because they don't know if they can do it, and they want to find out. It is only curiosity that drives every such action about which other people ask 'why would they do that'. Anyway, as I said, I can only answer this question in roundabout, unsatisfying ways for a person who has this question.

Recently, I've been talking and skyping with girls who are strangers to me. My parents tell me about them - they think that she and I should talk - and we do. Girls I've spoken to thus far are mostly unable to understand why someone would study, code, solve math problems just like that and more importantly why they would want to put up with such habits, and so the conversation sort of fails. On the other hand, the small minority which get this are invariably in other ways so opinionated that I imagine living with them would be a lifelong presidential debate, so the conversation fails again.

There was one particular girl who I actually met in person rather than on skype recently, about which I do have a funny story to tell, but I'll reserve that for another, a hopefully funny post.

So yeah, that's what's up as well, other than studying.

Other than that, Trump won today and I'm not saying anything about the election. Yeah, I'm not. I started having election fatigue 6 months ago, and now is time for relishing the absence of election noise around.

Oh, yeah, one more thing. I didn't get promoted. Yeah, still an associate; although some senior people did care to make aghast faces at the supposed unbelievability of it. I don't buy faces, though. Faces are deceptive. Don't base your judgments, emotions or decisions on reading faces. That's childish. Did you ask my age? I'm 30. It's OK.

Rohit is coming cross-country to NYC this weekend, although unlike all the earlier times, he will not be staying at my apartment in Princeton. He will be talking next week to youngsters at his alma-mater Columbia about start-up success, or something thereabouts. I will visit him on the weekend, maybe have food at the dhaba we used to go to every day back when I was interning in the city and sharing an apartment with him 3 years ago. Those were good times. Some sort of good times, I suppose, although when I reconsider I can recall that there are ample reasons to not categorize that time as such.

That's it I guess, given that I don't intend to unload my bucket of don't-even-get-me-started emotions on this blog.

Happy Diwali!

Wishing a happy Diwali to whoever reads this! Hope this Diwali you see the external and internal changes you want to see.

And if you only want to see changes externally, hope this Diwali you can start to want to see changes internally as well! ;)

Have a great one!

Drivel

I was reading an article yesterday which quoted Iris Murdoch writing to someone "Your mind is a country I find very agreeable". I thought that was pretty cool.

We hired a new guy in our team at work, and he brings me sweets and snacks all the time and insists I eat. And after some pretense at self-control I usually cave in.

I don't call home everyday anymore like I used to.

Summer is about to end.

I've been having some trouble with dreams these nights that I don't want to have.

Cricket last Saturday was fun, Sunday not so much.

Aimless blogging

I haven't gone to the gym in a week now. I started working out this July, and I was very pumped about it until last week, going almost every single day. In my mind I thought that the first half of the year was about intensive learning, and the second half would be about intensive fitness, and I followed through on it for almost two months. Even the odd day that I wouldn't go to the gym to exercise I would at least go for a run outside, or go to the kickboxing place and pull some punches, let some steam out.

However, it's been a week now since I stopped. I remember when I missed the first day, that was the 24th of August, and I felt entirely entitled to do that. Everyone needs rest. Then the second day I just decided, well, it's okay, I can live with a little guilt. The third day I thought something escapist - something along the lines of "it's also important to study" to rationalize my decision, and then read a book, or part of it. Clearly, I was lying to myself, the motivation was simply to laze around at home. Then this weekend, I missed not only gym but my only 2 days of cricket per week, as I had to be somewhere. What was it yesterday? Yesterday, I did some yoga, yes. It didn't exhaust me at all, so I could have also gone to the gym, but then I told myself I did yoga today, and that's good enough.

And maybe it is. I used to study so much until June, when I started working out and gradually stopped studying entirely. Now I've kind of stopped working out, but haven't restarted studying either. So what am I doing? I started watching Quantico, Priyanka Chopra's US TV show. I have to say it's nothing too mind-blowing but I'm watching it anyway, you know, just being lazy. The only silver lining to the last one week has been that I have persisted with eating healthy and haven't gone back to junk food, at least not on a regular basis.

My posts these days are neither funny nor insightful, I know. Maybe things are going well elsewhere but my writing has certainly taken a steep fall. I sometimes read my old posts, and I find them so much better than how I write now that I wonder if it was really me that wrote all that.

This coming weekend I'm traveling to Cleveland to my brother's place, and from there both of us will drive to Toronto, where some of my cousins live. I went there at this same time of the year, last year, and it was very nice. I'm looking forward to the weekend. On my way back, I might first go to DC to some of my other cousins before coming back home. That should quell my yearly need for good old cousin comforts, I think. I've already been to India earlier this year, and it wasn't that much fun after the first few days. I came to the realization that the India I go back to isn't the India I left four years ago. Actually, the moment I landed back in USA, I was as thrilled as I was about going to India when I was leaving US three weeks before.

Oh yeah, I will go to the gym today. Do some curls. My biceps just don't get any bigger, though, no matter what I do. Anyway.

Yesterday

Yesterday, I went to this temple straight from work. After a little while of just hanging about, I felt terribly enervated. I left and drove straight to a restaurant, and ordered a chicken gyro. I had turned vegetarian sometime last year, but in this moment of feeling so exhausted all of a sudden, I felt like I needed something more strengthening than something vegetarian would be. Yes, this was flawed reasoning, but I'm not trying to win a nutritionist's argument here; just stating how I felt and thought in that particular moment. So I had a gyro, which is quite a lot in itself for a dinner, and before I had finished that I ordered one more. For yourself?, the guy asked, puzzled at the second order. Yes, sir.

I finished the second one equally ravenously and went home. I don't know when I fell asleep, but it was within minutes of reaching home. Before 7 PM, to be sure. 

When I woke up, it was 7:40 AM today. 12 hours and 40 minutes. I haven't slept that long in a long time. 

Something was strange, yesterday.

Moral of the story? I don't know.

retrospection(retrospection(janmasthami))

I was reminded an hour ago, out of nowhere, just sitting on my office desk, of this: http://theunsweptcorner.blogspot.com/2006/08/retrospection.html

That was 10 years ago. I was 20, and apparently was already feeling old enough to deem it appropriate to look back on my younger self. I was ruminating wistfully over a kind of life I had already left behind, one of being crazily excited about festivals such as Janmasthami, about the little things that made it awesome and, to be sure, about my own intense participation in them. At some level, I was also thinking about my 8 year old self, how I looked, how small my hands were, how short I was and how I had look up into the sky to talk to my dad. At 20, though, I already looked largely as I do today, so that difference is perhaps not as outwardly stark when I sit down looking back now as I did then. But the nature of my Janmasthami has changed again.

At 20, Janmasthami was still being celebrated all around me. My parents observed all the little things. What I missed was my own former enthusiasm. Today, there is no Janmasthami around me, except in the abstract. The people I meet and see on a day to day basis have no clue that there is some such thing. I live in a world far removed from it. The enthusiasm for Janmasthami, though, is discernably more alive now, despite that. Despite that, or, because of that? I can't say for sure. 

I will be leaving early from work today, because google helped me locate a temple where they're having Janmasthami celebrations. I admit it won't be a Janmasthami of great personal involvement that it was back when I was 8. In all likelihood, all I'll do is drive there, hang around for a little aimless while, and come back, hopefully with some delicious prasad. And that would be gold, too.

Happy Janmasthami!

YAAR! (yet another angry rant)

I feel like a phony coming back here. I don't relate to this writing your experiences thing anymore. I continue to do it all the same because, once, in a moment of clarity and some insight, I had decided that I should do it. So I'm back, and I'm ranting.

I don't know how people deal with numerous romantic relationships - I truly find it daunting. Even one is more than enough, it seems. Yet people all around me participate in this merry go round time after time, each time with an equal enthusiasm. My own experiences only informed me that the whole thing is akin to going out of your way to shop for defeats of different shapes and sizes, and the little victories once in a while are mostly accidental and always pyrrhic.

My parents talk to me about getting married every single day. For I can't even count how many days. Yet I can't see one really good reason for why I should. "Do it for them" comes the closest to convincing me to do it, but I know that it fails on the criterion of being "a good reason". For most people, I think, they get something from this and that's why they do it. Good for them. But if I don't derive anything out of it, should I merely follow the convention?

I suppose some people feel lonely without a romantic partner, but being alone has never bothered me. In fact, a vast, vast majority of my best moments in the thirty years I've been around have occurred when I was alone. Besides, those moments were the most real. Anything in the company of other people -- no matter how much I love them or they love me -- has always had a tiny winy tinge at least of something unreal, something fake, put on. And that stuff saps energy.

I'm not asocial by any means. I have some of the best people for friends, am well liked by most people I've known. Still, to subvert the arrangement of my life to an extent where my most personal tics and antics, things that I truly believe are nobody's business but mine, are also put out for someone else's accountability for a lifetime, is an action that I don't understand why I should undertake.

Rant over.

Back injury. Excruciating pain. Daunted by I don't know what. Leaking wall. Feeling insufficient. Seeking to discover what to seek. Decently happy. Lost.Vaguely disillusioned. Heavy air. The sound of insects from afar. Crammed days. Empty evening. The books I read. Reminders and questions. The books I didn't. Whatever. All that seems significant is invisible.  A dainty collection of screams that I did not scream sits portentously atop my throat, and I'll gulp it down again. Olympics are inspiring. I hope to sleep deep tonight. Tomorrow is simple.

Happy Idiot

I've been happy, as much is normal,
and most days sleep a full 8 hours.
When I wake up, and look at folks,
it seems to me their joy is a farce.
And whenever it is they look at me
with that air of inquisitive frown
"who the hell is he talking to,
this talking-to-himself clown?",

I am talking to you.

A long, sad marriage

The husband is not a bad person. The wife is not a bad person. But it's a bad marriage. The husband and the wife have very different values. Sometimes the wife thinks that the husband, indeed, is a bad person, but regarding this she is not always sure. But even when she does not think so, she does believe the wedding was a farce, a deceit; an imposition from her adoptive guardian whose decision she now sees no reason why she has to comply with. The wife wants a divorce, and the apartment she lives in. Make no mistake about that. The husband is always disappointed in her. He wonders to himself sometimes how disloyal she is. He reminds her of the copious amounts of money he has spent on her over the years. She is tired of hearing that, and just says she feels suffocated. He tells her she would be nothing without him, that she does not appreciate how good she has it, so stop being such an ungrateful wife. Sometimes in worse language than I just used. She is sick of the condescending tone. In the past, this has led to some domestic violence on both sides, some would say the point of no return to a past life of camaraderie has been reached. Even if you don't know whether it was due to the husband's actions or the wife's, it's hard not to see that irreparable damage has been done to the trust between the two. The husband's kins call her names, and tell her she's welcome to go away, but dare not think of the apartment! The wife throws similar expletives at them. The husband has reacted to all this by monitoring her with a heavy hand - something that is only worsening the wife's sense of dismay. And the more she gets fed up, she resorts to more extreme displays of spite, every couple of years trying to stir some serious harm in the husband's otherwise largely harmonious life, which includes his work life, on which, by the way, he's been focussing a lot more the last couple of years and has actually been making great strides; and although it's not all a bed of roses elsewhere on his large estate, it's this apartment with the missus in particular that most often leaves him sleepless. The wife, on the other hand, lacks this 'other' life of relative peace and progress - for her, it's all about the divorce.

All this has been going on for many, many, many years. Ask yourself: if you were asked to opine on their marriage, would you advocate that they separate amicably, or would you still argue for sticking it out. Oh, a possibly important piece of information while you make your mind, this apartment is one she already had before she got married.

And know that the conclusion you offer, is also what you think should happen about the Kashmir problem. Let there be no incongruity.

Good day

I had the most satisfying day at work today. Since this blog is also a bit of a diary, I have to note this down. Made breakthroughs in a couple of different statistical research projects I was working on, and in addition had a great day, exposition wise, on a third macroeconomic stress model I had worked on last week. Days like this are so rare, and I'm pretty thrilled with how everything went today, especially as all three were the more creative and thoughtful of my projects. I also work on several other, more regular and tedious ones, and success on them does not quite make my day in quite the same way. Hooray!

Enough self-congratulations for now, I suppose. Must start reviewing Khan Academy Linear Algebra lessons in a few minutes now.

Half-formed things - 2

Why I stop:

1. Unrealistically ambitious goals (e.g. my plans often include 15 hours a day work sessions) which, at some point, I can't deal with anymore, and put the thing aside, to start another, temporarily more intrinsically rewarding and less tedious and freedom-restricting thing.

2. Often, I just want to escape the drudgery of the implementation part.

3. I work on multiple time-consuming projects at the same time, each of which, it is quite plausible, demand sustained and exclusive attention. By the very nature of setting my goals in this way, I set myself up for failure, because at some point many of the other things will necessarily need to be put aside for some time, to focus on one particular thing. The danger is that often I fail to return to those things later.

What are NOT the reasons I stop:

1. Perfectionism - That is not why I stop. I do understand whatever I'll do will be immensely imperfect, even before I set out to start it.

* * *

From a neuro-scientific perspective, it seems to be true that I entertain the autonomous right hemisphere a little too much at the cost of the order-following left hemisphere.

Might expand on this part, later.*

* * *

Hacks to try and fix things:

1. Set precise process-based (as opposed to goals-based) targets. For example, "I will work on the XYZ project for an hour a day", as opposed to "I will write 5 pages a day".

2. Give those targets less autonomy. For example "I will work on the XYZ project for an hour everyday, at 8 PM"

3. Don't clutter. Don't have projects XYZ, ABC and PQR all vying for attention, at 8 PM, 9 PM and 10 PM respectively. It's hard to say what the sweet spot is, but intuitively it seems that having only 2 main projects has some advantages. It avoids the possible monotony with having just one, and avoids the clutter that may come with having 3 or more.

4. Expect that things can still take a lot longer than you initially imagined, and accept that. At the outset itself, ask yourself, if this took 4 times as long as I think it will take, would I still want to do it? If the answer is yes, start.

5. Start today with something (not very ambitious one, but still, something which is not trivially small - ideally at least a 4-5 day effort) and make sure that no matter what, this one project you will most certainly finish.

* * *

So, today, I choose to complete reading "The Master and His Emissary" as the first project, not too small nor too big, and one which will also help me hopefully finish the neuro-scientific perspective part just before the hacks in this post that I said I might expand on later. I will read this book for an hour a day, every day, at 10:30 PM. Not setting any restrictions on how many days I have to finish the book. My very rough estimate is 15-16 days, but let's see.

Since I, as of today, believe that having 2 projects hits the sweet spot, I will also be completing the Linear Algebra courses on Khan Academy, one that I've been putting off for a long, long time. Again, without committing to a time for finishing it, I'll just say I'll spend 2 hours on it, every day, at 7:30 PM. My rough estimate is it should take me 8-10 days, but let's see.

Most importantly, I will NOT take up any other things while I'm still at these two.

I'll come back in a couple of weeks to report my progress on these two mini projects.

Half formed things - 1

Perhaps my biggest weakness is not seeing ideas or projects to completion. Invariably, I take a lot of interest in the problem formation, in understanding everything about the thing in great, minute detail, chalking out an algorithm for the problem, at which point, one would think, or at least I end up thinking, that all the challenging parts are taken care of, and what remains is a mechanical implementation of all the hard work done so far. And then I start on this often tedious but rather critical second part, and almost always lose interest mid-way during this part, and divert my attention to another problem, with which, too, I similarly lose interest while I'm mid-way in the implementation part, and so on.

The result is that I have a lot of incomplete things. Incomplete data science projects, incomplete essays on economics, half-read books, quit training regimens, incomplete short stories. 

Recently in a conversation of some sort I was asked what I thought my big weaknesses were, and I had replied that in the trade-off between exploitation (of acquired skills) and exploration (for learning new things), I tend to veer towards exploration more than what I think is ideal. I was asked, then, if I felt that adversely affected my precision or throughput. Now since I was asked the question in a way that gave me two options, I think it restricted me to thinking only in within the bounds of these two consequences, and after some musing, I found that it did not affect my precision as much as it did my throughput. I now think that what I was reflecting upon when I said that was a rather sugar-coated, roundabout way of saying what I'm saying in this post: that I leave stuff incomplete, except that the bounded way of thinking I had been set into prevented me from getting to it with quite this clarity. It is not the throughput, either, that suffers per se, since I'm actually making decent progress per unit time, between any two points of time, only it never feels as such, because the said progress is predominantly lopsided in the first part, and has very little in the implementation part, which actually produces tangible, touchable output.

If there is one thing I find should be my topmost priority at this stage in terms of improving in a work-ethic sense, it is to start to make sure to finish things. I will write some more on this as I get any lucky insights on how to bring about this change, but for now, a diagnosis is all I have.

In praise of satire

Loved both of these:

http://thesmartset.com/powerpoint-makes-us-stupid/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S0FDjFBj8o

Awesome stuff.

On the state of Eastern Philosophy today

One of my abiding interests is Eastern Philosophy. To be more specific, the Upanishads, which after years of study and deliberation, I'm fairly convinced had outlined in minute detail millenia ago whatever western philosophy converged to towards the mid 19th century, plus more that western philosophy will probably some day converge to, if it is able to circumvent some roadblocks it has built in to its approach. On the other hand, the problem with eastern philosophy is that little progress has been made since the ancient days, and whatever progress has been made has come after gaps of centuries. A lot of time has been wasted in centuries-long debates over inconsequential details. But even their most powerful contribution is not a recent addition: the idea that the process of learning, or of attaining truth for lack a better English translation, is clearly not an exercise to be carried out using only your intellect, a fundamental idea that western Philosophy is yet to accept, and chances are slim it ever will. Still, it must be admitted that a spirit of active debate is missing from eastern philosophy when you compare it to its western counterpart - the focus is instead on disseminating what is already out there, on eulogizing its past achievements - and is inhibiting further progress in the field. Alternately, I'm also open to the idea that progress must diminish asymptotically the closer you inch to the truth, and some of that may be at work here.

Who I'm awed by

Current favourites below. It is clearly a disservice to fit many of these people under a category, because clearly their influence and great talents are wide-ranging. In fact, the common theme in those that I'm awed by is as much breadth as depth. Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) it seems knows about everything well enough to teach it to you better than your specialist teacher. Bill Gates fluidly moves between high technology and philanthropy. Ramachandran is a brilliant and eccentric neuroscientist, but his ameteur attempts at archaeology are also very impressive. Tyler Cowen and Rajan look more like specialists in this group, but their breadth inside economics is wide ranging - unlike most economists who are limited to one or two areas. Some of it, I confess, is because of of my own inclinations in Economics. Daniel Kahneman is more of a specialist, yes, but in an area that has increased greatly our understanding of how breadth has a depth all its own. David Eagleman is an outstanding neuroscientist whose work of fiction "Sum" was equally outstanding. On a similar vein, Vikram Seth - delightful poet and mighty novelist; is also a pretty good painter; George Soros, who you might better know as a hedge fund manager, made seminal dents in the philosophy of markets. Charlie Rose is the most versatile interviewer I know - and betrays a good understanding of subjects from Literary theory to Macroeconomics to Hollywood to Brain sciences to Politics. In fact, he has been responsible for introducing me to several things I later got very interested in.

In time, I'm sure this list will change as my own interests evolve, but for now I'm pretty happy with this. There are so many others I admire a lot, but in condensing the list I know I've tended to favor those who are not just great, but whose greatness exerts itself across many disciplines, as well as into a human element I love.

Entrepreneurs:
Salman Khan
Bill Gates

Academics:
VS Ramachandran
Raghuram Rajan
Tyler Cowen
David Eagleman

Philosophy:
Iain McGilchrist
Jaggi Vasudev

Artists:
Vikram Seth
Jagjit Singh
Hugh Laurie

Eloquence:
Shashi Tharoor
Barack Obama

IOAM 2

I never quite know if I am replete or not, and it seems that most other people seem to know this. I do sense hunger. Not often - because I take my meals more or less 3 times a day so I end up not letting hunger a chance to set in - but on occasions when for whatever reasons I haven't been able to, I do feel, physically, pangs of hunger. It's not something to observe under IOAM because it is the most normal thing. I only note it because I've almost never quite known the counteracting feeling of experiencing, physically, that I am replete. I just stop out of conventional wisdom and reasonable rationing borne of external stimuli (e.g. gathered knowledge to the effect of "you're supposed to stop after eating this much.."). I wonder if it's just me, or most, or everyone.

IOAM 1

Coffee has never worked for me. Never made me more active, awake, anything. So far, it seems, probably never will. I like its taste though when mixed with milk and sugar.