After 17 years of writing silly stuff here, I have finally bit the bullet and I have decided to write silly stuff on Substack. I have been struggling with managing and updating my blog on blogger for a while, so I decided to move to something new and shiny and continue there.

I may not post here for the foreseable future, so if you wish to continue to subscribe to me on RSS, please follow my feed there.

I was trying to end this on a dramatic note, but well life goes on. Nothing dramatic about it. Thank you blogger for all the love and hosting me for free for so long!

I read an interesting book recently that talks about the super limited amount of time that we spend on this planet (less than 4000 weeks) and yet all our life we are always doing something for the future. We are constantly busy in the pursuit of tomorrow, till one day tomorrow never comes.

It's one thing to say "live in the moment" and it is totally different to really mean it.

While this may sound morbid, if you really think about it - a lot of things that we are doing, we will probably be doing them for the last time (or the one and only time) in our lifetime without realizing it. Yet, we are constantly distracted either by something else or just by thinking about the future.

Also the fact that there is no way I will ever be able to do absolutely everything I ever want to do (cause I won't ever have enough time to do all of it!). This squashes a lot of FOMO. It is actually just better to totally live in the moment and be thankful for what you can do and neither worry about the future nor worry about doing everything you want to do (yeah that bucket list of yours) cause you will not be able to do it!

And finally, whatever you are procastinating on because you are not good at it, you better start doing it now. Cause you will probably never be perfect at it anyway and like I said before you probably won't have enough time to even do it in the future.

3 years ago I started on my journey to get to a proper chin-up. First quarter was all about dead-hanging almost everyday for 30 seconds first and then progressing to a minute. After about 4 months of just dead-hanging, I tried attempting assisted chin-ups with a resistance band. That went on for a quarter more of daily practice till I could barely do my first pull-up. A full year into my daily routine, I could barely do 3. 2 years into my daily routine, I reached 6 proper chin-ups. I know this is ridiculously slow progress for a vast majority out there, but this was mine.

I think the key is persistence. Not to give up, even if you don't see any progress whatsoever. Cause the moment you stop, you undo the gain that you have had. And that has exactly what has happened to me now. I stopped doing my daily routine for more than a year now. I attempted to do a single chin-up today and I couldn't. I am not sure if I have to go back all the way to the dead-hangs and build up from there.

I am disappointed, but also reminded of a quote attributed to Arnold that sort of said that whenever he saw a well-sculpted man, he always thought of the discipline behind maintaining the body. Gains are super easy to lose and discipline and consistency is what is required to maintain your health.

I hear a lot of stories of people working towards their happy place — the beach the forest or that beautiful mansion that we all love and dream of. We will relentlessly work hard to pursue our dream of retiring / moving / vacationing at our “dream place” and we will bear this miserable being while we are at it.

But happiness is a state of mind. If you are unhappy in your current home, you you will not be happy in that new destination of yours. Do not mistake “comforts” as “happiness”. You will get used to the comfort of the new place in no time. Happiness comes from within. You don’t have to wait to be happy. You can be happy right this moment as you are reading this! This is a deep realization that bears repeating so here I go again — Your mind decides if you are happy or not. No external factor can make you happy if your mind can’t be happy. Work towards it now!

 So I have not written anything here for a long while. More than 1.5 years to be precise. I have my excuses for not writing. Besides living upto my self-proclaimed title of the "God of Procrastination", I was also thinking of moving my blog off to another platform cause I don't trust Google to keep running blogger forever. I unsuccessfully evaluated several other platforms over the last year, and did not commit to anyone in particular. And then finally, my work requires me to "write" a lot and that meant my leasure writing took a hit.

So why am I back? I seriously dont know. I still love ranting. And I am happy that whoever reads does it! Also, as life goes by, I sort of realize that I have less time remaining than I had before, and I should continue to do things that I love (writing being one of them, though I know that I am at best mediocre at it).

I am pretty sure I lost a lot of you. But for whoever is left, thank you for reading me once again. I  commit to write more often here again.

India has had crazy amount of inflation over the last 10 years. Every time I visit, I see prices going up everywhere and things getting more expensive.

I have a friendly neighbourhood kulfi vendor who is my perfect gauge for inflation in India. That's mainly because every time I visit,  I make sure to visit his place and order a stick of kulfi. And every time without fail, his price has increased as compared to the previous year. Just for reference, his kulfi costed Rs. 5 in 2007, and as of now in 2022 it costs Rs. 50. That's a CAGR of approx. 16.59 % It is unbelievable!

 Long term readers of my blog know that I loved to wear masks even before wearing them was a thing (read - pre-COVID). So I sort of did not feel bad wearing masks for the last 2+ years. Besides all the other benefits of masking up, one big benefit is - I can hide my face and be fairly anonymous in a crowd.

Anyway, now most outdoor places in my vicinity are sort of asking people not to mask up anymore. This has become highly uncomfortable for social recluses like me! I hope mask wearing becomes a fashionable thing just like how we wear shoes, and people who want to wear masks are allowed to do so forever.

So I changed jobs like 7+ months ago. And if you have noticed, I totally disappeared off this blog. Not that I did not want to write, but I was lost, stressed and couldn't get a grip on all the new things I had to learn.

Not only did I change my industry, but the entire technology stack has been totally new for me. So I have been studying hard most nights and weekends to catch-up - first on the business / industry aspect of my new job, and then on the technology stack. Learning is infinite! I am still stuck in the wonder world and every new topic I read or learn takes me down a rabbit hole that I take a few days to climb out of. I have read 3 books on my industry till now, and I still feel like a total imbecile.

I hope you all have been doing great and enjoying the ride that is 2022. I hope to write more often in the coming months :) !!

And just like that 2021 is over! Another year has gone by ... I had a relatively busy and not-so-disciplined last quarter of the year. That is reflected in the absence of any blog posts past October this year.

As we look forward to 2022, I am hoping we can return to at least some form of normalcy in this year (or get used to whatever the "new normal" is going to be). I hope to continue to learn, read new books, and continue on my path to a healthier lifestyle.

I wish you all a very happy new year!

 Since I have joined my new company, my day consists of listening to a lot of recorded meetings that have happened overnight in North America (while I am fast asleep). A trick that I learnt when I started listening to podcasts a few months ago is - speed up the recording! Human beings take a lot of pauses, think and speak slow most of the times!

Our brains can comprehend other people speaking at 1.5x their normal speeds without much trouble (Yeah you have to focus better, but anyway, you are expected to focus in meetings!). The advantage is - I can save 20 minutes in a 60 minute recorded meeting (that's 33% saving of time) without any loss in the content or comprehension!

Now this trick only works if the speaker speaks at "normal" human talking speeds. It does not work in a multi-party meeting where some people tend to speak real fast. So if you have multiple people speaking at different speeds in a meeting, this may not work for you (unless everyone speaks at the same pace).

Anyway, now I have gotten so addicted to this trick that

1. I prefer recorded meetings to live meetings cause I don't have to participate, and I can listen to the content at "my pace"
2. I have gotten used to listening to a lot of people at 1.5x their normal talking speeds, so when I indeed have a live meeting with them, they sound super slow to me!

Hello people! So I decided to type this blog by using my voice.This is the first time I am using the voice typing feature in Google Docs. It's amazing to see how smart Google has become at voice recognition. 

I decided to let the blog be written without me correcting any word that Google has written. And if I have to really correct one, I would let you know that that particular word has been corrected by me manually.

I find that Google has not made a single mistake so far and can recognize my voice flawlessly. I always thought that speech recognition would be an extremely difficult task for computers to do because of all the accents that it has to address and correct for. But it looks like that does not seem to be an issue anymore. Everyday I keep getting amazed by the level of progress that we are doing as a society. It's scary to imagine the future.

I'm still struggling with punctuations. So I had to press the enter key and start new paragraphs. As I'm voicing these two paragraphs above I realized that it's a lot more easier to talk than to write. So maybe in the future the "writer's block" may be a thing of history. I can also imagine that if documents  start writing the way they do right now with my voice we could actually write a lot more as well as a lot faster than we do right now, and entire conversations could be just written down this way without someone having to actually write them down manually. So writers would just have to proofread what was automatically typed by the computer already. That's it from me folks, it's actually a weird feeling to talk to the computer and see it write down as you speak to it.

This section was written:
 
After I voice typed the section above, I realized that Google gets my punctutations incorrectly. So I had to paragarph and put periods and also put quotes for the "writer's block" above. The rest of the speech is as it is - verbatim - perfect. If you want to try it out for yourself, I would recommend you open a Google Doc in Chrome or Edge browser and try this function.

 In our relentless pursuit of happiness, I realize that most of us have stopped acknowledging the ephemeral happiness we derive from small wordly moments every single day. 21 years into the 21st century we actually experience a lot more happiness on a daily basis than anytime in the history of homo sapiens. Most of us experience unprecedented levels of comfort, access to amazing healthcare and nutrition. Yet we as a society have now become increasingly divided, unhappy, irritable, stressed and unhappy.

While curbing societal pressures and controlling stress is something beyond everyone's reach, acknowledging happiness is definitely something we all can (and should do!). Ideally, throughout the day, we should learn to pause, acknowledge and appreciate the simple pleasures in our life. Complex things like airconditioners, refridgerators, microwaves, telephones, internet, televisions and simple things like hot water, taps, electricity etc. etc. all have enriched our life by leaps and bounds. We have completely stopped acknowledging the level of ease we have gotten used to, and constantly think of the next thing!

As you read this blog, I hope you think about all the little comforts that you have gotten used to, and starting today, pause and appreciate these fleeting moments of happiness as life passes by at breakneck speed!

 After having used Windows for all my working life, my new company forced me to switch to a Mac. I was terrified, unhappy and was not sure I would be able to cope with the switch. The first week was a nightmare, cause I had to unlearn all my shortcuts.

For starters, Mac has no backspace, no Windows Key, no Home, no End, no Page-up and no Page-down. Function keys are in the fancy touch bar and there is this key called "Command" which does most of the work. The mouse scrolls in the opposite direction, the concept of Desktops is different and there is no start menu.

Anyway, I have now been using the Mac for almost 3 weeks now, and I think I am surviving. I am confused with a lot of my shortcuts, but slowly and steadily I am getting my speed and efficiency back. The best part of learning to use Mac was to just Google search things like "How to Page Down in Mac" and you would get the right answer to your question almost always.

The interesting part though is - I hardly use any desktop tools anymore. Almost all my work is done in the Google Workspace suite. Though I am very familiar with the Office 365 suite of products, I am lucky to have also used Google Workspace extensively before.

My preliminary impression of Mac is not that extraordinarily different than Windows. Build-qualitywise Macbook pro looks definitely "cooler" than my trusty old Thinkpad X1. But that may have not been a big reason for me to change (ever).

I have almost found equivalent alternatives for all software that I used on Windows. The only problem now is that when I go back to my Windows Laptop, I mistype my shortcuts!

 Every once in a while I have this epiphany about what my life is all about because I read a book or read a tweet or a blog. This is one of those tweets by Tim Urban.

The way I interpret this tweet is - your life is a sum total of all the things that you have ever done (or to be more poetic - a sum total of all the paths you have taken). Which for me means - the books you have read, the blogs you have followed, the movies you have seen, the random tweets, facebook posts, tik-toks you have consumed as well as the people you have spent time with, the jobs you have worked on and the schools you have gone, the places you have visited and the friends you spend time with.

Now the good part of the diagram is - you still have a million different paths to go on after today. So rather than having a defitist mentality, you can still be an optimist and "optimize" the paths that you take, the things that you do, the time that you spend on going forward. Starting now, you can still choose a better path than you ever did before. And this could then be your lowest point in your life!

 As I grow older I realize one of the most important part of the "being an adult" experience is the ability to just "let it go". In not so positive words - it is literally getting used to the feeling of helplessness.

I had an amazingly protected childhood. I generally got what I wanted and I grew up with this attitude that I can get what I want if I work hard towards it. So, my childhood was all about, setting a goal and working towards it. Then adulthood happened and as I grow older I realize - you can't achieve a lot of things that you think you can. It's not that you are not putting enough effort or you are not focused, but there are a billion things beyond your control.

As I sit and ruminate on my present state, I think the most important lesson that I have learnt over the last decade or so is that - you have to try hard for whatever you want to do or achieve. But if you can't you have to gracefully let it go. The "being adult" part is the letting it go and moving on part. The more you can do it faster, the better your life is going to be.

As I sulk with the sadness of losing yet another tool in my technology arsenal, after having already spent many sad nights losing another one, I realize that my association with technology is at least two decades behind the current trend.

So while everyone is tiktok-ing and instagram-ming, I am still blogging. While everyone uses iPads, tablets, wearables and mobile devices, I am still most comfortable with a desktop. While everyone else is spotify-ing, I am still stuck to my rusty old radio.

If there is one lesson to be learnt from all this sadness and feeling of betrayal - I think it is that I need to upgrade things that I rely on; faster. Not only will it not lead to sulking, but also it will make me the cool uncle that I have always aspired to be.

Google has done it again. They have killed one more of their properties just like that. It is Feedburner this time and it affects everyone who subscribes to this blog either via email or through RSS feeds.

I have manually migrated my RSS Feeds and my Email subscribers to follow.it. However just like all IT migrations I am sure there are glitches. So if for some reason you stop getting emails or RSS Feeds from my blog, or better yet, you take the effort to re-subscribe now (by clicking here) that would save me a lot of heartache!

Thank you for patiently reading my rants all this while and I hope you continue to do so 😊

Every once in a while I take crazy-ass decisions in my life. Yesterday happens to be one of them. Without going into the specifics. Here is a gist of what has happened - 

• I got promoted (sorta) and I quit my current job
• I will be taking up a new job with:
• Reduced scope of work
• Lower title
• Reduced geographical coverage
• Different business model
• New Technology
• New Industry
  

So basically, I am sort of restarting my career after 16+ years of doing more or less the same stuff (pre and post MBA). I am excited (the kind of excitement when you are standing on the ledge of a 40 floored building and looking down at the street).

Coming from an eastern religious mindset (Hinduism/ Buddhism), I believe I have several lifetimes to correct the mess. If my life was a Hollywood movie, this is the time when the protagonist does something absolutely crazy. My favorite scene for this would be Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding Jr, doing the "Show me the money bit" in Jerry Maguire (Disclaimer - I no way think that I am Tom Cruise, nor do I think I am taking the kind of risk that Jerry Maguire was taking in the movie at this point).

However, aren't we all the main characters/ protagonists/ heroes of our own life stories? So associating with Tom is fine at this time!

And why do I want to blog about this? Well, this blog is turning out to be my life story and some milestones are best left documented.

 So this is like a follow-up to a blog post I wrote in 2014 about learning online. By now, I hope you have realized that it is practically possible to learn almost anything online. Yeah I know you can't learn to fly (for example) cause you still need an aircraft.

I feel like we are living in a unprecedented time in history where we have access to all the knowledge in the world at literally a "touch" of a button and can spend time to learn and enrich our lives with anything. This ease of access, is seriously going to jeopardize the business of higher education. I believe that in the next 10 years University education will get massively disrupted.

From my own experience, I feel like I learnt more outside of my formal education than the 4 years of Engineering and 1.5 years of MBA. And the rapid pace at which things keep changing around us, anyway continuous education is the way forward. I am not sure students of the next generation (and their parents) would be keen to spend a significant portion of their earnings on a degree that can be easily obtained online and you can choose your teachers and build your own curriculum. Ultimately though, if employers stop insisting on University degrees and recognize your education online, that would spell an end to University education the way we have known it!

My nationality, race and religion has always been at the forefront of my "classification" within the society at home and abroad. With social media increasingly fueling people to be overly religious, xenophobic and racist, I feel that it is time to talk about these topics from a pseudo-scientific perspective without going down a slippery slope. So my dear readers, please try to read this blog post without any bias.

Nationality - By far, I think this is the easiest to identify and categorize human beings on. All you have to do is ask for their passport. But if it were that simple, then life would be easy. There are certain nations in the world that allow dual-citizenship. In that case you can have 2 nationalities (e.g. Swedish-French, American-Italian etc.). You are legally carrying 2 passports and both countries recognize you as their citizens. 

Then there are people who change their nationalities during their lifetime. For e.g. an Indian citizen can renounce their citizenship of India and become a citizen of USA etc. In that case, you have had one nationality for a few years of your life and you changed your nationality for the next few years of your life and so on.

Now, according to the very broad definition of xenophobia, it is the fear or hatred of foreigners (which would mean foreign nationals). If you decide to become a xenophobic and spew your hatred on someone, you have to make sure that they are really of a different nationality. For e.g. Anyone in the world can become an American or an Australian or a Canadian as long as they follow their immigration processes. I believe that's what the nations have been founded on. So you can't just look at a person and call them a "foreigner" and marginalize them.

This xenophobia gets even worst when people of the same nation discriminate amongst each other based on their "place of origin" in the same nation. (e.g. in India - discrimination based on the state that you "domiciled" in)

Religion - Coming from India, this is a very contentious topic. But I guess, again, religion is quite easy to understand and categorize. You follow a faith and you abide by the principles of that faith. So you could be a Catholic, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist etc. Your religious identity is very distinct from your nationality. While statistically speaking there is a higher probability of having someone from some religion coming from some nationality it is just a statistic. I mean, theoretically an entire population can decide to change their religion overnight and still maintain their nationality (in almost all countries). I do understand that some countries are formed on the basis of religion, and you are not allowed to "freely" practice another religion if you do not follow the state religion.

Race - This has been the most difficult to comprehend classification for me. As far as I have researched there is no solid-scientific basis on which to classify people into races. While we continue to desperately classify populations of people into races - this classification is inherently flawed and very difficult to prove. If you think I am wrong, I request you to comment and redirect me to credible sources on race. This classification  has caused innumerable conflicts, wars and genocides and we continue to fight amongst us on a classification that has no clear scientific basis.

The general arguments I see online sounds something like this - My ancestors came here before your ancestors, so this land belongs to me and you go "back". This argument only holds for "Nationalities". For e.g. An Indian passport holder can only live in the USA for the duration of the time that her "Visa" permits her to stay in that country. There is no argument there. And for any reason if the "relevant" authorities (The people in the immigration who determine if you are fit to stay in their country or not) decide that you have to pack your bags and go "back" (to your country of citizenship) - you have to.

Any other reason given for this argument is - xenophobic and/or racist. You can't discriminate people based on how they look, how they speak or how they dress. Human beings have existed on this planet for 150,000 years. I can confidently say that none of our 100K+ years of ancestors stayed in the same place as we stay now. You can potentially only trace back your ancestors to a few hundred years? Same goes with race. Whatever physical features of a person you see have come after 100K years of intermingling between homo-sapiens coming from around the world and evolution. Some blood-lines have had distinct features that have propagated to their off-springs, but that's about it (I am talking about skin color, eye color, shape of eyes, type of hair, height etc.)

It is time (I know this sounds so cliched) we keep these differences away and work together towards the greater good of humanity and the planet!