Gathering thoughts…
A world of little thoughts.
Sometimes I feel like I see my grandmother in your eyes. The way the soft lines across your speckled face crinkle when you laugh. How your hair reaches up to the sky like the winding branches of a tree. I think sometimes I see my grandmother in you where she is not. When your eyebrows crease and I can't tell if I had…
this is the thing i wanted to talk about: i used to feel deprived in social interactions because i wanted something that i could not get. i didn't really know what it was exactly but i think it is: uninhibited intellectual-artistic playfulness and uninhibited intellectual-artistic curiosity i wanted someone to play…
I have realized that I have grown into a different style of traveling, normally we don't travel together with my family and the times my mom and I had traveled when I was a kid were mainly work trips, me walking around while my mom would be looking at products. Now that I'm older I have realized that this traveling…
I took this picture last year as we were walking on our way to the Mukteshwar Temple in Uttrakhand. The pathway leading to the temple was full of vendors selling their farm produce. Many emphasized the fact that these products were grown organically without the use of pesticides, which was the main reason we stopped…
Well, I asked for a piano keyboard and Santa delivered. Sitting right next to me is a second-to-cheapest-I-could-find 88-key keyboard with a stand and seat. I have been using FlowKey about 30 minutes a night. When I was between eight years old, I took piano lessons. I quite after three months. Learning the piano is…
I took down my website. It was bullshit. Just like the many bullshit ideas that cross my mind, and all the other bullshit projects that I embark on. I started that site as another "creative outlet". A place where I could improve my writing. The latter, AKA "the goal", remains genuine. The former, AKA "the idea", AKA…
Life is just a game - don’t feel so uptight and harsh on yourself; especially if you f up too many things It’s just consequences; every action and thought process will lead to one and another I just hope at this age you’ll be mature enough to know the significance of - Not going to the gym Sleeping early Don’t think…
Anytime I come across a person who lives based on streaks of achievement, I feel concerned. I've noticed this the most with regard to fitness. Gym rats is a commonly used word to highlight an individual's dogged resolve towards exercising. It is quite funny to me that it's called gym rats. I immediately think about…
Is it true that we are more or less the same on the inside? I don't mean psychologically. I'm thinking of the vital organs, the stomach, heart, lungs, liver: of their placement and function. -- You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
As a child born in the 70s, along with other Gen X's, we all grew up without social media. In 1984, I remember watching the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games which was being telecast from Los Angeles. Mr. and Mrs. Swamy, our lovely neighbours on the 2nd floor had invited all the children in the apartment complex…
Have you ever thought that for yourself? Do you even have an idea? It seems fitting for an entry on the first day of the new year. Because there's a lot of stuff on social media and the internet about the so called "New Years Resolutions". That at this point is more a meme than any other thing. Most of us know (and…
Back in India, I read an article called "Travel is no cure for the mind" [https://moretothat.com/travel-is-no-cure-for-the-mind/]. It illustrated how changing your surroundings is not the answer to existential angst or the pursuit of joy and fulfillment in life. And while the article covered sufficient ground…
Authority, like a vector, has two properties: magnitude and direction. The magnitude of authority is proportional to the limits on individual freedom. The magnitude may range from anarchy to totalitarianism (chaos / order). All viable regimes fall somewhere between these idealized states. The ideal magnitude of…
7: Wake up, Shower etc. 8: Meditate, Journal 9: Read 10: Write 11: Exercise 12: Work 4: Meet a friend 6: Dinner 7: Hobby 9: Go for a Walk, Call a friend/family 10: Clean House, Shower, Plan the next day 11: Bed Most of my days don't look like this. But this is what an ideal would look like for me. For work, I'm still…
The world is changing too fast. I'm not sure what the turning point was, but I went from thinking of people as old school, to realising that I'm finding it hard to keep up with the times. Social media is a constant reminder of this. A few years ago, I consoled myself that it was ok to stay off the gram as the negative…
H.266 VVC is technically better than AV1. In terms of Quality, Performance and Complexity. FVC is a working name for the successor of VVC. With a target of 50% reduction regardless of computing power. In all previous case they have encoding and decoding complexity target. So it seems FVC is trying to push the boundary…
You know when you see sketchbooks that belonged to people who sketched? They're wonderful to look bakc through. I am a person who draws, but much of my “sketch” work is done on the computer. I have a good chunk of files of things I’ve started or experimented with or copied to get a feel of, or something. I want to…
Rights are like muscles. They must be exercised regularly to prevent atrophy. They are earned through hard work and preserved through constant maintenance. As with any maintenance work, the cost of neglect can lead to sudden unexpected catastrophic consequences, particularly so when one can least afford to address…
Eu vi Erycah Badu. Cara, que intensa. Ela é o tipo de pessoa que se fizesse uma seita, eu seria a primeira a entrar. Bruxona, catártica, muito além da mente. Ganhei o show de graça numa promoção do Instagram e não tava botando fé, mas rolou de verdade. Cheguei e falaram que meu nome não estava na lista, mostrei…
Love has been endlessly defined—fluttering hearts, blooming flowers, soaring violins. These tales shape our dreams, but is love truly so theatrical? Perhaps. Perhaps not. For me, love is something darker, more profound—much like a horcrux from Harry Potter. A horcrux, J.K. Rowling tells us, is a fragment of a soul,…
The comfort zone is a deceptive piece of shit that keeps trying to stop me from having formative experiences. Although I am aware of this, it hits me every time and each time it costs me a great deal of effort to overcome it. The good news is that the comfort zone expands with every new experience, when seeking…
A friend recently asked me if he should upgrade to business class. My initial reaction was to mock him for spending so much money. It was quite the opposite to what he hoped for - he probably felt because he could now afford to fly business, I'd respect him more. That was not the case, but as I thought about it more,…
Today I’m listening to Foxing’s 2014 album The Albatross. Recommended to me as a great introduction to the Midwest Emo genre, the album really bares it heart wide open for the listener. I enjoy the surpsingly varied composition, with plenty of one-off instruments and track vibes. The vocal performance swings between…
Walking around the space where Im gonna spend these couple years, what was once a dream and now its's reality, it's something that I still can not process and it feels that I'm a impostor. Not because I don't think I belong here, but just because I never thought I would had gotten here a couple years ago. I hope that…
I've spent so much time in one mode of living (ie the aspirant mode) that something else feels foreign and alien, something abnormal and even wrong. I crave the familiarity, the structure, the discipline of the routine. I crave the sense of purpose it provides. Yet I must also begin to understand that living in just…
There is something fascinating about eating a ''foreign'' food. A food that we have not eaten growing up, and then when we discover or eat it for the first time, the entire experience is mysterious! Since we really don't know what it was supposed to taste like, we have an open mind in wanting to learn more about it.…
"Sometimes, the heaviest things we carry are the things we never got to say" Grief is not a storm. It's the cupboard that won't open anymore. He found it on a Tuesday. That quiet, off-colored moment where nothing hurts and everything does. A sock without a pair. A phone with the number still saved. The absurdity of a…
This page serves as my personal digital diary. Due to my overly active mind and severe ADHD, I often forget thoughts that never even make it to my consciousness. It's as if I've thought of everything, but in reality, I'm not thinking at all. The topics covered will range from the silliest reasons to serious thoughts…
The past three places I've lived have all been near a busy street. Not too busy, with cars honking and voices shouting. Not too loud like a highway. Instead, just the right amount of busy, at the right times. What do I mean by this? In the morning, when I wake up, I hear the cars and people start to move about,…
I wasn't receiving any emails for days. I had been too busy to really question why, even though I was expecting responses from various outreaches. The issue became clear when I needed a verification code for a signup and it didn't come through. I sent myself a test email - nothing. Total panic set in thinking about…
'People don't quit companies, they quit managers'. Just like the way companies do background checks, you also need to do background checks on managers/teams/companies. Oftentimes we don't put in the effort for two reasons - 1) lack of choice, we need this job 2) we don't even know how to do it. Glassdoor reviews can…
I write this at 8 AM on my birthday in one of my worst states of mind in a while. Ideally, it shouldn't have been this way. Courts have closed in Kolkata for summer holidays and I was to embark on a vacation abroad after more than two years. Only for my visa not to arrive in time. At this point, I am gutted. A while…
5pm, sometime in March in the year 2000. Six young men sat on the floor of a sparsely furnished living room in a flat in Bandra. They had spent the past few days working out the details of how to structure their new law firm. That firm needed a name. And there was a flight to catch. We had agreed that the firm would…
I do not want to be dependent on the arbitrariness of others. I do not want to do something just because another person has decided for me that I should do it. I want autonomy and freedom. I notice that I have developed a real allergy to authority in recent years.
I know other journalers through my online writing cohort and social media connections. I don’t know other journalers among my family, friends, and acquaintances. When others find out I journal, they express admiration. In my visual journaling class, I was the only one who journaled. Even the instructor didn’t journal!…
Today was tough. But here I am, staying true to the promise I made to myself – to write and publish something new at least five times a week. Problem is I don't have anything to write about. The goal was to read, learn, and write about the difference between Aetiology vs Teleology. But anxiety had different plans.…
Despite my scientific background, education, and critical thinking skills — I am extremely superstitious. I am not religious. I love the contrarian viewpoint. I am able to think for myself. Yet I am incredibly superstitious. It is primarily because of witnessing too many improbable events. In healthcare, some of the…
i am thinking of writing fan letters to my favorite authors. what do you think? i'm thinking of specifically: - megan boyle - i would like to say: i love your sense of humor, i love that you expanded my beliefs about what a "book" is and opened my tiny tiny mind up to the world of possibilities - jordan castro - a…
As a man, a husband, in my forties, who has moved more than 5 times in my life and had to get a new collection of local friends, one piece of advice I wish I could give myself is: never is an opportunity to "get real" with someone. When folks ask: "how's it going?" the reflex is to keep the response as shallow as…
is it a good thing to have friends who look up to you? yeah of course ; and it feels nice to be someone's mentor (but sometimes i feel dubious about some of them, like i fear that one of my mentee-friends is just taking my ideas and espousing them as her own to sound intelligent; i fear she lacks the mental faculty to…
The cold, empty space stares back at me: What if it doesn't resonate? What if I'm not pleased with it? Tick-tock More seconds elapse and I don't even have a draft to call first. It's an uncomfortable feeling. Staring across the chasm between the brilliant insight in your mind and the not-yet-articulated onto the…
It's been over a decade since I last started a blog, so curious how this will feel. Blog feels like an outdated term for this—I guess I mean, "long-form tweet!" Just perused the aforementioned blog I made as a young person. I'm so glad to have a record of that time, even though I didn't write much about anything that…
Emotionally-charged, moralizing content wins the virality lottery most often: - For each "moral-emotional word" used, content receives between 17-24% more engagement. - Moral anger and disgust increase virality across the political spectrum. - Content that’s written in more divisive, inflammatory language is…
I believe in the power of swiping. I believe it is a song continually singing left or flipping right, delighting in the minor and major of it all and the fall of the green and the birth of the ice and the magnificent way we all stop to think twice about our lives, our dreams, our reams of baroque reasoning our ways…
This 100-day project does not take weekends off. But I'm staying true to my overall writing philosophy: write something every day. In my mother's immortal words, "Keep Saturday Saturday: start late and go slow." I started very late, 2pm, and the 15 minute goal to write anything project-related became 30 and 45 and…
You started to feel anxious because You are comparing yourself to your friends subconsciously Your brain tells you and giving you signals that you didn’t know “Preparing yourself” don’t mean you need to putting yourself into stressful situations It just means adjusting your mindset That given certain situations - what…
my heart just skipped a beat i noticed that you can only tell in hindsight who you really loved for me, one of my true loves in life was my friend danny we used to listen to music together and talk about philosophy i just found danny on my old spotify account; he follows me there i want so badly to message him but…
Perceptions give me the benefit of the doubt with an unseen cost
