Life

Two Thoughts I just have two things to my 20 year old self - be honest and put yourself first. Simple, but not easy. Be Honest Don't get this wrong - I am an honest person in that I will never try to cheat anyone of anything. Honesty, however, is much more than that. Most of us are honest to our society and to our community. A whole bunch of us are not honest with ourselves. And honesty is the single most important ingredient to success, in my opinion. If I have to be frank, this is a little confusing especially to those of us brought up in the 90s middle class India. Money was akin to evil and there were movies showing how all rich people were predominantly evil and how they were morally corrupt and the like. Today when I watch the movies again - apart from being appalled at what I watched growing up - I realize that a lot of the "evil" rich characters aren't that evil or morally bankrupt at all. They are just brutally honest. Their actions are brutally consistent with what they are trying to do. Being honest is taking decisions that are consistent with your belief system. And the untold truth in that statement is that your belief system is not driven by your society or your community. It is driven by your compass, your north star. If you don't have one, you aren't anywhere near succeeding. You can't arrive, if you don't know the destination. For a good number of us, myself included, the north star is setup by social conditioning and religious misinterpretation. ...

Removed From Reality I have never read the Gita fully. Nor have I read the Thirukkural fully. I’ve read them in parts and mostly understood them based on their English translations. And there start most of my problems. There is a fantastic quote I read someplace - Every written word is twice removed from reality: Some thing happens and you observe it. Now the observation in your recollection is already incorrect in that it doesn’t have the resolution of the actual incident (not that we are liars). Then we write it down. Now when you read it, it is further removed. What you understand from a piece of text is extremely embellished by your own experiences in life. ...

I turned 42 this year. 42 is a significant number for me. I am not sure if it's my favorite number, though. 42 is the answer to the great question of life, universe and everything. Well, I don't think there's a better joke than this. But jokes aside and while Douglas Adams seems to write it so matter-of-factly, the entire few pages where deep thought gives this answer to Loonquawl and Phouchg is filled with amazing philosophy. And am sure Douglas Adams will roll in his grave (or be happy, we'll never know) when I write this :-) ! Here is the exact lines that I love - copied from the book (without permission, duh) ...

A couple of years back, our investment advisor got us an invite to take a personality test from Gallup. It was part of a seminar/workshop that we signed up. This was one of the first such test I took so far. I’ve taken a handful since. This post is largely going to just talk about my experience with these tests and their findings. I remember taking psychometry tests as part of the placement process back in the day. I usually tried to game the tests. In the sense, I’d align my answers to what I thought presented my best persona. I didn’t quite think if the tests were game proof. I didn’t try to be truthful either. It didn’t matter to me. Besides, in your early twenties you are more keen on getting your way than getting it right ;-) ...

Late bloomer is a term often associated with developmental milestones in kids. It turns out the actual meaning is a lot more generous than that, despite what Urban Dictionary has to say on the topic. I always topped my class in school. Even through undergrad classes, I stayed in the top 5 ranks. So, “late bloomer” is not a term that anyone would associate with me. Frankly, I haven’t considered the possibility until very recently. I did well in most of what I took up doing. And if you look at my career path, I’ve dabbled with a lot of technologies across the spectrum. I mean, does anyone even remember SSI clustering anymore? Until recently, I even had a google alert setup for “Mosix clustering” - if you even remember something like that in the first place. Just out of college, I had the opportunity to setup both SSI cluster as well as a Mosix cluster :-). So to say, that I had the opportunities and then I had the capability to pick up on those opportunities is somewhat humble. So where is this thought of a “late bloomer” even figuring in all this? ...

So I am an entrepreneur now. And I turned 41 last week. Despite all this, the year has been extremely eventful. We took two vacations, I attended two conferences; presented in one, my wife found a good position that challenges her and gives her the space to grow, my son completed a year learning to play the drums, finished level 1 of swimming. Not all was bright though: I got covid twice this year; my immunity seems to be in a terrible place, i've been dealing with a variety of stuff with my body - results of not taking enough time to exercise in my twenties are showing now. There have been some things that could have been better but not entirely bad either. So let me just catalog these as good, bad and ugly. Its all relative though. If there is one thing this year cemented in my head, its the relativity of things. ...

Rest In Peace Manoj. I will miss you. I keep thinking I should have made some time to meet you - either here in Singapore or back home in Chennai. I think we met in the second year. And I don't think we hit it off all that much, though. We became friends much later, though, if I recollect right. I knew you wanted to be a pilot back then. And you were pursuing engineering just cause that was a requirement for your folks to allow you to take up flying full time. For something that was a hindrance in your path, you spent a lot of effort studying the coursework. You were amongst the few I knew that had access to all the reference texts. ...

2022 was a lot of ups and downs. Its the year we traveled to meet our families after 2 years of lockdowns and restrictions. Its also the year we got vaccinated for COVID. And still got COVID anyway. Its the year I spent learning ROS. Its the year I almost shipped my side-project. Almost. Its also the year we decided that our impermanence in life is probably a good thing. Or not, but it is what it is. ...

Earlier this year, we all got our booster doses and were eligible for traveling. And the situation also seemed to ease a bit after the initial Omicron wave here in S'pore and in India as well. So we took a quick 2-week trip to Chennai in March. Flights were empty, airports were empty and the whole experience was so chilled out. Am getting ahead of myself. Let me just look at how the year has fared so far. ...

2021 was not the best year I've been through, going by how tough things got for me - personally and professionally. But it is highly likely that this is the year that taught me the most about every aspect of myself, my life, my aspirations and motivations. Instead of pouring over everything that went wrong, am just going to reflect on the learnings and see what I can do better for the next year. I also hope to setup my own broad targets going forward. ...