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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. ...

The setup Sid is learning to sing. And his choice of music is the Indian classical form, Carnatic music. Neither myself nor my wife understand or spend enough time listening to Carnatic music. Its not that we don't like it, it just never was a goto. After all, there is enough and some more of film music to fall back on for most of our purposes. Around the time my wife was pregnant with Sid, we started having a playlist of devotional songs in the morning. Again, we are not religious enough to do this. We both agreed that this kind of music might be a good way to start the day, especially given the number of things stressing us out back then. And around the time Sid was under a year old, we found a nice album from Chitti Babu ( a renowned veena player ) which was very interesting to listen to. And we noticed a pattern that Sid always responded positively to that album. He would generally be less cranky when this album was playing. To his credit, though, he was never that cranky anyway. ...

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) ...

Prelude My grandfather was an incredibly disciplined man, a teetotaler and vegetarian. Traveling as a vegetarian is a painful thing. It still is, but it must have been worse in the 60s. And yet he travelled quite a bit in his day. One of his such trips was to Japan. I think it was Tokyo or Osaka, but I don't recollect too well now. There were a few stories of his that stuck with me: one was about how difficult it was to get decent food - if you were a vegetarian, they understood you to be a herbivore and usually only had raw fruits and vegetables. He didn't think it was discriminative - rather, they didn't cook anything without an element of fish or meat in it, so this was the only option. The other was about how punctual and polite people acutally were. Many of those stories ended up creating a desire to try and live in Japan for a couple of years. While I am not sure if I will do that yet, my trip to Japan was a fantastic opportunity to experience this wonderful place. ...

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 ;-) ...

I’ve always understood the word “focus” to imply a spotlight - what is currently in your mindspace. What is the one thing you are spending most of your time working on? I have always had a bit of a problem with that thought. Focus, I believe, depends heavily on what you are building. If you are building multiple micro SaaS, then focus is not your friend. Or, minimally, the focus is now elsewhere and not on any of the SaaS themselves. I tend to have these arguments in my head. Luckily, I don’t throw them around too much so its largely privately held. ...

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? ...

On Introductions I've generally realised and come to terms with the fact that my reaction times suck. That is to say, if you took a shot at me, I'd not know what to come back with immediately. Much like George in S8E13 - The Comeback, I'd have a comeback a while later in a rather very unhelpful way. But the problem spans beyond comebacks. I am a thinker by nature. So I'd have a brilliant way to present my thought - if I have sufficient time. But if you put me in a spot and asked me to describe my thought, I'd end up underwhelming. I generally prepare and rehearse multiple times to make sure I don't disappoint. ...

Right vs Wrong Its the quintessential philosophical battle. What is right and what is wrong? I am not sufficiently philosophical to attempt to answer that question. But I have, for a while, believed that there isn't anything right or wrong. These are just social constructs made up by societies to ensure their own peace. Which is to say, anything that is wrong isn't necessarily universally wrong - it is wrong in that context. And the context could be the epoch of interest, geography of interest of just the religious belief of the larger society of interest. Of course, designated rights and wrongs do help us make better decisions in many cases. So overall, the idea of right and wrong is probably right. ...