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I keep reading about how India is really moving up the ease of business list. That's nice to read but it doesn't seem to translate very well to common people like me, though. As a citizen of the country, it should be relatively simple for me to setup a company there. Even as a non-resident, it should be simple. Am non resident, but my passport is still Indian. So that is my home, irrespective of anything. I usually don't want to rethink this, but often times the way things work in India are so annoying, that I can't help but think if that's really my home. ...

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. ...

Success is an elusive metric. What does it mean to succeed? I've pondered over this question a few times. I avoid reading this stuff up, though. So whatever follows here on are my own thoughts. Some influenced me, but mainly as they occurred in my head. They must be naive, for most of you. What is Success? According to a dictionary, Success is the accomplishment of an aim or purpose. Let me, then, start with my purpose. For a long time, my only aim in life has been to live free, to pursue my curiosities while not worrying about financials. My interests aren't at the scale of solving world hunger or climate crisis. They are much simpler - build a robot or two, teach kids basic sciences, invest in people who need a break, write a book, pursue my own idea of spirituality and so on. These are highly selfish pursuits, too - I don't have any grand visions of philanthropy. ...

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. ...

So I quit my job. And have decided not to search the market to get back into a grind. And thankfully, the wife can keep her job and become the "breadwinner" of the family. That's a relief - to not have to worry about food on the table and the bills. I wanted to be running my own business back when I was in high school - circa 1998. I didn't even know "entrepreneurship" as a term. People around me back then didn't start their own businesses. And even if they did, it was a shop in the market selling/re-selling something. It had nothing to do with selling their skill - selling was the skill. I knew I didn't want to do that. But I didn't quite know what else I could do. ...

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. ...

I've been on Hugo for a while now and I have made a couple of blog posts as well. I am fully using the emacs org mode and am content, to say the least, with the flow. I maintain the website for another friend which is a wordpress instance. I cannot expect them to start using VSCode or Emacs to write their content, let alone set them up with AWS keys and a publish flow. It's just a little too nerdy for them. And that got me thinking. This approach, if made palatable, seems like a brilliant option for a lot of personal bloggers that don't really need all the bells and whistles that wordpress provides. We might have something here. So the rest of the post is sketching out the details of what I think will be an interesting offering. ...

I recently moved my website from wordpress to hugo. It is taking a little getting used to, but I absolutely love the fact that I don't have to leave my editor to update my blog. I was still editing markdown and had to lookup markdown syntax here and there. So today I spent some time to figure out how to get the ball rolling with org-mode in emacs. Turns out, its not that hard at all. ...