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. ...

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? ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Hello Hugo! Today I moved my blog to hugo. Frankly it doesn’t make intuitive sense to run a blog on a static site generator. But when I think about it again, my blog is my expression of ideas. I rarely engage on the comments section. And the best way to let me know your thoughts is still to tweet at me. Given these, it makes sufficient sense to run the blog as a static site. And the site is now stupidly simple. I found a fabulous theme, and am editing the site using markdown on my emacs. This is actually faster than editing on wordpress editor :-) ...

I am a paranoid guy. But my paranoia borders on a potential disorder. I am paranoid about things that might not even happen. For example, I always worry that I cannot do great work. My fear is not about failing, though. My concern is that someone will dig up something I said on my twitter feed that I can’t entirely agree with today. Is that rational? But when has fear been reasonable? ...

My favourite TED talk is the talk by Larry Smith on “Why You Will Fail To Have A Great Career”. It is also my worst nightmare. It is what keeps me looking hard for problems that I believe in, that I want to be assosciated with. I take part in multiple forums just trying to see what would interest me. After all, if you want to commit all your time to working on something, you might pick up something that you really believe in. Or you have to be one motivated personality (which I know I rarely am). I need a reason to do things however silly the reason may be. But I cannot fool myself into believing there is a good enough reason. Catch-22, right? ...