Extracts from a Diary

Traditionally, I wasn’t much of a New Year’s resolutions guy. Nor much of a “how has this year been” reflecting-type either. January 1st is an arbitrary date chosen to start a calendar year. One could just as well introspect about the past 365 days or initiate a resolution on, say, 29th Aug, and it shouldn’t make a difference. But, it does. And 31st Dec/1st Jan works great, at least in terms of neatly bookending events occurring in a given year. Last year, inspired by a practice that The Missus has been a regular with, I wrote a letter to my future self. You can write to yourself from here ( https://www.futureme.org/ ). It allows for different durations, or you can choose a custom date, and it’ll come to your inbox at the end of it. Consider. I also had second thoughts and some mild reservations about ‘publicly’ introspecting on the year that was, or the plans/hopes for the year that would be. Mostly because I am still finding my voice and am not sure if it is a good idea to write abou...

Last week of August, I was fortunate to have travelled to Vietnam. I say fortunate because I loved every bit of it, and hope to be able to travel there again. We visited Ho Chi Minh City (also called Saigon or HCMC), Da Nang, and Hanoi — the three major cities across South, Central, and North Vietnam respectively. Each of those had a different flavour across the many dimensions — food, culture, traffic, road infrastructure, markets, coffee, among other things. Our trip was for about 8 days, and we definitely felt that was too short to fully soak in the things the country had on offer. But, it’s better to leave with an incomplete appetite and a desire to return, than otherwise. It was an excellent trip in absolute sense and in terms of value for money. History While Vietnam has had a continuous history of about 3000 years, in the modern era, it’s been a theatre of the different world powers. Under French colonial rule until World War II, control shifted to Japan after France fell to Naz...

Nihilism: The Case for No Inherent Meaning to Life Two anchoring sets of facts: We’re on a pale blue dot called Earth that orbits a modest-sized star, barely noticeable in an otherwise average galaxy containing 10 11 other stars. This galaxy is part of a supercluster containing 100,000 other galaxies. There are probably about 10 million other superclusters in the observable universe. The universe began about 13.8 billion years ago. Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. Modern Humans appeared around 300,000 years ago (~0.0067% of Earth’s current age), and all of written history — and any named human — are from less than 10,000 years ago (~0.00022% of Earth’s current age). These timelines and scales are so huge that they are humanly incomprehensible. People realise this and move in either direction — incredible religious awe as well as those around rejecting it. You could be like the young protagonist of Annie Hall (1977 movie), who on hearing that the universe is expanding ( 45 seconds ...

I've been intending to revive this blog for a long time. I call the time month year of death sometime to 2018, when I last wrote something here (coincidentally, on someone's death - mom's death if you're curious but don't want to click). I've had multiple different ideas still lying in draft stage. However, this time is different! Or so says every addict looking to quit; or in this case, the reverse - a person with inertia looking to move to action. Lots of updates in life but I'll just touch upon a few of them here. May (or may not!) cover in detail on some of these, in subsequent posts: Got married to a wonderful life partner - easily the most 'high leverage' decision that I didn't realise/think was as impactful as it turned out to be. Aside from/along with/higher than one's 'work', life partner is the other context that carries maximum impact to our day-to-day peace/irritation/happiness/frustration/satisfaction/depression. One c...

A couple of weeks ago, when I'd called up somebody, who had taken a lady I deeply loved, to the hospital, I was expecting the call to be along the lines of how it was a minor health-scare but nothing 'serious'. A deeply pained, but calm, voice spoke about his wife of over 41 years, "Kanna, amma is no more." ( Son, your mother is no more ). I remember my hands were shaking and I felt as if my mind was running in a million directions and my body wanted to keep pace with my mind. Yet, my hands were shaking. A 'simple' task of dialling a number seemed hard. Over the phone, I conveyed the message to a few people concerned, calmly, but I was still not in 'control' of my physical self - I was still shaking. Over the course of next few days, I saw various friends and relatives recall different anecdotes with her, recall traits my mother had, ethics & moral code she upheld, how she influenced their lives, the various incidents in her life (a...