In this theatre of life – my son had perhaps only seen the magic on stage, but never the absolute chaos occurring in the wings. He had never seen me as a beginner – as someone who struggled to put one foot in front of the other.
Personal History
As the earth completes another ellipse around the sun for me, I make it a point to put fingers to a keyboard (though there is a renewed resurgence of “pen to paper” due to a newly acquired Lamy pen and a stack of Campus notebooks). Birthdays in general have never mattered to me, but I…
A Personal AI Manifesto
I remember the very first time I played Super Mario Brothers on an NES console. It was 1989 and I was down with chicken pox. To stop me from scratching myself and keep me distracted, my dad rented a console and I played Mario (and Contra) non-stop over the next few days (with my mom…
Father of Man
Maybe it is a character flaw. But most of the time I don’t react in the conventional/ expected way to the ups and downs of life in the tech industry. It isn’t equanimity or “grace under fire” or indifference. In the moment – I do feel the onslaught of emotions. I find it useful to…
A Year of Quizzing – 2024 Retrospective
I used to quiz fairly regularly both in school and college and also loved setting and hosting quizzes (the high point was co-hosting the inaugural IIT Madras Open Quiz in 2004). But then I lost touch with it for over two decades. A chance meeting at a kid’s birthday party with a parent who I…
Language and Science
Or Why Metaphors are Dangerous Language is imprecise. Language is especially imprecise and imperfect when it comes to describing scientific concepts. And the irony of using the tools of language to write about its own shortcomings is not lost on me. Think about the oft repeated phrase – “survival of the fittest” and how it…
Gratitude
I love good teachers and classrooms. Something about the act of learning – sitting in a room, completely distraction-free and being a complete sponge – listening intently to a teacher at the peak of their craft, sparring with your fellow students and building new neural connections – lights me up like the Rockefeller Center Christmas…
Side Quests
I often find myself thinking about the Greek hero Odysseus (and NO – this is not one of those Elon Musk things where he claims he thinks about the Roman empire daily or how men supposedly think about the Roman empire multiple times a day. In the last year, I’ve only thought about the Roman…
Doubt and a Miracle
Sometimes all it takes to part the clouds of self-doubt and let the rays of confidence shine through is for Novak Djokovic to lose at the Australian Open. Djokovic does not have bad days, especially at the Australian Open. Since the beginning of the 2019 tournament, he had not lost a single match in the…
The Mahabharat Mega Thread
I tried something a little crazy on Twitter: narrated the entire 18 days of the Mahabharat war as a mega Twitter thread. At 149 tweets (which I posted over 6 days) – this was exhilarating and tiring. Go ahead, click on the tweet below and jump in.
Do Transformers Hallucinate of Softer Skin?
Cover image generated on Dall-E with the prompt: “A robot similar to Optimus Prime standing on a barren landscape looking at his human hand, cartoon style” All new technology in its early phase is highly disruptive to the status quo. I call this the “dynamite” phase – you can use it to blow things to…
Why Manage?
The single biggest mistake every first-time manager makes in tech companies (especially product, design and engg) is in believing that they no longer have to contribute as ICs (individual contributors). It doesn’t matter where you are on the spectrum of company size – a handful of people fighting for survival and trying to launch a…