21/22

2021 was a great year for me, 2022 too but in different terms. 20s transit your life, you leave stuff behind. You don't want to, but you have to, and you finally do. You chase new stuff now, with grace and heat, and leave old stuff with elegance.

2021 was great, wish I knew how great it was when it was actually happening. I was just out of college, a brand new job where I was working from home, and thus really close to people I love. I started brewing coffee that year, and just like when you start to date someone, excitement you have with a new hobby is something else. <days skip> I got an interview call, and preparations followed. I was mildly stressed, but now that I look back, I enjoyed that preparation phase. Maybe, lil bit more than the goal itself. <days skip> My college called me for the convocation. Not considering some really good friends I made there, and some subjects, I didn't like college, I hated it. Didn't want to attend convocation either, but well it was probably the last time I would get to live those days back with my best friends again in that campus, so I was at convocation. Now, at a convocation, you get a degree, you a bid a farewell, and a phase of life ends. No one wants it to end, but it does. I also got a gold medal btw, meant nothing. But for my parents, as the come from academia, it was a big thing, maybe bigger than placements. I saw happiness in their eyes, mine had some tears-of-joy, and that's when I realised I played college well.

2022 begins. I get my interview results, and a new job.  And, just before it did I had a really nice gap of time, where I was at home, doing nothing, not worrying about results, and maybe a nice time to live life. I wasted it, in the worst way, worrying about stuff which was never there. It got worse. Meh. I went to a trip with my parents, to Kullu-Manali, just before my birthday. The trip was awesome, but I was still carrying some weight. <a day skips> and my birthday comes, and it was the best. After a long time I was physically with my closest folks (my parents, she and some really close friends). Best birthday cakes ever! We went to calm woods and did our little ceremony there. Days pass, and you move to a new place (and your old place seems different). A busy city life starts to kick in, office, work and weekends. This is when a new phase begins. Just didn't realise it then. Stuff happens, and you finally see a beach. Goa felt like home, maybe, any place does when you are with some people.  A ton of things happened that year too, I made new friends, lost some old ones, went on a solo-soul-searching-trip, sky-dived.

I was a jerk who wasn't living, I was escaping, and then escaping what was already an escape. it. never. ended. What I was seeking was right there, it wasn't an escape, 'twas the reality.

You don't correct things in an instant, spells don't work. So, you leave, for the last short journey. To an imperfect one. You have pretty cool foods, you ride bicycles, and You find yourself watching stars. At 2 AM. In shivering cold. You don't click pictures then, you forget to. You don't need some app to remind you of that night, it stays with you, till the very end.

What if the clock stopped?

The purpose of posts like this is to gather up thoughts, and pen them down. This series of blogs is usually written to calm my ass and help me document the life in a way which proves helpful in future. You are welcome to read these (that is why I share them), but they were written with sleepy eyes during a calm night, so we are not talking about grammatical mistakes or typos, this is about thoughts, about rush.

Time is an interesting thing. Physics says that Time began when Big Bang happened, and there was no sense of Time, as we know it, before it. However, the culture to keep a track of time, started not so long ago. Literary pieces available to us say that the trend to record time started in the Buddhist Monasteries, where they needed to wake up before the first light of the morning. Originally there used to be some person who used to stay up all night, and wake up people on Time. Then, there came the dreadful Clock, followed by its availability to the masses, followed by the Your meeting is about to begin in 10 minutes.

The need to keep track of time cannot obviously be denied. We are not living under a rock now, this rock has been transformed into a building with internet, which makes us communicate to the people just on the opposite side of globe. Communication is inevitable, but the need to keep ultra granular track of time is probably not. 

So, what if the clock stops, and humans forgot about the existence of time. A single flash, and every mother-fucking clock disappeared, and to make things better we forgot that the concept of tracking time existed, and to even make it better we forgot about the concept of death. Realistically, what probably will happen is, we will figure it out again, but that gap till we discover it again will be beautiful. There is also a chance that we might become more productive. It is  analogous to not being able to solve a question in a competitive programming contest because of less time, but solving that exact same thing when we forgot about the tick tock. Maybe, we will be able to solve some really big problems, which we could not do otherwise just because we were too worried about the track of time. Let us call this state of forgetting the existence of time as timelessness. I read about this practice somewhere, and now I want to try this out. The best way could be somehow disable the clock in laptops, and then all the visible clocks in my reach.

The discovery of Time was destined, but maybe, just maybe, if we wouldn't have thought about the  methods to record it, life could have been simpler and much more beautiful. And perhaps it is so in some version of Earth in some Multiverse. 

But on this version am thinking to sleep now, worrying about starting the next day on Time. :(

Book Reviews: Self Help and Anti Self Help

The original plan was to write this series of blogs, every month, or every quarter, but plans focussed on curbing "time" in one's favour rarely work (see: distractions, see: schedules). 

Different problems faced by humans made us create books which cover different domains of ones life, and different ways of dealing with them. In this post I try to classify and compare all the different kind of books I read, over the last couple of months. I read other things like SciFi, Erotica, and a thing or two about Chaos theory, and Multiverse, and Quantum States (see: Schrodinger's Cat; see: Spiderman: No way Home) but that is for another text. 

Classification and Comparison:

Cynical Books

"Good people make world a better place, Cynics make history", is the key idea in this area.

Following them religiously often gets oneself in tough places within one's mind, but obviously at the cost of getting what you crave for, which is the reason why these are loved by people who are living in highly competitive/stressful environments. "Think and Grow Rich",  and the "Art of War" are the two books  which more or less fall into this domain. I have blabbered a lot about these two in the last post, so skipping some words here. BTW, if religiously followed, these are really powerful books, the first one teaches to infuse a desire, and second one is the sure shot of way doing whatever the fuck you want.

Good Guy Books

Then there are the books which aim to make us a "good guy", teaching someone the ideas about helping others, leading people, apathy, (see: sympathy; see: difference in these two), etc. 

The best book in this area is undoubtedly the "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey. This book has a cult following, and literally every modern age self help book is derived from its ideas. Probably the most thought out book that will ever by written by humankind. 7 Habits are not something on the lines of "getting up early", but these 7 habits are different aspects a "good guy" should master oneself. In contrast to the cynical stuff, this also talks about achieving things but in a sane way. Stephen Covey's take on apathy and his philosophy on time management, is just beautiful.

The other book which I think falls in this area is Atomic Habits by James Clear. One of the modern age books, and the ideas are more or less similar to the ones shown by Stephen Covey. Not really a fan of this book, but it is again a really well planned book. It's basically a cheat code to develop any freaking habit, quickly, which is exactly what it aims for. One reason that I am not a fan of this is because it focuses more on mechanical ways to develop habits, but less on methods about infusing the desire in one's mind (which btw is the core of habit formation; which btw Cynical Books excel at; Cynical Books ftw).

Anti Self Help Books

There are tons of books focussed around getting 48 hour efficiency from a 24 hour day, but not a ton of books about realising that there are only 24 hours, no more no less. 

"4000 Weeks Time by Oliver Burkeman" is written around the idea of realising human capabilities, about realising that how it is not important to always give 200% in your game. Books are these are kind of detox to what the Cynical Books teach, and are often called "Anti Self Help" in the pop culture. Many believe that stuff like this can often make one ambition-less. However, being ambition-less, is what makes a person ignorant, and an ignorant person is always a happy person. Ignorance is a bliss, isn't it? Anti Self Help is a powerful domain, and probably the only domain which teaches us to be happy, and this is what I want to read more in the next few days.

By the way,  I found an interesting definition of happiness in Atomic Habits, which is "Happiness is state between one desire being fulfilled and new desire forming". This has to be one of the most powerful lines I read in the past months, and deserves a mention.

Book Reviews, August 2021

The purpose of this series of blog posts is be to document & review the books I read over time. The goal is to become a better reader by the end of this year, so that I can live the great literary works available to mankind. 

This month, I mostly read books about space, and self-help. 

• The Brief History of Time, by Stephen W Hawking: When I got this book, I thought it would be really boring, after-all who would want to read a physics book in his free time, but it's definitely not like that. Dr Hawking is a great writer, and reading his books makes one feel as if one is attending a live lecture (there are no "chapters", there are "lectures"). Since, it is written keeping the layman readers in mind, everyone can understand most parts of this masterpiece. The books begins with old theories about time & space, and converges talking about string theories and the future of time.
  
• The Art of War, by Sun Tzu: This masterpiece was written in around 500 BC, and talks about the strategies to be followed in a war. It's pretty surprising to see, how a book having this less number of pages, and written way back in 500 BC, can contain ideas which are that much practical in today's world. Sun Tzu must have been a killer war strategy back in his day, and I plan to read his masterpiece again. Something new can be learned each time, one reads this book.
  
• The Theory of Everything, by Stephen W Hawking: This is based on the series of lectures Hawking has given after writing The Brief History of Time, so this is a subset of the first one. I read this one before the former, and it served as a perfect spoiler. Still, both books are lovely, and if somehow I can delete memories, I will read the Brief History of Time, before this.

 Trying to develop an active reading habit has helped me a lot and has by far served as the best way to relax. There is nothing that beats the distinct almond like smell of books, and no web series or any modern media beats the quality content found in those rusty pages.

 Currently, I am reading some fiction, and self-help books, which I will be writing about in my next post. Thanks for reading!

New Horizons

I have been wanting to write a blog post for a long while, and also started writing one long back, but never cared to write much. Now, I have decided to write one here. The earlier ideas were to buy a domain (or create a github.io) and create my own custom website, but went with Blogger because its simple, and it alligns with the KISS ideology I have been trying to follow. So, this is going to be the place I will write (until I have time & content to create a website).

Here, I will be writing about things happening in my life, the reviews about books I have been reading, the skills I am trying to learn, the lame poetry I try to write, tutorial to some nice algorithmic questions I come across, some accidental discovery I might make some day in Computer Science, etc. The idea is also to keep it out of social media, as much as practicable. I will still be sharing the link in bios, DMing my friends to read it ;-), and in rarest cases will share the links to selective blogs (which are worth sharing).

If you have read it up-till here, thankyou, and I hope you will stay around.