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The Making of a Dumb Datum

Imagine 10,000 years in the future. Two archaeologists are digging a site, and they find the remains of human bones. They take those remains to the lab, perform tests on them, and try to reconstruct the habits and lifestyle of that human. Say those bones belong to me. They are trying to find out my story, how I lived, what I ate, where I traveled, etc. Once they find all the info they need, they toss it into a museum where they store all other such ancient human remains they find. I was essentially one data point to them in trying to understand how humanity evolved over time. Or I can also call myself a “datum”, the singular form of data, literally one piece of information to solve a bigger puzzle. Honestly, I don’t need 10,000 years to become a datum. I am already a part of several datasets people use these days to study many things. So for that objective learner, I am already a datum. Now let me get to how I got the dumb part of it. I have had an interesting and eventful life so far...
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The Backup

I realized it has been 8 years since I started working in tech. 18 th May 2018 was my first day as an associate software engineer at Accenture. I remember meeting people with 8 years of work experience in my first week there and thinking, “man, they are really old.” I regret it now. My first manager, who was definitely old, took a look at me and foretold “this is the boy who is going to be the backup.” Backup is one of those ubiquitously used IT industry terms, because people ran out of words in their word bag to describe someone who is secondary to a main guy working on a project. They could have called me a rookie, but they don’t want to, because rookie makes me sound cool and they know I am not cool. Over time I gained the trust of both the manager and the main guy, and I was later assigned as a backup to three other main guys. I was even once the backup for a backup. By the time I was about to become the main guy myself, a global pandemic punched me in the face and knocked m...
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Irresponsibility

I think about this one story I read about Feynman a lot, especially during the times when I am going through burn out in my personal and professional life. I am unfortunately not blessed with a good memory, so I am fairly certain I get many facts wrong in it, but I can recall its essence very accurately. After Feynman was done working on atomic bomb during the war, he was offered a hot shot professor job in some big school, Cornell, I think. And he kept getting better offers from all other places because everyone wanted a piece of him. But he was also depressed and burnt out. He worked in a very intense environment in Los Alamos for atomic bomb, and around the same period, love of his life and his first wife, Arlene died due to sickness. So later when he started working in Cornell, he was barely scraping by at work, and he spent time reading Arabian nights (early version of doom scrolling). He felt guilty and he felt like a fraud, because all were saying wonderful things about him,...
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Miles 1377 - 1387

  1.      It has been so dark lately when I get out of my home early in the morning to run. Usually, people aren’t out on the streets yet, so my first sign of contact with life in that new day is a cat which lives inside a ditch near my home. I named it Garfield because it is a yellowish and a funny looking cat. Whenever I try to go near it, it gets antsy and hides inside the ditch. Today I thought I saw Garfield and tried to approach it, but I found a raccoon instead, yikes. I wonder if Garfield's doing alright. 2.      One mile into my run, I enter a nice street with expensive houses. I sometimes see people walking their dogs there, but no one ever bothers to reply to my good morning. But there’s this one old lady who I see walking with a cane almost on my every run, she recognizes me now and we started waving to each other. This is how you make friends while running solo. 3.      I ran a 22-minute 5k today. It is cr...
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Religion and Spirituality

Growing up in a secular India, I was fortunate enough to have been exposed to different gods. When I was a child, my family lived near a Hindu temple which served delicious food on Thursdays, so I never missed an opportunity to tag along with my friends when they visited the temple. God there had a bronze statue. I used to diligently stand in front of the statue with folded hands, and put my wish list in front of the God – “please help me convince my dad to buy a new cycle”, “please help me get good marks in the next exam” etc. I genuinely believed God somehow had a communication channel open with that bronze statue. Then I went home and saw my mom praying to her god, but there were no folded hands with a standing posture. She instead performed a sequence of postures that ranged from standing, kneeling, falling to ground etc. And God my family believed had no bronze statue, in fact no shape at all. There used to be a Muslim tailor near my home who always wore a taqiyah (Islamic sku...
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A better world

Today I learned that October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. This is a deeply personal topic to me, and I ended up writing a long essay about it. I've decided to keep most of it private, but there's one paragraph I want to share: "We all have our personal demons inside our heads, but they never justify physically or psychologically abusing another human being. Each of us is carrying a huge knapsack filled with the burden of responsibilities and emotions, and struggling to haul it all up this big mountain we call life. So, the least we can do is be kind to each other. When our time on this planet inevitably comes to an end, I hope we leave a better world filled with more stories and fewer scars."
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Mildly Boring

I often think about this one research study I read in past, where participants were asked to choose between sitting for 15 mins in a silent room with the company of their thoughts, versus hitting themselves with a mild electric shock. And majority of men actually chose to shock themselves. I am not surprised. When our brains lack novelty and external stimuli, that’s when our sleep generating systems get triggered, resulting in a big loud yawn with the words “boring” flashing in our heads. But it doesn’t just stop there, our brains start to wander. They reach those mental spaces that we desperately try to hide and avoid, and make us relive the experiences we would rather pay to avoid reliving, if we could. Recently, I was experiencing a few difficult emotions and memories playing in my head on repeat. So, I pulled a strategy from a long list of coping mechanisms I have, which involves running as hard as I can to tire myself physically, and thereby mentally, to find an escape from th...
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Joy in the grind

I did a solo long run of 20 miles today, and I had all those 3 hours of running time to think about how my relationship with running has been changing. I started running mainly because I wanted to gain the respect of my friends and coworkers. I was out of shape, had unhealthy food habits, and it impacted my self-esteem. Somehow, I was able to productively use that basic human need for external validation, and managed to get to the point where I can run respectable 5Ks and 10Ks. It earned me people’s validation to some extent. After a while, my non-running life started becoming heavy. Being an immigrant in United States is not a fun ride, and a painful breakup only made it worse. I now needed something deeper than external validation, and that’s when I discovered the concept of internal validation - the one where I set goals that seem very out of reach, and drown myself in training for them, just to have this false sense of progress; that I am doing something to keep the needle moving. ...
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