Damn. Another year, another end. Time really does fly as you get older. There are some years, like 2020, that stretch forever, and years like 2021 that started fast, stretched, then blazed through. Sitting at the end of the year, one’s bound to think - what was there to look back at in this shithole of a year? But truly look, and there really was a lot. So much to be grateful for, so much to learn from, and so many instances to count our blessings.

One of the biggest changes this year was to learn to be more thankful. Its ironic, but its also straightforward that in a year with so much trauma and hellfire all around, you’re just bound to be thankful. To be alive, to see friends and family healthy and well. The absolute privilege with which I have lived has become more stark in these times, and one can only live with it with gratitude and thanking the stars.

2021 was also obviously, a...

On this podcast with Lex Fridman, physicist Sean Carroll was asked about how he thinks in an interdisciplinary fashion and how to motivate others to think in an interdisciplinary fashion. And there was an interesting insight around motivation, and the lack or necessity of it. Read on.

“I think about this sometimes - a guy knows a personal trainer and he was asked on a podcast, how do we psych ourselves up to do a workout? How do we make that discipline to go and work out? And he’s like, why are you asking me? Like, I can’t stop working out. Like, I don’t need to psych myself up. And likewise, you know, you asked me, how do you get to have interdisciplinary conversations and all sorts of different things, all sorts of different people. Like that’s what makes me go right. Like, that’s I couldn’t stop doing that. I did that long before any of them were recorded.” - Sean Carroll

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

-Neil Gaiman

In this time of uncertainty, I hope this quote reminds you that you can still find hope in stories. All we have are the stories we tell.

I’m one of the lucky ones. Life hasn’t been hard for me - I’ve not been through the pain, loss and suffering that many my age have been through. This pandemic has been one of the most stressful events I’ve ever encountered, which isn’t true for many people.

Still, there’s a ton of despair and anguish at the situation. The virus has torn through the fabric of the industrial world, through all our pretenses of a stable civilisation and species, and shaken our faith in long-standing social contracts and established human progress. We seem to have fallen. And so how do we power through this all - wake up everyday, go to work at our desks, sit through calls, work on presentations, cook two square meals and prepare to do it all over again?

I don’t know how. Sometimes its a straight up miracle. Even if you manage to drown out the noises on Twitter and on television, there’s a louder voice...

Mars is the next frontier for humankind. When the Saturn-V rocket took men to the moon in July 1969, if you asked the people then how 2020 would be, they would painted pictures of a space-faring society, a species of humans far more advanced than themselves. We’d have settled on one of Jupiter’s moons, or fought wars for land on Mars in their imaginations.

Sadly, we’re worse than before. The International Space Station - the ISS - is the one place outside Earth where man has set base, forget a small colony on the Moon. Humans only fly to the ISS, and only from Russian soil on a Soyuz rocket. The United States shut down the Space Shuttle program in 2011, and American astronauts travel to Kazakhstan to fly to the ISS. What happened to Mars?

Well, a lot of things that I can’t possibly unpack in one piece, but I’ll go over them broadly. The major one’s politics. The Space race between the...

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve internalised over the past few months is the power of compounding. There are tons of thought pieces on this, memes have been made, and bards and oracles (of Oklahoma too) have spoken about compounding. I’ve always read it, but its never something I’ve taken as a fundamental lesson for myself.

Compounding is the accrual of doing one thing every day, over a period of time. Whether it’s investing money, or working out, or reading - doing something a thousand times builds a large value repository of said tangible or intangible item. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but it has to be a guiding principle for some decisions of your life. Health and savings - the two things that are enormously important as you grow older, are both immensely better if you start early, and keep at it. Relationships - invest in some, pay attention and keep at it - these...

I’ll admit, I’ve only recently started treating my kitchen as if it belongs in my home. With privilege dropping through my nose, I’ve never really had to cook meals properly, or wash dishes. Sure I’ve cooked breakfast, washed utensils through these years, but never a sustained effort of ‘making a meal’, as it were. Except that’s all changed with this lockdown. So here’s a few things I’ve learned. This is advice you’re not bound to find on any food channel on Youtube, or a cookbook. Nay, this comes from that elusive intangible material, experience. Here goes nothing.

• The pressure cooker is actually your friend, and not a mini-sized steam engine ripped off a local train ready to blast your house to bits.

• When they say ‘namak swaad anusar’ or ‘add salt according to taste’ it really is an intuitive abstract emotion that comes from spending more time with your dish.

• Kasuri methi is the...

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Tolkien, a man ravaged by the Great War of his time, wrote this years later in reference to the horrors he faced. How relevant it is for today’s time.

I just finished reading this book last week, called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

First, about the book. Sum is a book by famed neuroscientist David Eagleman, who typically writes non-fiction science books on the brain, what makes us tick etc. This is a radical departure from his usual fare, as this is a speculative fiction book, about 40 ‘imaginations’ of what happens when you die. Each of these imaginations is a 2-3 page note on what life will be like. One hypothesizes that we relive our life again, but with all similar experiences clubbed together - so like 8 days tying shoelaces, 5 months on the toilet, 1 week going through all breakups etc. There are 40 unique ideas of the afterlife.

These imaginations are inventive and unique. They’re a page-turner, making you think harder each time. They’re also a lot of fun. Its...