tag:nakul.me,2014:/feedNakul S2024-01-01T05:32:18-08:00Nakul Shttp://nakul.menakulsantpurkar@gmail.comSvbtle.comtag:nakul.me,2014:Post/20232024-01-01T05:32:18-08:002024-01-01T05:32:18-08:002023 - A lookback<p>2023 was a crazy year. If <a href="http://nakul.me/2022">2022</a> was a year of weariness for me, 2023 was a year full of craziness. I moved cities again, left behind dear old friends and a job, and started life relatively anew in a (so-far) very strange city. I hope I am able to warm up to this place. </p>
<p>One of the joys of writing a post like this is that each year you think you grew up, and you sit down to write a new post and you realize <i>oh boy were we wrong the last year</i>. Of course, one isn’t wrong strictly, just that each year brings more challenges, more highs, more <i>dhakkas</i>, and that much more room to grow. Progress from strength, strength from struggle. As Camus put it so beautifully in <i>The Myth of Sisyphus</i>, ‘The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’</p>
<p>As always, my opinion that life is a gift has solidified even more - every year and day is a blessing to experience, to reflect. Pain, loneliness, joy, victory - its a privilege to live through it. Yes, these are pithy statements made a million times before, but there are only a handful of truths, and one internalizes them through lived experiences. The only aim for 2024 then, is to experience more, feel more, do more and be in a cocoon less. </p>
<p>However, this is a 2023 lookback post, so let me get back to my annual tradition of listing my best-of stuff:</p>
<p>The Best Books I read this year:<br>
I must have read about 5-6 books this year, there were very different priorities. The only book I loved this year was Richard Osman’s <i> The Last Devil to Die </i>.</p>
<p>Best TV Shows of the year:</p>
<ol>
<li>The Bear Season 2 - Shoutout to Forks being the #1 TV episode of the year</li>
<li> Blue Eye Samurai</li>
<li>Succession Season 4</li>
</ol>
<p>Best Movies of the Year:</p>
<ol>
<li>Past Lives</li>
<li>Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse</li>
<li>Mission Impossible 7</li>
<li>John Wick 4</li>
<li>Jailer</li>
<li>Polite Society</li>
<li>Guardians of the Galaxy 3</li>
</ol>
<p>Other highlights of the year:</p>
<ol>
<li>Meeting old friends and some fantastic weddings</li>
<li>Actually bringing serious focus to health</li>
<li>Listening to some fantastic podcast episodes, like LVMH by Acquired, and Morgan Housel on the Tim Ferriss Show. </li>
<li>Running a couple of 10Ks</li>
</ol>
<p>Look forward to 2024. </p>
tag:nakul.me,2014:Post/20222022-12-31T04:54:46-08:002022-12-31T04:54:46-08:002022 - A lookback<p>2022, a middling year. Kind of like Class 8th in school. Just recovering from the vagaries of chaos and infancy, and yet pumped about the future. The year was still about shaking off the dread and trauma of the pandemic years, and yet heralded a newer and better time ahead for us collectively. We crossed the 8 billion mark as a unit, and lost millions of friends and family to war and disease. We were enthralled by ChatGPT and AI, and were hit with the double whammy of the Great Layoffs and Inflation. I guess dichotomies exist in every year, every timespan - but boy was 2022 a reminder of that. </p>
<p>I remarked last year that 2021 was a year of perseverance. I think 2022 was just a year of weariness. Everyone around me emerged battered and bruised, and did face more challenges. I guess as we’re getting older, life is getting less rosy. Which is helping us hold precious moments of happiness more tightly, and find every opportunity to indulge in them, given how few they are. This isn’t to say that the year has just been grimdark (coined by Brandon Sanderson of course), but that maybe we were exposed to a lot more reality this year. And yet, my life is an extremely privileged and top 0.0001% status life in this nation. </p>
<p>There’s SO MUCH I have to be grateful for in this hectic year - moving to a new city, living entirely alone, working (and surviving) at a turbulent startup and more. I’m grateful for the new friends I made this year. I’m grateful for the friends I already have - if anything this year has brought me closer to them all. I’m grateful for the roof on my head, the ability to still run in the park, easy access to books and sexbomb masala dosa, and bffs and family on speed dial. What else is life for? </p>
<p>The best books I read this year were:</p>
<ol>
<li>The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu</li>
<li>Death’s End by Cixin Liu</li>
<li>Stoner by John Williams</li>
<li>Hyperion by Dan Simmons</li>
<li>The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman</li>
</ol>
<p>The entirety of the 3-body problem was a mindblasting, mindbending, out of body surreal experience. No book series has gripped me like this in the recent past (I miss being young and caring so intensely; as one gets older passions for anything get more blunt). But Cixin Liu’s ideas and philosophizing just melted my brains out and then some. I can’t stress how amazing these books are. People have very strong opinions on this series - they are either absolutely thunderstruck, or think its shit. </p>
<p>Favorite TV shows of the year:</p>
<ol>
<li>The Bear </li>
<li>Only Murders in the Building S2</li>
<li>Barry </li>
</ol>
<p>I watched very little TV this year - I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t even finish the House of the Dragon yet. But I will.</p>
<p>Favorite movies of the year:</p>
<ol>
<li>RRR</li>
<li>Kantara</li>
<li>Everything Everywhere All At Once</li>
<li>The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent</li>
<li>Bullet Train</li>
</ol>
<p>A very general male-oriented list, as is evident. </p>
<p>Other highlights of the year:</p>
<ol>
<li>This episode, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/09SXvbH9idu8KFjfxnaMOh?si=9769bb0f63f94936">Among the Oak Trees</a>, from This is Love</li>
<li>A beautiful trip to Kenya</li>
<li>Running the 10K twice!</li>
<li>Some amazing weddings.</li>
</ol>
<p>2023, be kinder. </p>
tag:nakul.me,2014:Post/20212021-12-31T04:16:40-08:002021-12-31T04:16:40-08:002021 - A lookback<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>2021 was also obviously, a year of loss. I hated this side of adulting, but its a threshold that’s inevitable. Mortality was a concept that was luckily not a big part of my life so far, but that changed drastically this year. Loss and pain and death were everywhere, including personal losses. Death was a near presence. </p>
<p>2021 was also about turning older. I turned 30 this year. Goddamn do I feel old. It also makes me question my angst when I see people tweeting “Turning 22, feeling like the end of the world already”. I guess the best years of my life are ahead of me, but that’s not something you can internalize really.</p>
<p>Like every year, this was a marquee one for all the TV I watched, the books I read, the films I experienced and all the podcasts I heard The best book I read this year was <a href="https://www.amazon.in/dp/B07NQ2D32G/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">Lifespan</a> by David Sinclair, who’s done a phenomenal job of explaining why we age, and how we can stop death. Death, which has always been an absolute inevitability. Its fascinating to see where we go from here on this subject - the interest on ending death grows more and more, and even the $$$ funding. Other honorable mentions include <a href="https://www.amazon.in/Haunting-House-Penguin-Modern-Classics-ebook/dp/B002RUA4QQ/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=the+haunting+of+hill+house&qid=1640927680&s=digital-text&sprefix=the+hauntni%2Cdigital-text%2C231&sr=1-3">The Haunting of Hill House</a> by the inimitable Shirley Jackson and <a href="https://www.amazon.in/Russian-Silhouettes-Genna-Sosonko-ebook/dp/B00L9J6DJ8/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1USC56MTW4LXT&keywords=russian+silhouettes&qid=1640927773&s=digital-text&sprefix=russian+silhouette%2Cdigital-text%2C184&sr=1-1">Russian Silhouettes</a> by Genna Sosonko, an old book on the personalities of 20th Century Russian chess Grandmasters. It kicked off my Russian reading obsession (3 books this year), and I’m sure there’s many more to come this year. </p>
<p>I grew to appreciate longer form podcasts a lot this year - The Lex Fridman Podcast, Sean Carroll’s Mindscapes and Huberman Lab were this year’s major podcasts to dwell in. And South Indian films were the highlight of the year honestly - I think Tamil films and Malayalam films have just improved the quality of their nuance and storytelling. </p>
<p>Overall, I think the year has been a lot of chaos and loss and struggle, but if the year has been about anything - its perserverance. Onto 2022!</p>
tag:nakul.me,2014:Post/motivation2021-11-02T22:22:39-07:002021-11-02T22:22:39-07:00Motivation<p>On <a href="https://youtu.be/l-NJrvyRo0c">this</a> 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.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“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 <i>that’s what makes me go</i> right. Like, that’s I couldn’t <i>stop</i> doing that. I did that long before any of them were recorded.” - Sean Carroll</p>
</blockquote>tag:nakul.me,2014:Post/fairytale2020-04-04T10:49:14-07:002020-04-04T10:49:14-07:00Beating Dragons<blockquote class="short">
<p>Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>-Neil Gaiman</p>
<p>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. </p>
tag:nakul.me,2014:Post/despair2020-04-03T12:52:00-07:002020-04-03T12:52:00-07:00Powering through despair<p>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. </p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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 that refuses to stay still - your own thoughts. Uncertainty, chaos, panic - its only natural to experience these now, and accept the powerlessness of one’s actions. I believe, only that acceptance will bring some strength to wake up the next day. It must. That’s all we have.</p>
tag:nakul.me,2014:Post/mars2020-04-02T12:38:32-07:002020-04-02T12:38:32-07:00Let's go to Mars<p>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. </p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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 US and Russia ended by the 70s, and then the political will dwindled, and so funding to NASA dwindled. Men were sent to the Moon with less processing power than what’s in our smartphones today, but it happened due to politics. The second would be priorities. Long-term projects require complex, long-term teams dedicated to these tasks. Space agencies around the world had far more immediate and interesting problems to explore. Indeed, they’ve been very busy, launching multiple landers and rovers and orbital satellites that have explored Saturn, its moons, Jupiter, Pluto, even hyper-fast rotating asteroids, and of course, Mars (Curiosity and Opportunity rovers). The third would be costs. That speaks for itself. The costs to consider a mission - to develop technology, test it, manufacture the rockets for such an arduous journey would be gigantic. Only a combined world effort over a period of time can achieve that. </p>
<p>But not all hope is lost. Planet colonization is still a distant dream, but the voices grow louder than ever. There are companies like SpaceX that have made this their #1 priority. They’re investing in building those rockets, the technology, the sciences that will take us to Mars. </p>
<p>Let’s hope the Coronavirus situation makes governments and space agencies take Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar poster’s words seriously - ‘Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here’. Once again, its all the Marketing guys who do the heavylifting. Sigh. </p>
tag:nakul.me,2014:Post/compounding2020-04-01T12:06:48-07:002020-04-01T12:06:48-07:00Compounding<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>keep at it</em>. Relationships - invest in some, pay attention and <em>keep at it</em> - these will drive fulfilling and meaningful connections. Compounding, compounding. Its not an untold secret - no its an oft told blatant fact that is easily discarded. </p>
<p>So, choose a skill or value that you want to build over time. And work towards it every day. One day you’ll be on top of the mountain and you won’t remember how you got there.</p>
tag:nakul.me,2014:Post/kitchen2020-03-31T11:43:26-07:002020-03-31T11:43:26-07:00Things you learn in a kitchen<p>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, <em>experience</em>. Here goes nothing.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>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.</p></li>
<li><p>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.</p></li>
<li><p>Kasuri methi is the appendix of Indian spices. Its there, but you don’t really need it.</p></li>
<li><p>Vessels will burn, fingers will burn, and vegetables will burn. Ours is the way of the fire.</p></li>
<li><p>Time heals all bad experiences. That and some handy ice-water to dip your fingers.</p></li>
<li><p>Eggs are a double-edged sword - they make you feel that you’ve arrived in the cooking world, and the very next day your utensil is charred with too little oil. </p></li>
<li><p>First, keep the garnishing ready. Presentation will help swallow a bad meal.</p></li>
<li><p>How many variations will I make with potatoes and any random vegetable that’s not cooked well to help eat it easier, you ask? Only one way to find out.</p></li>
<li><p>Golden words, hear me once for they shall not be repeated: Bhujia sev with everything.</p></li>
</ul>
tag:nakul.me,2014:Post/Hymn2020-03-30T13:42:42-07:002020-03-30T13:42:42-07:00Hymn for a stressful time<blockquote>
<p>“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.<br>
“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.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings</p>
<p>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. </p>