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...

In my last post I spoke about rockets’ structure, and why SpaceX’s rockets are cool, in that they’re reusable. In this post, I briefly wanted to touch upon the first rocket from the company - their workhorse - that has powered their missions.

Image Credit: SpaceX

The Falcon 9, operational since 2010, is the second rocket that the company made, right after the Falcon 1. The Falcon name comes from ‘Millennium Falcon’ - Han Solo’s spaceship in the Star Wars saga. The 9 in Falcon 9’s name comes from the 9 incredible Merlin engines at the bottom of the rocket that provide the thrust for its flight. It is also the first partially-reusable rocket in the world, with the first stage coming back to the ground, a historic feat the company first achieved in 2015. The first stage - the part at the bottom - is also often called a ‘booster’ as it boosts the rocket up.

The rocket has undergone...

Rockets are a fascinating invention. Ever since the mighty Saturn and Proton rockets sent us out to interstellar space, they’ve captured the imagination of a generation, as the news anchors put it so grandly. One company that’s cool and hip when it comes to space and human spaceflight is SpaceX. What’s so revolutionary about them? For that matter, what’s in a bloody rocket anyway and what’s the big deal with SpaceX’s rockets?

The first stage (the bottom bit) is what lifts the second stage and payload off the ground, and launches them onto an arching suborbital trajectory. Then it separates, the second stage (the upper bit) finishes the launch and gets the payload into orbit, and the first stage lands back on earth, either on land or on a ship (depending on how much fuel’s left).

So what’s so good about their rockets? All other rockets from NASA or any other private player work in...

Can you really write anything new about the mountains after Ruskin Bond? That man, God bless his soul, has written about the experience of being amidst the mountains so vividly and perfectly that there’s nothing more one can add. Still, we plod on.

Much has been said about the romance and sense of grandeur of climbing mountains. There’s a sense of pure awe when you trudge along a mountain - slow, step after step. This is land that rose through huge tectonic plates clashing with immense force - heaven would have shook. And then, for an act so violent and deafeningly loud to produce something so calm…and still. The mountains don’t do anything much. They simply exist. Yet, that existence has evolved to evoke a symbol of peace and eternity. Indeed, one can’t often throw out ‘majestic’ to describe anything.

I’ve been fortunate to be a part of a Himalayan trek and walk through some of the...

Its been a couple of months since BoJack Horseman ended.

The show was a cultural phenomenon, capturing the zeitgeist of these times in biting humor, wit and searing intellect. Ambitious in its storytelling, BoJack was unorthodox in its structure, bold in its choices and far superior to anything playing at the moment. Being an animated show about a talking horse, it was constantly underestimated and pooh-pooh’d from the get go, and it took that to its advantage to pleasantly surprise everyone. By the time the 3rd season started, there was not a critic or animation fan who didn’t have this in their best-of lists, virtually tapping people on their shoulder insisting that they * have * to watch this show.

The consistency of its brilliance is beyond doubt a credit to the writers. They brought a level of complexity and nuance arguably unseen till now - on television - to depression...

Its the end of the decade. 2019 was a brutal year - a year of growing up, of reckoning with the real world far more than one expected, and of consequences. I thought 2018 was a hellish year, and 2019 was just waiting around the corner, with fangs. It was a darker and tougher time, for me and nearly everyone I know. I guess that’s what happens as you get older.

If 2018 was a quest for finding fulfilling work and ‘growth’ as I put it in last year’s lookback post, 2019 changed the meaning of it. Ideas about finding ‘balance’ and sanity prevailed more than pushing harder and digging deeper. Work and its ability to define self-worth took precedence over meaningful friendships, connections and everything else, which I regret.

But as always, there was light amidst the grey. Every year makes me recognize my privilege, and I’m thankful for it. I have immense gratitude for all the travel...

2018 - what a maddening, gobsmacking, utterly hellish year. We’ve all lived 10 lives since it started and can barely wait for it to end. Yet there was cause for celebration, moments to be thankful for, and times of awe and wonder. It was a year of finding new interests, new ideas to subscribe to, and new passions to pursue. There was so much to learn, so much to understand and so much to admire.

If I could sum up the year in a word, it would be - growth. I grew a lot this year, mentally and spiritually. 26 was an age of unshackling the young and trying to adult. It was a year of ‘finding myself’, that tiring cliche that rings so true. In most of my writings this year, I wrote about the anxiety of finding fulfillment in work, or lack thereof. 2018 was about finding meaningful work and being part of something that counts, and to that extent I have succeeded. I have never been hungrier...

I recently shifted jobs, and I now have the pleasure of working alongside some incredibly hardworking, inspiring and successful people. These are people at the top of their craft. They are the leaders of the industry, and make things happen with sheer will and effort. Over the course of these past months, I’ve made an observation about their success, and how I think they did it.

The most important observation I have is that these people are always working. They are either working, or thinking about work. There is no ‘off switch’. They have built their entire life around this, and are happy to live and breathe this all the time. They are giving a hundred percent, a hundred percent of the time. They are constantly vigilant.

There is no surefire path to success; there’s a lot of luck involved. But my hypothesis for success, from seeing them, is to give 100%, 100% of the time, so that...

I loved La La Land. It was a movie of love and passion and dreams crashing and coming true. The visuals, the songs, the acting and everything moved me. My favorite part of the film was the fantastic endlessly playable song, City of Stars.

The song is an ode to their relationship - both Sebastian and Mia smile at each other and sing in unison. The song is a celebration of their love, but I think its more than that. The song is as much about their love for each other as it is for their love for their craft. Mia loves acting, while Sebastian loves the piano. She just wants to be in the movies, and he just wants to be successful enough to open a true jazz bar. City of Stars, are you smiling just for me? is as much a cry of romantic love as it is about their life’s work. They are in joy at finding each other, and the song honors it, but it masterfully brings out their yearning to succeed...

Here’s a hypothesis about interactions. Often when we’re talking to other people, we’re talking to ourselves.

There is often advice in our conversations, which we want to give ourselves but are too lazy to adopt. There are things we wish someone had told us earlier, when we were in the same spot. There are reassurances in our conversations, words we want to tell ourselves but aren’t too strong enough to tell it directly. Conversations with someone else at times are basically talking to a previous version of us - us from 3 months ago, a relationship or a decision ago.

This isn’t a new hypothesis at all, but I found it interesting enough to write about because I wanted to know if other people also do this, and realize it later [or are realizing now after reading this]. Of course, there is nothing wrong in doing this, its a feature of our interactions with people. But it is surely...