Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Intelligent people know how to get what they want. Wise people know what’s worth wanting.
Shane Parrish
My typical simplistic approach to problem solving is why, what, and how. So here we go:
Continue readingIn many ways, the books I read are my mind’s zeitgeist, and naturally the favourites reflect this. This year, the list is along broad lines of History & Culture, Mind & Philosophy, Systems of the World, and Fiction. And with that little prologue, as per tradition – from 2019, 2020, and 2021, and 2022 – we have this year’s list of ten (plus a few 🙈). From the 65 books I read in 2023…
The original plan was Portugal, but at some point in the research, we turned right into Spain. BLS (not VFS for a change!) was not as bad as it looked online, and we got the visa ahead of the promised time. We travelled in the first half of October, and the weather was pleasant (our winter jackets, which we decided to carry thanks to a 13 degrees we saw somewhere, weren’t touched). Best to book flight tickets at least 4 months in advance.
We chose Malaga as the first port of call because it seemed like a good base for Andalusia in general, at least given the places we wanted to see. So here goes – where to stay, what to eat, and what to see and do in Malaga, Granada and Ronda.
Continue readingA recent event reminded me of a post about karma I had written half a dozen years ago. The idea of the post was thanks to Umair Haque, who had a definition of karma that was different from the garden variety ‘consequences of your actions’.
Continue readingKarma isn’t what you “have” or something you “do”. It’s what you are….. Karma is all the concepts and notions you hold in that tiny little head. All those concepts are stitched together by the idea of “you”, right? So karma is all those concepts, together, which determine your intentions, actions, behavior, all of it.
Umair Haque
Japan was always the plan, it was only a matter of when. 🙂 We planned well in advance, but even then, thanks to it being Sakura season, a lot of hotels were sold out. The visa took less than a week to get processed. Bangalore has a direct flight to Tokyo. So all you have to do is, to quote Amrita Rao, ‘JAL lijiye’. Interestingly, the pilot took off immediately after we landed, confusing all of us! We finally landed again after about 20 minutes. Tokyo was our first stop. We began, and ended, our 11-day Japan trip in Tokyo. This is our list of where to stay, what to see, and where and what to eat.
What’s a visit to Scotland without a trip to the Highlands! Thanks to the Rabbie’s Tours itinerary, we were able to cover a decent bit of ground in 3 days.
Our base technically was Portree, where we stayed for two nights at the Pier Hotel, run by a very homely Effie and family. The place is right next to the water, and less than 5 minutes walk from the town square. The building, Effie told us while making us breakfast, was more than 200 years old. But for a small stay, it’ll do just fine.
It was a little over 4 years ago that I first brought up the increasingly transactional nature of our interactions and even existence in general. I was reminded of it while listening to Amit Varma’s podcast with Nirupama Rao. Interestingly, they brought up contexts similar to what I had used – mails and rails. I had used birthday greetings going from long mails/cards to a ‘Like’ on someone else wishing the person a birthday. Travel was the other context, and I liked Amit’s example of train journeys being a unique experience. In contrast to say, the flight from point A to B.
Last year, around the same time, I had framed it as An Efficient Existence, and used the example of Taylor Pearson’s 4 minute songs – the timeframe he had mentioned for songs in the context of certain rules that creators need to follow if they want their work to be consumed and appreciated. I had brought up an earlier era of Floyd, Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac etc whose songs didn’t follow that template. Demand or supply, what happened first, I asked. Does it have to do with the abundance of choice now, and the demands of instant gratification? While templated packages for all sorts of consumption are increasingly the norm, people also want to finish and move on to the next thing on their list. Transactions. (Generalising), there seems to be very less desire to have an immersive experience. Outside the screen, that is. As the Spotify ads show (unintentionally and literally) we’re usually in a bubble, oblivious to our surroundings.
Continue readingD and I watched Crime Stories: India Detectives on Netflix a few days after it was released. The episode that saddened both of us was “Dying for Protection”, which was based on the murder of a sex worker. Not surprisingly, it turned out to be the subject of discussion on a Saturday late evening, which these days are spent on the balcony, in the company of spirits, watching the sun and the world part ways. Yes, that is privilege.
Continue readingThe thought first occurred to me a couple of years ago, when I realised that thanks to outsourcing and automation, we would struggle today to do many things that were once life skills. We also lost a little more than that – learning.
Sometimes directly, and sometimes, through the interactions with the world, they facilitated a learning experience that taught one how to navigate the world and the different kinds of folks that made up its systems.
Regression Planning
It was continued with a bit more specificity in a subsequent post.
Continue readingInstagram, Facebook, Tinder, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon – everything is a feed of recommendations, whether it be social interactions, music, content or shopping! Once upon a time, these were conscious choices we made. These choices, new discoveries, their outcomes, the feedback loop, and the memories we store of them, all worked towards developing intuition.
Intelligence, intuition and instincts. The journeys in the first two are what have gotten the third hardwired into our biology and chemistry. When we cut off the pipeline to the first two, what happens to the third, and where does it leave our species?
AI: Artificial Instincts
An excellent coincidence that I finished reading James P Carse’ “Finite and Infinite Games” the same day I wrote this post. The book helped me frame thoughts to my satisfaction.
There was an age when accumulating possessions – from apparel brands to places visited to career designations to property ownership and anything that signals prosperity – was the game I played. Or games, because a milestone was a victory in that finite game, and I quickly moved on to another. Trophies that the world dictated. Continue reading
Anil Rajput Some books just happen to me, this is one of those. It found me. I really liked the framing – cognitive fitness. An analogy based on physical fitness. If I had to sum it all up, I’d say this is a scientific (with a little bit of philosophy) take on mindfulness. Though I […]
From Tbilisi to Yerevan via… I think this was the first time we crossed a border by road. On a relative scale, the two rounds of checks – one out of Georgia and the other into Armenia – did not take too long. The Armenian security was a little concerned about our alcohol content into […]
continued from Georgia : Tbilisi Beyond Tbilisi, we stayed in the Kakheti region, and went on day trips to Uplistsikhe, Mtskheta, and Gori, and another to Kazbegi and Ananuri, going right up to Stepantsminda, which is less than a dozen kilometres from the Russian border. Georgia is quite blessed by nature and its natural beauty […]
We had put this off a while back because we had heard horror stories of people being sent back despite having an evisa. After that fear passed, we were saving this for a time when we didn’t want to go all the way to Europe, but still wanted the feel of it. The border of […]
W. David Marx I love it when a book matches the expectations set by the cover. In this case, a very intriguing “how our desire for social rank creates taste, identity, art, fashion, and constant change”. As GenX , and a marketer, I have often tried to make sense of the changing nature of culture […]