Blogs
Apr 14 2009 - 6:44pm
Being and working on your own basically boils down to one thing - maximizing the very limited time available on your hands to derive the best results. Maximizing is not just a matter of how many hours can you pull into something, it is also a matter of how do you spend your hours, leaning heavily into the old paradigm of quality over quantity. 12 hours a day of doing the same over and over again is always worse than 3 hours a day of doing something new and doing it well.
This leads to making tough decisions in life. Even though everything in life can't be measured, you can't often sit back and wait for things to fall into place forever. Sometimes it is better to hedge and lose than to die wondering. Strangely, this is something that covers both the personal and professional realms, even though it is easier to pull this off in the professional than personal. Sometimes, there is really no nice side to what you have to do. You just have to grit your teeth and pull through it.
Apr 13 2009 - 4:56am
It is amusing to note how often we lean on metaphors to reach out to people known and unknown. Such is the human condition that 'the connection' is deemed to be of a greater importance than what it actually connects to. You could be talking about apples, I could be talking about oranges, but as long as both you and I are convinced that we are talking about round fruits that taste nice we could start embracing each other by using "like" and its variants as a rule in every spoken sentence.
We can build personal connections, we can build an entire civilization on such things. An embrace, a handshake or any other gesture is often nothing beyond a metaphor. A metaphor for warmth, friendliness and any other value we have deemed that it holds. If there were to be a raid on the human subconscious and should the aliens take away our metaphorical glands, what would remain of us in this little world of ours?
Will it herald a world of unique moments, unattached and individual? Would we still seek and reach out to one another if there is no "like" to hold on to to? If your apple and my orange are different from the outset, will we still continue to talk about fruits? Is what we call "identity" nothing but a sheer lack of it and a deference to the collective?
Apr 8 2009 - 3:48am
These days my reading habit is back with a vengeance and the past three days I have finished off some three books (not from start to end, but more like books that were already close to being finished) and have already started on a new one.
The first of the lot is Soul Mountain by Gao Xinjian. I have struggled to finish this one for a very very long time now. The book has kind of aged with me since I started with it in 2007 when I was spending a lot of time shuttling between Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore. The memories of flying back into Delhi on a late evening flight, reading through the hard-to-bite text still remains fresh in my memory. And it is one hard book to read, with the Gao trying at every turn to throw you off his trail.
The second one is Murakami and the music of words by Jay Rubin. Haruki Murakami has in the past two years become my outright favorite author. It is interesting to read a well-written book about the man whose books I really enjoy reading. It is easy to see the tremendous enjoyment Rubin has derived from the work. The research and the references are meticulous and the dots are amazingly well connected all over the book. I may just wind up reading The Windup Bird Chronicles again as a result of this. And I don't remember ever reading a book twice or wanting to do that with any other book.
The last one is Life Is Elsewhere, by Milan Kundera. I have tremendously enjoyed The Unbearable Lightness of Being, written by him before this. While Murakami can often mix in a lot of surrealism and fantasy to explain things and connect the dots, Kundera is deals strictly in the very real and often very abrasive version of it. There is only one part, the Xavier episode, where Kundera leans on fantasy to make a point. It is not an easy read and it will put you through the wringer with the detailed examinations of people and their connections.
And the book that I have started on is Doris Lessing's A Briefing for Descent into Hell. I tried reading this book over ten years ago during my college days and it entirely freaked me out. It is very rarely that a book does that to me and when I saw this book, after so many years, in the store I had to pick it up. Reading the first couple of pages it is easy to understand why it still scares the life out of me. But this time, I will persist.
With Gao and Doris, things have sort of come full circle for me. I have never taken over two years to finish a book, which has been the case with The Soul Mountain and I have never before walked away from a book because it has scared the crap out of me, which has been the case with the Lessing. In a manner of speaking, this is kind of closure. Now to get on with the reading.
Apr 7 2009 - 6:42am
One of the sadder parts of the vast amount of literature written about successful people in the world is how little of that is about the failures they have had along the way. Seen in isolation, success stories can be deeply disheartening for anyone who starts out on their own -- be it in life or at work. Everyone stumbles, falls and crawls before they get running. Mistakes are the stepping stones to better things and overcoming these falls are major success stories that the visible and glorious ones often tend to overshadow.
In the four months that I have spent since leaving my full time job to try and start my company, there have been numerous setbacks, change of plans and disappointments. Someday, i hope that I can still remember all of them and show them up as the realistic side of doing all of this; should I get to where I want to get to in the future. I hope that is at least one thing that I can do differently about this.
Being on your own is often mistaken for the highest point you can consistently keep. That is just so wrong. Being on your own is about managing to keep the lowest point consistently as high as possible. Which means that you need to make the most out of your least productive days and keep them as high as possible. It is a learning experience beyond compare, since this something you brought up on yourself.
When you work on your own, there is no place to run and hide. Even the most minor imperfection of yours gets amplified a thousandfold. It is the greatest growing up experience in life.
Apr 1 2009 - 5:51pm
The past 30-days represent the first tentative steps in my life and work towards a different focus in both. As a result, both are undergoing massive changes, resulting in my dealing with more grassroots level technology and problems to start off with for the time being, than being bothered with queuing mechanisms, sharding and the usual fancy bits we use in the normal geek world.
After nearly ten-years of working in mostly big firms, that is a significant paradigm shift for me. More so because it forces you to optimize and not take any thing for granted since there is no big company support system to watch your back or even get routine things done for you. Of all the things I could have thought of, cleaning up Windows XP installs and doing basic networking were never things that ever crossed my mind and that is exactly what I have been doing for the past four days now.
The weirdest part, well, maybe not so weird after all is that I can still coexist in all the different worlds easily even now. It is also true that I have more or less lived that way all my life. But I do feel that a course has been charted, not out of fear, spite or a lack of direction, but because of a complete absence of it.
That said, it has not been easy. It is rather convenient to see those 30-days in isolation from the rest of the time since the passing of November. I lost the plot and was forced to make my way back to the drawing board numerous times in those days. It has been unbearably frustrating, painful and disheartening too at times. But it is still every bit worth it.