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Showing posts from October, 2011

The Paralysis of Choice

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A desk overflowing with choices — the perfect metaphor for a modern mind. I’ve always wondered why stepping outside my comfort zone feels harder than it should. With so many ways to spend time, I keep circling the same question: am I choosing what matters, or am I just numbing myself with options? Choice overload might be the defining anxiety of our era. One moment I’m browsing an AI course on Coursera, convincing myself I’ll finally finish it. The next, I’m tempted to restart my Sanskrit lessons. And somewhere in that mental whirlpool, a random LLM video on YouTube quietly steals an hour I never intended to give away. It isn’t learning — it’s drifting. I think back to my first iPhone 4. One model. One color. No storage decisions. Apple had already stripped away the noise. Life felt simpler when constraints were built in. Today everything comes in infinite flavors — phones, courses, ideas, careers, spiritual paths, entertainment platforms. Abundance looks empowering,...
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Two of an era - Jobs and Ritchie

The last couple of weeks have been particularly bad for technology related stalwarts.  If the death of Steve Jobs hadn't even sunk in, it was even more painful to read up that Dennis Ritchie, the father of C programming and co-developer of Unix was no more.  Dennis Ritchie may not be as famous as Steve Jobs is to the layman, but there is no denying that without C, one cannot fathom the existence of these super powered smart phones and almost every other embedded device today. It was in my Engineering that I was first exposed to C.  Already, the message was spreading quick and fast. If you miss even a single semi-colon, you are in trouble.  It is so difficult to debug.  And, maybe for the fun of  it, somebody added a comma as well.  Given a choice, my fellow batch mates would have added every punctuation mark to exaggerate the whole thing.  There were also suggestions that it was mandatory to add two slashes after a semi-colon as a part of the p...
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Turning 30

I was getting up, and slowly my email inbox was getting filled with the usual suspects.  These people never fail to email me on my birthday.  I had a few calls as well.  Again, these people never fail to call me on my birthday.   So, how's the feeling? Pretty much the usual, I replied back. So, turning 30, haan? Everyone had to ask this, unfailingly and unflinchingly. Yeah, I let out a couple of the usual, monotonous jokes.  It means, they don't deserve to be called jokes in the first place. In the midst of all the jokes , I also tried to act all grown up (am sure I failed miserably at this). I have to say that Afridi and I have a lot of things in common apart from a few obvious differences.  Firstly, he is supposed to be a totally hot cricketer, according to the girls.  OK, even the guys know it.  I leave it to my friends to judge whether this is a similarity or a difference.  They know it.  I know it, too. Secondly, Afri...
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