Untitled – 8 Oct 2023

A series of thoughts about things that are clouding my head.

I don’t know what to write. Need someone to talk to but don’t know who. So, the blog. This is a brain dump about things that are clouding my head.

Playing this in the loop as I write this.

Let’s go!

A/ Amazon Sale.

If you don’t know about this sale you are probably living under a rock. I have been thinking bout getting a second screen for my work (to be able to work faster etc). I bought one. This means that I would have a place where I’d work from which is not a Starbucks. I am not sure how much I’d use it but let’s see if it helps me in my productivity.

B/ Space and Spaced out

I have a couple of friends living with me and I am not liking it at all. And these are friends that I care for and I want to be with. These are the friends who helped me when I needed help when no one else offered help. These are the ones who chose to put my interest ahead of theirs when we were trapped indoors during COVID-19.

Plus, I’ve had people live with me all my life but for a change, this time it’s different. Probably because this house is way too small? too uncomfortable? too claustrophobic? I don’t know.

Plus, I did not know that I was so used to being by myself that I would not like the idea of sharing space with others. I need to work on this!

C/ Events

On Saturday, I managed an event and I realized that I like when I am in control of things. This is not new. Most people are like that. Just that when you run an event, you control what people in the audience experience. It is en masse. I wish I could do more of this.

The thing is, events as a business is back, and all venues, suppliers, and even clients are packed. I could be a player in the competitive business but I think I am done with it. The hard work needed to pull off large format events – I don’t think I am keen on it anymore. I mean it’s the kind of work that will teach you a lot about life and getting things done. I’ve done enough of it and at 41 and change, I don’t want to keep learning. I want to now do. Implement. Make that fucking dent.

D/ Wanting to belong

I think all my life, one of the most important driving forces and motivations has been the need to belong. To sports teams. To college committees. To airport lounges. To business class seats. To exclusive clubs. To clubs and associations. And I don’t know why. Not that what I have is any less. Not that the access I have is limited. But I still want more. No, this is not power. This is not vanity. I actually don’t know what this is. But I want to belong. In fact, I want it so bad that if you want to fuck my mood, tell me that I am not invited. And I would sulk over it for days!

E/ Head Massage

One of my rituals every 2-3 weeks is to get my head shaved, get my beard trimmed, and end the visit to the barber with a head massage. The beard trim is the part I hate the most. Not one barber gets the trim right. Even today Sonu (that was today’s man) fucked it up. The best part was the massage. Sonu did an average job at it but I loved it.

I need to find myself a good masseuse. And I need to use their services often. Will action this in the coming week. Oh, the next few days are full of travel (trips to Pune and Indore. And if all goes ok, to Dubai). If you are around these places, let’s catch up :).

F/ Aaron Levie

After a break of a few days, I went back to the YC SS at Stanford. Today I heard Aaron Levie talk about enterprise. See this.

While I did not comprehend a lot of what he said I don’t know why a business like Box continues to exist despite Google Drive and MS Office. That’s not the point anyway. The point is, I loved his energy. And I realize I am probably like him. I need to just find a way to be a lot more out there and find more people who would want to listen to me. And that means I need to do more work and become valuable enough for people to want to listen to me!

So that!


Ok, this is for the time being. I don’t know what else to write. Guess this is it for the time being. Over and out.

Untitled – 27 Sep 2023

An untitled rant on what’s been up with me.

Today’s one of those days that I haven’t had in a long time. And I shouldn’t be. I mean I am in a different country, on a leisure trip, visiting a friend (and his daughter, aka heir to my assets), sitting at a comfortable cafe, sipping onto a 300 Peso iced-tea (terrible TBH), away from all the rigmarole of life in Mumbai. And yet I have had a terrible terrible day. There’s nothing that has changed from yesterday. I woke up without an alarm. I had a healthy-ish breakfast of dry fruits, an apple, and some more fruits. I walked to the cafe that I work out of. Saw Lecture 9. Got a few things done. Went back home. Ate home-cooked delicious food. Slept after that. Back at the cafe. So, in theory, all’s ok.

Maybe it’s the aftermath of old age. I turned 41 and I don’t think I’ve done even 4 things to justify my existence. Maybe it’s my general need to be by myself (while I have taken enough time for myself on this trip, I had planned for 100% seclusion and I was unable to). Maybe it’s my ability to do things that I had wanted to do on this “break” – eat better, swim, walk, write, learn, etc.

Whatever. I am not feeling it today. And I dont know how to fix it. If I were in Mumbai, I would have ordered some random food – dal, Maggi, samosa-pao, or whatever and then would’ve slept while seeing FIR or Taarak Mehta. I know none of these is healthy for me but I would’ve. I can still do all these but remember, I am trying to be better?

So that.

Anyhow. Lemme write some random updates. In no order.

1/ AGI is here and I am still trying to make ends meet. I think this could be the root of all my problems. That I don’t have access to great things happening in the world around me. I am merely sitting by the side of the road while the world solves engineering, intellectual, scientific, philosophical, and all such problems.

2/ A new challenge. I will start it on Oct 1. I will work towards doing 100 push-ups per day. I will start on Oct 1. I will do as many push-ups as I can. And then each day I will do one more push-up than the previous day. Some days I will not be able to add that last straw on the camel’s back. And that’s ok. But I will add one more push-up. Till I reach a point when I can do 100 push-ups. This would easily take me more than 100 days but I shall try.

3/ I’ve been tripping onto this song since I first heard it. I would’ve heard this a hundred times already, if not more.

4/ I have been away from social media and it’s not bad. I mean I’ve been checking Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn but I have not engaged with anyone or seen what people tag me for. I am merely using that to distract myself.

And I think I can continue to be that. Just that I need it for work. So maybe I will make new accounts where I only talk shop and delete all personal ones? Or do people want authenticity? I am not sure. Let’s see where the vibes would take me.

Ok, what else to write? Not sure. I can pick this up tomorrow morning and write again. But I don’t want to wait till tomorrow to publish. Maybe I’ll write a continuation post to this post tomorrow if I am up to it.

Whatever it is. Time shall tell. For the time being, time to shut this and go to sleep. Over and out.

Untitled 31 Mar 2023

No context post with no specific intent. Just practising my typing.

It’s 6 AM on a Friday. And the regular crowd shuffles in.

Today is the last day of the financial year and as someone that has built a life surrounded by work, I think this is a time to pause and reflect on how the year gone by was. And what would I want to do in the next.

PS: This is an exercise that I would typically want to do at the end of the calendar year (and I do – I make lofty goals (see this) and then I miss those by a large margin) but since the last few months have been like a whirlwind, I just did not get the time to sit, pause, think, reflect, act. So I am merely doing this after three months!

Wait. The post is not about the year gone by. Or the plan for the future. It’s about what I plan to do right now as I let my mind wander and I type out those wanderings.

Lets see what I end up writing. I will write for exactly 45 mins. It’s 6:10 now. And I will stop at 6:55 or post that.

1/ Oil pulling is not that bad.

I recently started with it. I am not a regular but as soon as I wake up, most days I wake up, pee, rinse my mouth and pull oil. I dont know why it’s called pulling cos all you do is take a spoonful of oil and swirl it around your mouth and then spit it out.

No, it’s not as yucky as it sounds.

Plus I’ve had bad teeth (I can’t eat from the right side of my jaw – cavities) and I dont like to go to the doctor. So, I am trying these desi nuskhas.

So that.

2/ Piano Man

Billy Joel’s masterpiece continues to be the track that I really wish I had written.

3/ Personal Branding

More I talk to people, more I think I need to help people build their personal brands. Heck, I want to build mine first.

While I know the tenets (I wrote this guide to personal branding before it was even a word), the inputs, I dont know what causes someone’s brand to blow up or not. I mean I’ve been doing everything that I would recommend to others (posting consistently, adding value, picking a niche (I have stayed away from this for the longest but I am now tending towards a few things), taking help from ghostwriters and all that).

But I haven’t been able to scale mine. Not sure how I would scale it for others.

Thoughts?

4/ Money / Financial duress

It’s payday and today is the first time when I would miss paying my people on time. I haven’t been able to because all my money is locked in some stupid project and I dont know what to do about it. I mean I will get it back sometime in May but it will make me miss the payments.

So, sad.

5/ WordPress

I need to find a way to get someone really cool that knows how to do magic on WordPress. I do have a friend that does my WordPress things for me but he’s no magician. He’s good. He gets things done. But he’s not someone that I could just say, “kar de” and magic happens.

In a creative business, you need to be able to write well, design well, code well (not a facebook kind of webapp but basic, simple pages) and communicate well. I think I’ve been able to achieve all these but code.

Writing I can do. I have C for that. Prak. Others. I am lucky that I can communicate fairly ok. With design, TBH, luckily I have been able to manage it with Canva, V, AK (please subscribe to her newsletter), some freelancers and others. But with code, I dont know.

Any help? Tips?

6/ Growing up

The other day I met a new friend who’s also a client. Let’s call him Z. So Z sees me at work and in life in general. And I’d like to believe that he knows me well.

The other day, he told me a few things that have literally shaken me. Lemme make a list of those. In no order.

  • Significant other – the world knows I dont have one significant other. I have close friends, business partners and my team. Z said that at the age of 40, it’s cool to be a vagabond and all that but as I grow old and I am no longer surrounded by people that I care for (they will have their own life eventually), I will not know what to do.
  • Entrepreneurship – ever since I can remember, I have wanted to blow my trumpet and row my boat (preferably a yacht and if not that, then a dinghy for sure). I think I’ve been doing that since 2014 now. Plus, freedom is the number 1 value I chase (thanks Ankesh for helping me reach this expression). Now, Z tells me that he does not see an entrepreneur in me. And I take his words seriously. He is after all a man who knows how to spot people!
  • Grooming – everyone knows my lack of attention and focus on how I dress and how I look. I remain unkept. I refuse to wear shoes. I am bad to a point that security often doesn’t let me into my own building complex! Z is of the opinion that I must be better.

He called me, “The most unorganised organised person in the world” and I think I agree. I need to remove this un-organization from life.

Anyhow.

The point is, in his eyes, at the age of 40, I am a failure. And while I may feel like that deep inside but I may not want to agree. I have been able to reach a point in life where I find enough work and money to survive. I am at a place where I choose how I spend my days. And while it may not be creating a far-reaching impact anywhere, I think I am at a great place in my head.

7/ Calendaring

I have 6 calendars that I manage on a day-to-day basis. And I am unable to manage all of those. There is no app that I can do a two-way sync with. Especially when they are on different platforms (Gsuite and Microsoft Teams). Any tips for that?

8/ Startup

I really really really really really… infinite times want to do and experience something that scales. To a billion people at least. If not more. You know, think Facebook. 4 BILLION people use it. Think Paytm. Almost a billion users. Think mobile phones. 4 billion. Modi. 1.4 billion. SRK. More than 1.4 billion. I can go on!

I have to have to have to think of something like that. I have no clue what it’s going to be. But I need to find something. I have been in this stage since I was a child. This discovery. I need to find a problem statement and move on.

And no, I dont want to do this because I will make money while I do that. I want to do this to be able to experience what it is like to manage that many people with that kind of width and move an entire company in one direction. I want to chase that experience of uncertainty, I want to know what it is like to lose sleep over lives of so many people. I want to know the bliss that you probably get once you’ve made that dent!

Come on, universe! Can you NOT see my desperation? And hunger? And the pain at the inability to do this? 🙁

Oh, its 6:55 and I think I’ve run out of steam.
Plus I need to get ready and get going.
More later.
Dunno when.

Over and out.

[Rant] Action. Inaction. Keeping at it.

A quick note about life, sleep, Kabir, meaning, action and inaction.

I dont know what to write. I just feel like writing. So, I am going to randomly type and see what I end up creating.

Also, this has come out as a rant. You may not want to read this.

I started writing this at 9 PM last night. While thinking about what to write, I dozed off. I think it is because I hadn’t slept well the previous night. At the age I am at, I need my 8 hours of sleep at night. And I need 2 hours during the day. I think this is one of those side effects of age that I need to probably undo.

Anyhow. So, I am at the airport, waiting for a flight to go to Mumbai. From Delhi. Since August of last year, I have been spending time between Delhi and other places. However, my work, my heart, my soul is in Mumbai. Or maybe Goa. Or maybe at airports. But definitely not in Delhi. Even though Delhi is home, Delhi is where I grew up and I am still unable to take Delhi out of me. I mean the way I am sitting sprawling at a chair in the waiting area, I could only be from Delhi!

While in Mumbai, among other things, I hope to meet a few people. The top of that list is V, my agony aunt, mentor, friend, and I dont know what all. She has been a pillar of support since I can remember (actually since 2009). I wish I had more access to her. But then the good part is that I meet her after long gaps and she can point to me if I have changed – you know, put weight, got better with thinking, or if I am taking action.

Talking about action, here is a video (about inaction) that I just saw and it gave me goosebumps! You HAVE to see this. Here…

I think with each passing day I am getting clearer about how I want to spend my life. I am unable to articulate it well but it would be something like…

1. Do great things. You know, climb Mt. Everest, chase a billion dollars etc.

2. While doing those things, live with the highest level of integrity, action, kindness, gratitude, ambition, effort and more.

3. When I think I have reached a place where what I’ve done is inspiring for the world at large, go inspire others to chase their respective bliss. Whatever that may be.

So that.

Of course, along the way, I will have to figure out work (that pays me enough, allows me to pay my team enough, contribute to causes, like the Kabir‘s life and all that), deliver consistently (if we are not consistent, what are we even?) and keep at it. I mean some days are hard. H A R D. You are left questioning the very why of your existence. And you are this close to giving up that it’s a miracle that you are even breathing the next instant.

I think I am lucky that somehow I have not fallen down the Rabbit’s hole of inaction. Probably I have surrounded myself with people and media that move me and push me. And I have chosen to cut off from people that ask me to take it easy. And thus I am able to even get out of the bed!

Ok, I am getting ranty.

Moving on.

The point of this piece was, well, nothing. I just felt like writing. And I started this piece last night. And now that I had the time (as I waited for the flight), I thought I will finish writing it!

With this, over and out.

See you guys next time!

First published here.

Untitled – 290821

A dump of things that I am thinking about. Nothing specific. Just a random walk on keyboard in an attempt to feel good.

About 7 PM. Sunday.

Have nothing to do and nowhere to go. There’s a lot of openwork that I can do but I dont feel like. This is the time when I want to be lounging at a comfortable place – you know, like a hotel or something. Instead, I am trying to find solace at a Starbucks with a cup of green tea. And no, that does not offer any solace. It merely allows you to distract yourself from the fuckeries in your head.

What fuckeries, you may ask. Well, the ones that keep your head churning. The ones that make you question the choices you’ve made. The ones that make you think that the damn grass is green on the other side while yours is withering and shrinking and shriveling like it’s the perpetual winters. I mean I love the winters. But you get the drift.

What sucks is that you think you’ve done so much for others all your life and you’ve hoped all your life that at moments like these when you want comfort, you want company, you would have those people around. But when you look around, you see standing alone. And everyone else that you hoped would be around standing atop mighty towers in various stages of their respective bliss. Which is not wrong, to be honest. It’s an issue with your expectation. How about doing things without hoping that you’d get something back? The act of asking for things, expecting from others needs to be contained. It’s a pandemic in itself.

The thing is, most times I am so hyper-active on social media channels that I dont get time to think and wonder where things are. But then since Jul, I’ve been away from Twitter and Instagram – two channels that I hang out the most at. Over at these two places, I have enough and more fodder to kill time with. In the sense that I am busy with general chit-chat and aimless wandering. Not that I made any deep connections there but I was busy. At least in my head. Of course, if I were dying, none of those would people would come to help. Lol. For that matter, the ones that I believe are my true friends, wouldn’t come in handy either. But then the point is that there is enough to kill time and keep busy. And leave me with little time to think about things like the meaning of life and all that. So, in a way that distraction is not bad. You know, filling it with fluff.

Ok, I dont know what else to write. I think I need to distract myself. I think I will go find something to waste time on. Over and out.

190821 – Morning Pages

In today’s post, I talk about how I enjoy meeting people f2f, local trains in Mumbai and benefits of taking a pause.

5:58. Woke up a few minutes ago. And I slept for good 12 hours or so over the last 24 hours. Lemme come back to it. So I had a meeting at Lower Parel yesterday. I came back at around 4. Ate. Slept for a couple of hours. And then ate and then slept again for a couple of hours. And then finally, I slept. Was in bed by 11. So that’s 2 + 2 + 7. So 11. Not 12.

But then, the highlight of yesterday has to be that I wore shoes. And pants. Denims. And traveled for 3 hours to attend an hour-long meeting. Total waste of time to be honest. But then I also realized how much I love meeting people. And how much I suck at small talk. I mean talk to me about work, I can yap for hours. But talk to me about films and all, I can’t do shit.

Oh, I took a train on the way back. Must have taken one after I dont know how long. Thankfully I had that universal pass and all that. I had forgotten my art of finding the queue with the shortest length, the platform nearest to the exits, the grind of walking up the stairs to change tracks. You may hate em but the local trains remain the fastest way to travel within Mumbai.

So, as I said, I was back by 4. Dint do must after that. Was not tired per se to be hoenst. But was in this weird sa zone where I did not want to do anything. More on why I was in this zone is on echochamber.

I did manage some packing. Mostly books. There isn’t a lot anyway. The decision to get Ikea’s Frakta (this and this) turned out to be a good one. Most of the books are now in bags that can be easily managed, stored and carried around. Actually, cartons are better for storage but I am not really concerned about storage at this point.

While packing, I made separate bags for books that I need to take to Delhi. And books that I need to store here in Bom. Wait. Why do I even want to store things in Bom? I don’t plan to have a house that has a toothpick more than what I need. But then why do I even take them to Delhi? I mean that house is small and there’s any way a loft full of books. Should I just dump them in some godown? Paras has one. Or at SJ2’s place. Or maybe keep waiting to have enough money to start a co-working space wherever I decide to spend my time and then make a library of sorts there? I dont know yet. Will think over the next few days. All I know is that I need to get things in boxes / bags so that I can move those easily.

Ok. Plans for today?

Well, the calendar looks kind of empty for the time being. But I am sure as the day progresses, it will get filled with meetings and all that. I need to buy myself shoes for the trek today come what may. If I want to come back in one piece from EBC! There’s a Decathlon in Bandra. Will probably go there if I am not too fried during the day. So far, I think my mood is ok.

I will go to Starbucks as soon as it opens. Reminds me. Yesterday, I was at another Starbucks in the morning (one in Lower Parel – you know I did not want to travel in peak hours) and it had giant windows overlooking a construction site. And before I started work, I put Anne Reburn’s track on my headphones, sipped onto the green tea, slowly, for as long as the track ran. I was literally in that moment. I dont know what made that moment magical. Music? Pause? The feeling of no-rush? I loved it! Those three minutes were lovely. I think I need to do this every day. I mean most times when I start the day, I am rushing to get things done. I dont pause per se. Maybe I need to do this. Maybe Naval isn’t wrong after all!

Ok. Been at this for an hour now. Need to take a break. Get ready for Surya Namaskars. Was on a two-day streak before I had to take a break yesterday.

Back. Done. 12. Felt easy today for some reason.

Time to get ready and head to a Starbucks. Also, I think I’ve written enough for the day. Ending it. Here’s the streaks…

  • OMAD – 1
  • #book2 – 0
  • #noCoke – 161
  • #noCoffee – 4
  • #aPicADay – 0
  • Money spent – 1097
  • Killer Boogie – 0
  • 10K steps a day – 0
  • Surya Namaskar – 0. If I do tomorrow as well, will update as 2. Dont want to get too ahead of myself.
  • 10 mins of meditation – 0
  • Minimaslism Counter – -2
  • Morning Pages / Meditations – 251