Impatiently Curious

'You know, you don't know enough right?'  A voice lingered in my head as I was strolling on my terrace on an evening. Me : "I know. We've never disagreed on this. I don't know why you keep bringing this up every time I'm trying to think about something deeply"  The voice : "Perhaps you don't understand why I keep parroting this to you. I thought you'd have become wiser all these years later" Me : "I suppose we'll always have some blind-spots. Anyhow, why do you keep on saying this?" TV: "First you need to understand something fundamental about your brain, which is that it is a master trickster. It makes you believe things that are untrue, distorts reality to suit your insecurities and molds perception to tailor-fit your preconceived ideas. This is a relic from the time when knowledge and information wasn't as abundant and freely available as it is now - a prehistoric relic if you like. But the world has changed...

Last night I deleted two of my previous publications. One was the first WordPress blog that I had started last summer. The other was the much loved and read substack newsletter. Old things have to give way to new ones, with the hope that new ones will be better.  My 'knowledge project'- which now spans a podcast, this blog, my other legal blog and the sublist broadcast - started with a small Whatsapp group. I started the group in August last year out of boredom and my love to share knowledge. Initially it had some 20-30 odd participants, and it has now grown to have some 200 participants. The scale is tiny when compared to other such communities but it doesn't bother me a lot (a bit, sometimes?).  The idea behind the group was to send interesting and intriguing articles, videos, podcasts, documentaries etc. Basically anything that would ignite your curiosity. And the range of the material is fairly wide (at least I like to believe so) which is why the name - 'Jack of al...

Procrastination - the enemy of Knowledge  I will not talk about the reason(s) why we procrastinate. For the purpose of this post we will work with this axiom that we all procrastinate. If you take a break from reading this - I'm sure you can name at least 2 things that you're actively procrastinating on. Not things you've scheduled later that you could do right now, not that kind. Procrastinating in the sense that you are supposed to do something now, something that you had scheduled earlier to be done now, or by now - that you're not doing or have left in between.  Don't worry you're not alone.  The correct framing of procrastination is that we don't want to start the work, not that we don't want to work at all . Even though most of us colloquially say - "I don't want to work", what we actually mean is - "I don't want to start working". Which is why the inertia to work is the maximum where you're beginning something ra...

For almost all of students, we've now spent a year in online classes. For the juniors I know from my previous college - their core college experience was taken away from them. The festivals, the events, the perpetual roaming around in college, sitting in college lawns (unless you're from LSR - then you probably cannot sit there) etc. I know people who barely attended their first semester in college and then ever since have been sitting in front of their laptop. Their laptop is their college. I then wonder if it is them who are more unfortunate or people who entered into new institutions online. Most of such people (including me) have not yet even seen the building of the university/college they've been attending for close to a year now. Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect is that they haven't even met their classmates - those with whom they talk almost everyday. And of course - they haven't met their professors as well. It is hard to put in terms the fact that you w...

Why?  I first want to establish why I came up with this blog . Especially since I already have the newsletter going on. Simply put - I want to write more often and write freely. The newsletter takes up a lot of my thinking and time - but most importantly the periodic nature of the publication means that the newsletter must come out great, always. Which it will, as always. But I want to experiment with shorter posts that I can write and publish quickly. Ashish writes in his post , "My stubborn attachment is to know more, and help others to know more. Not only can I share my ideas, I ought to share my ideas. Growth comes from ideas meeting". I have held this principle as the bed rock of my interactions since school. I remember coming across cool difficult mathematical problems and writing them on my class blackboard so that everyone could take a look. That habit was strengthened during college where I was a part of my college's debating society. We built a very close and c...

We’re a generation of hacks. Or at least people who want to ‘hack’ things. A lot has been written on how to hack the brain and change the way we think about certain things. Even though my initial reaction to anything that’s about life and wellness and starts with ‘How to…’ is to not take it seriously. It’s a mix of the cognizance that most ‘How to’ articles are a sham and exploit the vulnerability of people desperately trying to fix their lives for likes and views, and a broader understanding that when it comes to life and how to better live it – no single approach works alike for two people. Copying someone will almost always lead to failure because what works for person X is dependent on their background conditions (such as education, personality, friends, parents, attitude, habits etc.), and person Y can never get the same results by trying to copy what X did because they cannot replicate the exact same conditions. So two things. First, avoid most stuff that talks about how to make...

Life is a series of Trade-offs Life is a series of various trade-offs, from choosing what to wear to choosing what to study, trade-offs abound us. You can take a pause for half a minute and recall all the trade-offs you made today. I’ll go first. I sacrificed some hours of sleep to get milk for the house in the morning. I then traded off eating a couple of biscuits because I’m trying to be in a caloric deficit for my diet. Trade off(s) involve letting something go in return of the promise of receiving something else in future or at the moment itself. The calorific deficit trade-off is trading off present cravings for a future better and healthier body. Or, when you choose to spend your money on an ice cream instead of a pastry, that’s a trade-off whose payoff is delivered at the moment itself. If you’re following me until now, you’d have recognized that our brain is a specialist in trading off, or at least it should be. Essentially it is an ancient tool which is a product of evolution....

Belief is the core of us, it helps us navigate and understand the world around us. A belief in X helps you rationalize why C happened to you, and why D is the correct response to it. A belief in stoicism makes you look at a recent setback not as something to be sad about but to use it as an opportunity to grow. Beliefs could be religious, scientific, philosophical, and atheistic, among others. Essentially beliefs are the framework within which we think about life. So naturally, by changing the framework you can change the way you think about systems and occurrences. Belief & Background Values Beliefs usually suffer from dependence on background values. You will most likely either grow up as an aggregate of the beliefs around you, or be heavily influenced by the beliefs of those around you. One of the challenges of growing up is to first unlearn such dogmatic belief systems, while at the same time hold on to a self-discovered one. I would argue that even if you’re surrounded by peo...

A few days ago, I came across the word ‘Tsudonku’. It is a Japanese word that describes the act of buying piles of books, but never reading them. At present I have at least 50 odd books that lay placidly on my desk, waiting for me to read them. Every morning I think about reading, and by every night I fail. Why does that happen? As someone who still likes to call himself a voracious reader, the books I’ve read in the past three years is disappointing. What happened? In one of my podcast episodes , I talked about how the brain uses mental shortcuts called heuristics to make quick real time decisions. Somehow, our brains have started to use the wrong shortcuts. And they’re doing it far more often than before. I’m assuming that if you’ve subscribed to this newsletter, you more or less like to call yourself a reader. Now try to compare the amount of books you read before and after you got actively involved in social media. The graph is pretty bleak right? It’s not my intention to make the...

We’re all each other’s exes. If you’re willing to look deep enough, the sameness of humans is a surprising find. We’ve been raised to the idea that ‘everybody is unique’, and like most childhood tales it turns out to be untrue. To its credit, this story is a bit more robust than ‘Santa is real’ (euro-centrism alert). There isn’t and can’t be one event that can make this narrative false. Like almost all narratives, it is an integral part of our culture. Of our stories, interactions, dreams and aspirations. It isn’t easy to change so much about yourself, or at least how you understand the world in a short time, the brain simply can’t keep up. It takes decades to unlearn the idea that everybody isn’t unique. What is harder to digest perhaps is the idea that you aren’t unique as well. You have the same dreams as others, think about the same things as others, have the same aspirations as others, have the same apprehensions as others, have the same interests as others, and have the same idea...