Sajal Choudhary - Longform

Thin on the Outside Fat on the Inside

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

TOFI not Tofu (the food). Read first about it in The Diabetes Code

BMI is not a good predictor of T2 diabetes. A waist circumference is a better indicator.

Visceral fat accumulates inside and around the intra-abdominal organs - like kidney, liver, etc. In contrast subcutaneous fat is fat deposited under the skin.

Waist to heigh ratio should be less than half. So, for me waist should be under 89cms or 35 inches.

Love is Love

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #111, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

To follow the series, you can subscribe here. A new NordLetter will land in your inbox every Sunday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read previous editions here. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed.

You can reach out to me by replying to this mail. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I am reading The Sixth Extinction right now. This book is about the Anthropocene or the human epoch, i.e. the age of extinction we are living in right now.

This book contains stories, which follow a similar theme, the author goes to a place, describes the place, notices some things about people or places that make the description special, and then talks about how things were, are, or will be.

While reading it, I thought this is a good thing to emulate. This, in fact, is what Nordletter is about. From time to time, I go somewhere, I experience something, and then I write about it.

I like the way The Sixth Extinction is written. It is entertaining. And that's what a Nordletter has to be over and above anything else.

You may or may not have noticed it, but I have made some changes to how I write Nordletter. Since NL108. That had a lot of dialogue in it.

I was inspired to do it after reading The Anthropologists. There was a lot of dialogue in it. Which is not how I used to write Nordletters. I was experimenting and a part of me was dreading it.

But an equal part of Nordletter is about me getting better at the craft of writing. This is after all, the only piece of original writing I do every week, without fail. This is where I get to be creative.

The Sixth Extinction has a similar style of prose - Elizabeth describes some things and then without much pomp and show, a line of dialogue from one of the characters she is with. I had this thought, while she was talking about Norway and the sailor who took her to the island, said something, I don't remember what. But the way it was written, spoke to me.

I was thinking about this last week, as I wrote down about our midsummer picnic. By the time I started writing it, I was in a race against time. It was already Sunday, and that's when Nordletter ships.

Usually, I type it out on Saturday. Not the last one though.

And as I wrote about it, finished it, and sent it out. As I sat with it for a little while, I thought I could have done a better job with it. And I realised I will only be able to do it, if I spend some time with it. Trimming it a little. Maybe expanding some things. Talking about things that meant something to me.

That's the point after all.

Like, I did not talk about the conversation I had with a friend while we were cooking rice. He talked about how he used to write, but then couldn't. Now he had restarted writing. He said he had seen an earlier post of mine, the one where I had talked about writing my 100th edition. How that meant two years. And I thought, yes, two years. And I went somewhere else, in a warm and fuzzy place. Prerna told him it takes support. And the conversation continued after that.

He was interested in knowing how I wrote.

There was also some conversation around using AI to write. And I said, what's the point of writing if Claude writes for you. I write to understand, to think. If Claude does it, what do I do?

This is how I write -

In Obsidian, every day I write in my daily notes. Maybe one or two things that happened in the day. At this point there is no burden on these thoughts - they don't need to carry the next edition of the nordletter.
While out walking, I think. I think about what I want to say.
On Saturdays usually, I sit on my Mac, open Obsidian and type.

I am writing this on a Thursday, that should give me enough time to revisit this, rewrite this, edit this, before sending this out.

That, is the point.

I love cooking.

I love everything about it, especially the chopping and prep part. I love my knife. I sharpen it before I use it every time. I remember when I started cooking, looking at the ways chefs cut vegetables (Prerna teases me about this from time-to-time).

During the weekdays, I don’t have time to. During the weekdays, I (we) want to get our macros, not from elaborate recipes but rather from one-pot dishes.

During the weekends, I search for recipes online and then pick one or two to cook.

I am also a man of routines, so I am trying to turn Sundays into Biryani days.

I made Paneer Tawa Bhuna masala on Saturday. The bhuna part took a lot of time. That, as Ranveer Brar would say, is the monopoly of the dish. I also made Laccha Paratha to go with it. Both recipes courtesy of Sanjyot Keer/YFL.

On Friday evening, I had cooked Street Style Chowmein and Prerna had made Kadi Pakoda. We had invited some friends of ours for dinner and Savya’s play-date.

These are the same friends we had gone camping with.

A part of the evolution we have had (Prerna and I) as hosts has been that we don't have the same need anymore to make sure everything is ready before the guests arrive.

We started cooking an hour or so before they were supposed to arrive. I chopped the onions while Prerna worked on the kadi. And then I went on to chop the veggies for the chowmein. Once I was done with that, I started up the wok for the frying, while Prerna worked on the pakodas.

It felt very much in sync. We did not get irritated. We were smiling and talking and just cooking. It felt good.

During the rest of the evening I found myself invited to a party Accenture would be hosting at their premises in Aleksanterinkatu tomorrow. The original plan had been that I would drop Prerna and Savya at the party and then go to Oodi and get my k8s practice done. Once Prerna and Savya were done with their party, they would join me at Oodi and I would take Savya and leave for home.

Me and my plans don't really go anywhere though.

And so here we were, standing at Aleksanterinkatu 46, after getting down at the Rautatientori bus stop, crossing the road, walking, taking a left at the World Trade Center building, and walking some more. We told the security person we were here for the Pride Party. They took us to the back, through a door which allowed us to take the pram in. We parked it there and took the lift to the fourth floor.

'I had been here before, Nitor has an office here', I told Prerna. She nodded.

At the office, we were finding our names in the register when our friend joined us. We had found me and Savya, but there was a Priyanka where a Prerna should have been.

We entered a large room, through its glass windows, I could see the rest of the city beyond. It was a sunny day outside.

To the left, I could see people swaying, some EDM tracks going on.

'There's food at the back', she said.

We kindly obliged. The kitchen was at the back, to the right of this room. There was a large marble countertop with different bagel options - vege, turkey, and some vegan options to the side. There were smoothies and juices on the other side.

We ate our breakfast - Savya had a smoothie.

On the other side of the kitchen was a meeting room with a 'Kid's corner' stuck on the glass door. There was a large table filled with an assortment of knick-knacks - beads, alphabets - things you could put a thread through and make a necklace or a band.

There was an artist putting colours on children's faces. We went there next. Savya was wed to his sunglasses by this point, so she made a firework on his right cheek. He was game for the first couple of colours, but then I took him in my arms as she completed the thing.

Prerna meanwhile got some sparkles on her face.

We moved on and got to the dance floor next. The kids did their thing, dancing around, waving the pride flags. The floor was mostly empty at this point. We, the adults, took a table in a corner - drinking and talking, grooving to the music.

Helsinki Pride is Finland's largest human rights and cultural event. The Pride Parade would start at 12:00 from the Senate Square - as do most of the events in the city.

And so, we left the party and made our way toward the square. There were people with flags and banners and placards slowly moving in that direction. We had a couple of balloons and a couple of children in strollers.

There were bands prepping in the street. There were dancers in loud costumes. It was a smörgåsbord of colours and laughter in the streets.

When we reached the square, the first thing I noticed was a pram covered in pride colours. The next thing was the Cathedral and the hordes of people in the square and on the steps leading up to the Cathedral. There were banners protesting the Palestinian crisis. There were pride flags and balloons. There was music in the air.

We took a seat away from the centre, closer to the tram tracks. I got up after everyone had settled and walked a bit further inside. The music was louder here, as were the cheers. I heard the MC talk about some things - about who he was - a Brazilian, who had moved to Finland six years back. About how he was a teacher in daytime and an artist at night. I saw a girl with a sign - my parents are proud of their lesbian daughter.

We were here last when Helsinki had opened up the Christmas season. There was a parade then too. There were hordes of people then too. But the vibe was markedly different.

As I looked at the cathedral and the people in and around, I thought about the politics of this, the symbolism of this parade starting at the cathedral.

It's simple, really. Love is love.

Happy Pride!

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Extinction Was Discovered

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

At a time in the recent past, humanity did not know about extinction - everything seemed to exist in perpetuity. Then came Cuvier, a French naturalist who looked at fossils (which were assumed to belong to humans in some cases, and elephants in other) and said, they were in fact extinct.

Our knowledge of the world seems to have grown in almost all the aspects in this similar fashion - the solar system, Newton’s law.

While listening to his story in The Sixth Extinction, I came to know about his colleague - Lamarck who was a proponent of evolution. Cuvier did not believe in evolution.

While reading about this I thought about the concept of mental models which I am reading about in The Great Mental Models and I thought this is the same thing. Based on their models of the world, they came to different conclusions.

Hanko Midsummer Picnic

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #110, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Sometimes I wonder if people back home (in India) do the same things we do.

Do they sit together on weekends, and plan the week which lies ahead?
Do they plan to go to the mall, or the park or a drive somewhere?

We have not really lived in India. We meaning Prerna and me. We got married after I was already living in Finland. Prerna joined me soon after. And India changes so quickly and so often. I remember being surprised and delighted when I experience the Zepto 10-minute delivery thing. And so, it feels to us that this is how all people our age do things.

All this to say, that we plan in advance almost every week for something or the other for the weekend. Because otherwise, everyone has admin stuff to do - tending their homes, buying groceries, going out, whatever.

A couple of weeks back, we were sitting at the home of a friend who have a child of around the same age as Savya. We had been planning to do this for a while, or at least I was.

We are on the lookout for people for Savya to have play-dates with. In our old building, one of our neighbours had a son who was around six months older to Savya. And so in Matinkyla, we did not have to worry about this. We could just get into the lift, go up seven floors and be at their place. It was effortless.

Here, in this place, we haven't yet met anyone like that. Savya is the smallest kid around here. We haven't been able to organise playdates with kids from Savya's daycare either. And I feel like they must have had enough of each other in the daycare.

So, we are at their place. The children are laughing, shouting, jumping around. They have a small slide and a see-saw. The kids are playing there too - though its a little cold outside. So, I am trying to get them in.

We, at the adult table are having some samosa chat, chai, and some conversation. We talk about the things we usually talk about - jobs, jobs in cloud, raising kids in this country, and nature. From there, they talked about going camping a couple of weeks from then and would we want to join them?

And so, here we are.

Hanko is around a hundred and twenty kilometres from Helsinki. We took Route 51 and then Route 25 to get to Silversand Hanko. Most of this was a two-lane road with speeds varying from 80 to 100.

We left at 12:00 and should have reached there in around a couple of hours. It took us more. For most of the road-trip we were crawling through traffic. It felt like everyone was going to Hanko for mid-summer eve. At point on Route 25, we were sitting on the road with the car shut down. I opened the 112 app and saw there was a traffic notification for an issue with the bridge up ahead. Meanwhile, cars were taking u-turns and going away in the other direction - back home, it felt like.

It felt like this would be the end of our trip. I talked to some friends of ours who were closer to the bridge where this situation was. Just as they said lets wait for ten minutes and then see, the traffic started moving.

Silversand is a camping site near Hanko with different accommodation options and places to pitch your tent in. There are cabins in all shapes and sizes, including one in a barrel on the beach.

After reaching the site, we slowly drove toward the reception and restaurant. There were caravans and cars and people milling about. I wondered for the first time after reaching here, if we would have space to pitch the tent somewhere.

The plan and there was only a brief outline at this point - was to see the place, see the facilities and then decide if we wanted to stay the night. The highlight would be waking up in the morning to the chirping of birds and a wonderful morning sun over the bay.

We parked just outside the reception. The weather outside was warm, but not humid. There was a breeze in the air. There were some swings and a trampoline. There were kids running around. Savya was asleep now and I wondered if I should wake him up and let him have a go at the swing. He loves the swing. I did not wake him though.

We did not have to wait too long as the friends who had invited us to this thing had come to the reception as well. We started the boring stuff then - paying for a spot to put the tent in, finding a place to park the car, getting stuff out of the car, and so on.

Just past the reception/restaurant/washroom building, there is a kitchen on the other side of the road. That was our first stop. We had not really had much to eat before starting driving. We had made some sandwiches and rajma. We were carrying some rice and yogurt with us. Other friends were carrying similar things - veg biryani, some cutlets, chai.

There are three or four sections in the kitchen building - first a play room with a pool table and some toys for kids. There are also some booths for people to sit in, next to the windows. The next section also has a booth and some charging points, plus the refrigerator. The next section is the kitchen section - with sinks and induction cookers. Finally, the last section is a open sit and eat section - with three benches and tables to sit at.

We sat here and ate.

Everything was delicious - as it usually is. Then, I took Savya to the beach. Last summer, during a picnic at Oitta, Savya had really enjoyed himself at the beach. I had similar hopes this time around. The water was not too deep, there were kids playing in the water already. I changed Savya into his swimwear and took him in.

The water was chilly. And while he was laughing and saying - water - and pointing at it, he was also crying from time to time. So, I took the executive decision and cut his playtime in the water.

Our friends had put the mat on the beach and were just chilling there. We went there next. We took out the beach play-set and let Savya play. Which he continued to do for the rest of our stay.

We just sat and talked. Different things this time around. I went and sat at the raft out in the water a little distance from the shore. It bobbed and waved. I sat with my feet in the water.

We had decided by this time that we would not stay overnight. I don't like crowds. And the crowds had only grown since we had arrived. I saw some familiar faces - someone from work, a teacher from Savya's old daycare. And even though I loved the idea of staying here, and waking up in nature - I did not want to do it with so many people around.

There is a reason why I love living in Finland.

We went back to the kitchen. Someone started a fire at the beach. We made rice. Someone else had brought some parathas and pickles. We mixed and matched. I had rajma-rice, and paratha-rajma and paratha-achar.

We cleaned up after ourselves, put things back in our cars and went back to the beach. We stood near the fire, which felt uncomfortably hot. So we moved a bit away from it.

There was live music at the bar/restaurant. We asked if anybody wanted to dance - and then moved to the dance floor ourselves. I took Prerna's hand and before we had completed one sway of our hips, Savya had joined us.

'Papa', he said.

I picked him up and held Prerna at her waist as the three of us danced, awkwardly, perfectly. This little moment of not caring about things and just being.

Hyvää Juhannusta!

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

What Savya Wants

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #109, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Ever since Savya was born, we have been going for our walks. Savya and I on all days, with Prerna along for most days. The walks are when we get to decompress. When alone, the walks are when I started listening to and still listen to audiobooks. I used to listen to podcasts before that. The walks are where Prerna and I talk.

Savya loves the walks as well. In May, while his pram had broken down and we were trying to find a replacement or a fix, he would often walk to the door in the evening and tell us to take him out, for the walk.

We did get a new pram for him eventually, and the walks resumed.

Not for long though. The pram is fine! Like many times in the past, Savya has found a thing that he wants to do. This time the thing that he wants to do, affects the walk.

What does Savya want?

He wants to walk. Basically.

He wants to push his pram, with nothing or no one in it. It does not matter if there's a hike. It does not matter if we need to cross the road. It does not matter if there are cyclists coming along from either side.

He wants to push his pram, and no, he does not want your help steering or helping it up the hill. No, thank you!

This is a problem. I love rhythms and routines of things. I love my walk, which mostly follows a single route.

My solution to him wanting to walk was this - I would tie him down using the safety belts and let him make noises for a bit. He would eventually settle down.

That worked, till it didn't.

On Monday, we had just left our home, tying him to his pram. Savya started crying then. We walked a little, saw another parent with his daughter of a similar age going their own way. She, looking at Savya, Savya looking at her. Her father carrying an empty pram.

There was momentary peace then, before he started crying again.

And not just making noise. There were tears. There was snot running everywhere. I stopped, got around and was about to smack him in the head, when I thought - why?

I thought back to all the times I have felt irritated with Savya and I realised the frustration is in me. I don't want to be late for the event or his daycare or wherever. Savya does not care about shopping. He is being dragged through different malls with nothing to do. Of course he will be irate.

I removed the belts, and put him down on the ground. The tears were gone immediately. He had his big laugh back on his face. I wiped his tears and snot away. And then, he was on his way.

He walked past the Meteorology building, then the incline down toward the Kumpula Botanical Garden, then down the incline toward the tram station. I picked him up here, because we had to cross the road. Prerna pushed the pram now. I put him down on the other side and he continued walking, pushing his pram. Finally, we reached Lidl, I had a package waiting for me there. So, I went and quickly picked it up.

By this time, I guess he had tired himself out. He asked to be picked up and carried. I said, no, do you want to sit in the pram. He said, no. And I said, OK. Continue walking. He did. For a little while.

Just as we were at the park/nature trail. He stopped got to the front and tried to get on the pram. I asked him again, do you want to sit. He said, pram!

I picked him up and put him in the pram.

He slept after five minutes maybe. I put the seat down and let him sleep. And then we continued our walk.

There's a lesson in there somewhere. I don't care for typing it out here. Not everything needs to.

This has become our routine now. He pushes the pram for the beginning of our walk. Then he gets tired and asks to be put in the pram. I do not get frustrated at all. Prerna does from time to time, like yesterday, while it rained. I did not. This is, after all, our routine now.

Oh, and while you're still here. Here's my desk now, courtesy of the package from AliExpress - the Charmander/Charmeleon/Charizard themed deskmat + the ATK A9 Ultra mouse. I got two mouses - one for work, one for home. Both in white.

Still here?

Here's Prerna exercising her Everyman's Rights on our way back home.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Vacations and Noticing Things

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #108, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Once a year, I get an email from HR or some similar function that tells me - hey, you've got some pending holidays, work-life balance is important, go apply those holidays!

This, is something that happens in Finland. Not in India. I remember when I had started working, I had this rule - once a quarter, I would go on a vacation somewhere. It could be a weekend trip, a 5 day trip, a weeklong trip - something. Something that would take me out of the city. Out of the rut - this usual thing I was a part of. Something that would recharge me.

What followed then, would be a back and forth asking managers if it was OK. Could I take one day less? Why yes, I could. (I had asked for more days in the first place anticipating this conversation.)

And on, and on.

Eventually, I grew up. My responsibilities increased.

I have moved over to a new team recently. It is a more Devops focused role. I am happy with it.

Every Monday, we have a sprint-planning day at work. The PO books a meeting room at the office. Those of us who can make it to the office, are there in that room.

There are a bunch of things that are discussed then - some long term stuff, a retrospective, but mostly what would we work on in the next two weeks.

This week, my PO looked at me, he had the holiday calendar open, and asked me what were my plans for my holiday.

Every year, during the summer months of June-July, Finland more or less goes on a holiday. There are overlaps, but mostly everything including healthcare services are kind of on a holiday.

There are special arrangements made, Savya's daycare, for example, would house kids from the other two daycares in the area. We got lucky that Savya's daycare is the one that will remain open. Otherwise we would have had to travel a bit further than usual. If you know how our mornings go, you would know why that would be a challenge!

I looked at my PO, smiled, and said I was still planning it.

He said, OK, just maybe not in these two weeks toward the end. But still, just let him know whenever I knew.

I had no idea then where would I go. Last year, we were in Manhattan. I wrote about it across four different posts. This year there are no such concrete plans. Prerna had mentioned Prague at some point, I had mentioned Barcelona, a friend lives there. We could just go visit her.

After the meeting, Simo, me and Tomi were sitting around a table, having lunch. Per usual, they had gotten their food from the restaurants. Chicken Tikka Masala was on the menu today, and they love it.

Tomi had gotten himself a lot of veggies, some chicken, and a little bit of rice. Simo's plate had chicken, rice and some bread and veggies.

"What are you having today?" Tomi asked me. Tomi is nice that way. He always asks me what I am having.

"This is roti. Fresh bread, basically."

"Flat bread?", he asked.

"Kind of", I said. He nodded and got back to his plate.

"So where are you guys going for your vacations?" I asked.

"Savo. I will be away for four weeks, though this is not a vacation" said Simo. "We used to live there. There would be a lot of work. Moving things around. Painting things."

"I will be away for three weeks.", said Tomi. "There is a wedding in the family."

I laughed.

"I was hoping to get inspired by one of you and have a recommendation for a destination. Though its pretty warm in rest of Europe. I had been to Zurich a couple of years back and it was so damn warm. These countries don't have the infrastructure for warm weathers. There was no AC in the trams. It felt like we were sitting in a greenhouse!" I said.

I concluded that it might be a good idea to not go anywhere and just stay in Finland, perhaps go to Lapland. I asked them about it and got to know that now is not a good time to visit Lapland. 'Lots of mosquitoes', they said.

The conversation veered onto other things after that.

Over the next few days, I texted with a friend who lives in Barcelona about how Spain is during these few months.

"Hot!", she said. "We turn on the AC and sleep while under duvets. Sometimes till the morning."

I did look at the tickets though. On Friday, she called me, perhaps the first time after moving to Spain. I remember wanting to talk to her after she moved to Spain. Asking about her job, what was she working on, and so on.

I never got to it.

Life tends to get in the way. We've just been so damn busy. We do message each other on our stories on IG. Which is analogous to the letters people used to write to each other, back in the day.

All this to say, I may be going to Barcelona on vacation!

A note on the anthropologists

I finished reading The Anthropologists this week.

It was such an unexpected read. What I had hoped for was something different. Something more typical - a love story. What I got instead was a glimpse into lives of a couple, which seems, at the same time a glimpse into my life.

We followed a protagonist who was trying to highlight the beauty of everyday life by making a documentary. They were also wanting to buy a house. That was the main quest. There were chapters on feeling out of place, on wanting to be friends with a native, on looking longingly at them. Things, that I/we have felt at different times in our lives here. I have joked(wanted) to be friends with someone who has a boat, and would invite us over to go out into the sea with them.

And reading this book, I've thought to myself now, what is NordLetter for, if not this.

This is of course something I have been working toward. Slowly. Most of NordLetter till now though, has had a documentarian feel to it, of an observer talking about things they saw. But the things they saw, or the things they talk about have been mostly surface level. Things you would find in a Wikipedia article somewhere.

I think observing things is a big part of being a writer too. Of truly looking at things. Of being able to answer why something appealed to you. Why you took a picture of the purple flowers next to the tram station while walking your kid. Something about it. Maybe, I just love the colour purple so much.

Here are some things I noticed over the week.

I loved reading it.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

State of Play June

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Sony held a State of Play on 2nd June. There were a bunch of exciting showcases and gameplay reveals. These are the things that excited me.

Wolverine. The trailer looked good. I noticed two things. There was a lot of blood, but that blood got off of Wolverine magically. I wondered about the gaming loop, how fun would it be beating this hapless humans? There might be harder enemies to beat, but let’s see.
God of War Laufey. I loved the trailer for this one as well. Years ago I had tried to play God of War, but could not continue. I have both of them in my to-be-played list. This just makes me want to play those games and be ready for this.
Tomb Raider. Looks fun to play. I have played the three in the remake. I have not played the originals so the story would be new to me.
Control Resonant. This looks good too. But nothing new here in this trailer.
Until Dawn 2. Until Dawn is another game that I left after starting. This trailer looks similarly moviesque.
The Lost World. Don’t know if this one is tied with Jurassic Park/World movies, but looked quite good.
Ill. It looked good. A horror game. Not sure if I’ll play it. There are so many Resident Evil games in my TBP pile already.

About Apple Sports

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I remember when Apple Sports was announced. Not the exact date, month or year. No. I remember back then when it had been announced, I had looked at it and thought to myself - this seems cool, I want to use it.

I could not use it then.

It was only available in the USA then. And Canada and the UK perhaps. It does not really matter. It was not available where I was. So I stopped thinking about it basically.

Apple Sports expanded to 90 new countries and regions recently. Gruber wrote about it. I decided to revisit it then. I downloaded it. I added Premier League and Manchester United to things I cared about. And also the World Cup. The World Cup feels like the main reason Apple Sports is expanding now.

It is a nice app. I had a chance to test-drive it during Manchester United’s last match of the season. I could not watch it on TV. And with this app, weirdly enough, it feels like I don’t need to. While I tried to find a way to watch the match live, frequent alerts on my watch and live activities kept me abreast with the happenings in the match. Once United were up 3-0, I did not feel the need to watch the match anymore.

Cricket is not supported yet though.

CITCON 2026 Helsinki

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #106, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I was at CITCON on Friday evening and Saturday. The meetups are usually blog posts on my website. But we are making an exception for CITCON. And there are so many things I have to talk about the conference.

Let's dive in.

About CITCON

CITCON is pronounced Kitcon, like KitKat, with a K.

This was my first CITCON. I heard about it at a Devops event, maybe a couple of months back. I had checked out its website and it had seemed interesting then. So, here I was.

CITCON is a open spaces event, which means that there are a small set of rules and then the rest of the event is designed by the attendees.

I arrived at the venue in Helsinki, a little bit later than the start time at 18:00. I had walked from Hakaniemi station, as Prerna and Savya departed to a party in Espoo.

At the registration counter, I was given a choice to pick between a black or a white lanyard, based on whether I was OK to get my picture clicked or not. I picked black. I was going to click a ton of pictures. And also a piece of paper I could scrawl my name down on. I did. I also got two drink coupons. And then I moved to the basement.

I found a few familiar faces there already. We talked. I then moved on to the big room. There was a slide-show going on the two walls up at the stage, showing pictures from previous CITCONs.

We settled down eventually.

The hosts - Jeffrey and PJ started the event in earnest. They were charming, warm and funny. They explained what the event was, what the rules were, who the sponsors were and then we were off to the races.

We sat in a circle in the big room and one of the things they did after explaining things was go around the circle, as everyone did three things - give your name, how you came to the event and what was the one burning question you had.

My burning question was what would we do with the pile of cards at the centre of the convention. Would there be some fun thing to do with them. Turns out no, it was just flourish.

The rules of CITCON

Every meeting will have three roles - the person who gave the topic, a scribe to take notes and put it up on the wiki and the people who are in the meeting.
Anyone can propose a topic. You don't need to have ppt ready before the talk, etc. You fill out the title on a post it note. Introduce the topic, answer some questions (if anyone has any) and then stick the note on the schedule.
If you had more than one topics, you could announce one topic at a time and then went to the back of the queue and started again.
After the topics were proposed, you would go and mark the talks you were interested in attending.
Similar topics could be combined, the topics could be moving around even a hour before it was supposed to start.
And finally, the law of two feet. If you did not like a presentation - for whatever reason - you could get up and leave.

I was not planning on presenting any topics. I had gone there as I usually do, just to listen to people and interact with them. But Antti talked about how juniors become seniors in an AI first world and I got in a line and proposed my topic - how to learn with AI.

There were snacks and drinks in the lobby outside. As some people went to find the topics that interested them. Some of us went outside and had some snacks.

I had salad with raspberry dressing and a few of the spinach thingies.

Then I went and marked some talks I was interested in - including my own.

About the events

There were five one hour events scheduled in five different rooms you could choose from. I did not really use the law of two feet, so I attended five events. People did move around and so their mileage may vary.

I reached the venue at 09:00. I had some veggie bagels and coffee, while talking about AI, writing, the parallels between SaaS apocalypse and what the music industry had already gone through.

Soon it was time for the first discussion of the day.

1. How AI Impacts Team Dynamics

A sense of camaraderie from co-workers complaining about the tool
Code is written by someone else, so people can talk about it without feeling like they are stepping on toes
AI is accelerating whatever team dynamics existed - so where people used to discuss earlier, they discuss more. If teams were insular, they are more insular now.
In a team, there seems to be a rising competition to build the thing that works.
POCs can be built by a single person - so its more insular
Roles are merging - kind-of - with designers pushing code to production - who gets woken up when there is a production issue
what happens if you port your app to a new technology and no one knows it - if the junior dev picks it up fast, how would the senior dev react
Do we devote more time to training/mentorship?
One signal could be if the junior dev is in a loop - asking question to an agent - get an answer - ask a question again

2. Hands-on AI frameworks speedrun

There were a few options:

I picked Superpowers.

The new thing it did for me was build a local development server to show mockups etc. I don't know if it was powered by this framework or not. I think it is. I saw the project structure and could see a directory with the relevant files. Interesting.

What I did was run till the implementation plan step in a single chat but then the implementation thing I started in a different chat using subagent driven deployment.

I could have maybe split the earlier steps as well. So after specs I could have created a different chat perhaps.

We broke for lunch after this. I had some salad, rice noodles and some tofu in peanut sauce. We ate outside as it was sunny outside. Just the perfect sort of weather. I gave some suggestions on where to do touristy stuff at, to one of the attendees, who was here with their family.

Then we were back for the third session of the day. I was confused between the one I went to and Don't start with AI.

3. Your AI platform is missing 5 things

Governance
1. Who can create agents
2. What can they access?
3. How do you maintain control?
Integration
1. How do agents connect to systems?
2. Where does work actually happen?
Observability
1. How do we understand what the agents are doing?
Multi-agent collaboration
1. What becomes possible when agents start working together?
Deployment sovereignty
1. Can the platform run where your business requires it to run?

Then the discussion.

4. AI learning

When interviewing how do you figure out if people actually know stuff and not just using AI to answer questions? Maybe a change in how interviews happen? Like these days people are put in front of an AI agent and asked to use AI to solve a problem.

Train on thinking models - system thinking.

Get a bigger picture explanation from the model then dig in as needed.

Challenge the junior during code reviews - whether they understand what they wrote. Helping them learn to think critically.

Figure out how can you add friction that causes the learning.

Set up feedback loops. Add instructions and agent sets up a retro. Explaining what it did so you learn something. Going back and forth with the model about the decisions to make.

We are moving up the layers of abstraction - maybe we don’t need to learn to code anymore.

5. Is true ownership dead?

Ownership should be shared - ideally with business. Technical implementation ownership could be with an engineer, but true ownership lies with business.

People will continue to have ownership because AI is a tool, it can’t be held responsible.

As in the earlier discussion in the morning. AI just accelerates the situation in the company.

What level of attention would you pay to the things you’re building. Like if it is a UI thing would you test the hell out of it when compared to maybe something like financial transactions.

Wrap up

We sat around in a similar circle as Jeffrey and PJ thanked the sponsors and us for making this event a success! We all talked about our Aha moment from the event. Mine was from the hands-on session. It was different from what I had expected it to be. There was no hand-holding. I just did this thing I was thinking about doing for the past few months and it worked out beautifully.

We went for dinner at The Train Factory after that. I walked to the venue with Peter. We talked about platform stuff, about the hands-on session he could not attend and some other things. We reached the venue but had to roam around trying to find the place. We eventually did.

The place was nice and charming, but still a bunch of it is under construction. There were a few eateries open - 4 - with one already closed and out of food.

There were two long tables reserved for our group. We ordered some drinks and then talked.

We talked about language, the etymology and history of it. We talked about the Finnish language and how or why it had survived. I asked Claude to help me learn Finnish - based on someone's comment that Finnish was a language of rules. If you knew the rules there was little ambiguity after that. We talked about history in general. I asked about some recommendations for some channels which did max 20 min videos. We talked about which are the places where you learn the max number of languages as children. We talked about children. We talked about raising them. I heard wonderful stories.

Then the buzzer buzzed, my food was ready. I had ordered veggie momos and noodles. They were both very good. Or maybe I was super hungry.

I left feeling so full and happy. CITCON is awesome. I was glad to be a part of it.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

The Problem with Current

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Or why it does not work for my reading habits.

I recently started using Current to read the various people I’m subscribed to. I had some problems with the way Net News Wire works and it had some nice ideas about how reading on the web (via RSS feeds) should work.

With Net News Wire it had felt like I was always drowning and for most of the Hacker News feed just marking it all as read after a while. It is a heavy feed - there are maybe 100 odd posts in a day. It always felt like I was rushing to reach Inbox Zero.

Current’s mental model worked in a different way. It purported to show a feed which would adjust in time showing you things that you wanted to read. Things that you did not read would go away in time based on what it was - so news feed would go away from the river quickly, while those by people who posted less often would stay in the river for longer.

I gave it a try.

I have been using it exclusively for a couple of months now.

But it has never felt like home. Too often I find myself trying to find an old post by a writer and there’s no place for me to find those posts.

The main problem though is the feed. It feels like I don’t control it. If I want to read stuff from The Verge, there is the voices feed, but not the main feed. And I don’t control it. I have found pieces from Daring Fireball that never make it to the feed.

That irritates me. I want in control of what I read. Not this thing that decides it based on whatever. Even though I love the idea of reading whenever I want to and not being told hey, you’re behind - 50 unread posts or whatever.

It’s weird - because I paid for current. It feels weird wanting to go back to Net News Wire. Like admitting defeat - like it’s my problem somehow.

Current does a lot of things pretty well. But it just does not sit well with my mental model of things. I think in folders. I miss that - basically.

The Fazer Experience

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #105, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

In the morning today, as I was scrolling past one titled - 'Spring 2025', I came across a picture of Prerna at the the Roihuvuori Cherry Park in Finland.

The cherry bloom season was in full swing a couple of weeks back or so. There are many around the many apartments at the beach area, around the bus stop in Kumpula. The main bloom had happened in the weekdays, I think Tuesday. I had told Prerna then, there would be no point in going to the park this year.

The same thing had happened to us in 2024 when we had last gone to the park. The bloom had happened over the weekday, and by the time we got there, the bloom was no more. The colour, was not there anymore.

But trees are trees. So, here, a few pictures of some trees from around Kumpula.

Back to me scrolling past the picture in the morning. I saw that and knew that we will not be going to the park this year. And I was reminded of this piece I had read thanks to Hacker News some five days ago.

The Locals Don't Know

And then you have the tourist. Bright-eyed, eager, and fresh off a rewatch of their favorite Rick Steves episodes, the tourist is the most naive person to ever arrive in the city. The tourist has not spent decades fitting themselves into a jaded but comfortable box named Life In The City. The tourist, more than any local, can really do whatever they want.

And I felt like I was the resident who was kind of done with the park. The getting there, the dealing with the many, many people who congregate there around this time.

I felt a little happy about that too. That I do not consider myself a tourist in this place. This is my city. It took all of five years.

Speaking of touristy things. We visited the Fazer Experience Visitor Centre last Sunday. This visit was organised by the HOAS committee of our buildings. We were part of a lucky few, who managed to fill out the form in time.

We drove to the centre and were just before the pre-agreed time of getting there by 13:45. There were a few student looking people there already.

We said our hellos, put our names and signatures on a piece of paper and then waited while our reps got us our tickets.

The tour started then, with our wonderful guide getting us past the stanchion, past the massive bunny statue and into the exhibition hall. This was our first stop in the tour, and the place where the guide told us about Fazer, like the fact that this particular shade of blue, is copyrighted by Fazer. We saw a short video presentation about the company and the founders.

After this we moved to the greenhouse (fondly called a Swedish sauna). This is where we saw a bunch of cocoa trees, some spice trees, banana trees and so on. While the guide talked about where Fazer gets the chocolate from.

Then, we moved to the third stop, where we tasted some wonderful Fazer bread, and then played around with blocks, trying to build a healthy plate. Mine was 5 stars - super healthy.

Then there was the memorabilia section, a wall full of things that mean something - something about their history. I particularly liked the different posters they had.

There were more stops along the way - the place where we talked about how some of the candies came into being - trying to reduce waste as one example. We smelt the different type of candies and tried to guess which was which. We tasted two candies and tried to guess which was fruity and which not.

There was also a toy structure here. I had seen something similar at MoMa. There were also chairs built by a famous Finnish designer. But Savya was getting cranky by this time - he had had enough talk about candies, and wanted to taste some candy now.

Thankfully, the last and final stop on the tour was the candy tasting section. We don't eat chocolates usually, in this household. But we did not hold back here. We ate a lot of chocolates. Took pictures of ones we liked.

Then we got a goodie back each after we were done. We bought a fridge magnet from the shop. I wanted to grab something at the cafe, but all they had was more cakes and pastries. We had had enough by then. So we did not.

Instead we went to IKEA and had some veggie meatballs there.

Since we're human, I managed to compare my experience to the one other similar experience we had in Zurich at the Lindt chocolate factory.

That was bigger, the space. We had walked over so many different floors. The green area was bigger. There were so many different educational pieces on how chocolate is made and so on.

Not so much here.

Lindt also had this tasting area where you could basically taste liquid chocolate. That was awesome.

But it was a wonderful experience none the less. On a smaller scale. Sure. But wonderful nonetheless.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Wheezing past the cradle

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #104, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I spent most of last week coughing into my elbow (when outside) and just coughing (while at home).

I don't want to say Savya got this from his päiväkoti and passed it on to me. But I am not not saying it either.

What I do hope for is that this would be the last sickness of the season. I am really done with this. And in the immortal words of a fellow parent - it's summer now!

Speaking of, on Friday, at his päiväkoti, the teachers, Prerna and other fellow moms celebrated Mother's Day. There was coffee, a burger, some art and a couple of cards made by Savya.

Not by design, but we managed to celebrate Mother's day over the past couple of days, with some Samosa Chat at Indian Street Food Corner, Samosa and Handi-Paneer at Mango Palace and finally, Soya Chunk Kebab by your's truly.

Tomorrow, we will be visiting Fazer thanks to the tenant committee of our building. There were some tickets made available via a online form they had set up. Sometimes I wonder if there could be a better way to do this. Because, all that you have time for in these things, is fill out your details. And then the form is closed.

Incidentally, at Savya's last päiväkoti, one of the last things we did was celebrate Father's Day. There was supposed to be coffee and snacks, but I did not get any.

I was happy sitting with Savya and seeing how he plays. I got to play with him inside his päiväkoti. Prerna had been with him during the beginning-getting-to-know-the-päiväkoti phase. So I did not know the insides of the place.

I had sat with Savya while he drew with some crayons inside a father-son caricature. And then he ran around in the gym/sleeping room with other kids.

This week was momentous in terms of work adjacent things. I rediscovered my earlier post on be a hybrid and thought, that's a nice way to introduce myself in meetups and otherwise.

I also went through my first learning module at herizon. I had registered with them some time back, but did not do anything after that. The module was full of practical instructions, including things like - having a plan for the meetups (meet 3 new people), on what it means to network, how hiring happens in Finland, how to Linkedin and so on.

Most of these things were things I had heard from others in the past. But reading it here, in order, in one place, did something that getting this information in a disjointed way did not.

I finished reading Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut this week. This, surprising to me at least, was only the second book I've read of the man. Surprising because I know Kurt Vonnegut, and love his writing.

In addition to whatever I have written in my review, I loved the fact that he had named all the chapters in the book. And such funny names they were.

This is a funny and fantastical book. Read it.

I also gave a book-talk on Children of Time at work.

I have recently discovered a bibliography group at TCS. I thought they were new, but turns out they have been at it for the past 20 years - mostly based out of Mumbai - which explains why I hadn't heard of them.

I had loved reading Children of Time and wanted to discuss it's salient themes - around gender, intelligence, it's answer to Fermi's paradox and so on.

I had prepared the slides last week. My original plan was to keep it super minimal, with just the text on a white background. But then, at the last Vibe-Coding Meetup, I saw someone present these beautiful bold text on top of beautiful pictures slides, and I thought, this would be perfect for my talk.

So I went ahead and downloaded some images from Nasa Images and put some text on those.

I had fun with the talk. The goal was the discussions - and they were fun and insightful.

I am hoping to do this again, this time with Outlive.

And finally, two AI things that interested me this week.

Thanks to RAMaggedon, Apple raised the Mac Mini's starting price. They ended up shelving some configurations. I would not have cared as much about it, but my Mac is showing it's age now. I got a message some time ago about lack of free space. Not once - twice. So, that.
I came across this post about using HTML as the output format for Claude Code. I have had similar experiences in the past. Once when trying to come up with alternative UIs for something. Once while trying to learn something. And once today, when I wanted to build something and needed step-by-step instructions on how to do it. HTML is great for that!

Have a happy mother's day. And if you can, give them a hug!

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Birdsong

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I finished reading Things my grandmother said this week. It is a nice book of poetry written by an Indian guy - Amit Majmudar. I picked this up because of it's cover and the fact that the writer was Amit. When I saw this was a poetry collection, I started reading it immediately.

It was a nice collection of poems. There are two poems in it which are about the things his grandmother said. Both, are the poems I loved the most.

I felt inspired after reading this, to write a poem called - things my mother said. I created a blank note for this. And I sat, and thought. And I could not remember a single thing my mother said.

And I felt that's what the poem should be - a blank page.

A few days back, I was travelling through the woods, with Savya (peacefully sleeping in his pram), when I heard some sound, a rustle of the leaves. I got a little jolt of adrenaline out of that. We have evolved to be afraid of sounds in the dark. Sounds which could mean a predator nearby.

It was a little brown bird, trying to grab something - dry leaves, a broken stick, something, perhaps to add to its nest, somewhere high up in the trees.

I was reminded of this, this past week, on a morning stroll through the same woods. This time there was light though, and I could see the birds clearly enough.

There has been birdsong in the air for the past three weeks or so - ever since the weather has changed for the better. But the birds were never visible. They don't sing on the ground. They sing in the skies, or somewhere in the trees.

I love nature. I love spring.

I wrote about little buds sprouting from trees earlier. They have turned into leaves now. There is greenery on the ground and up above, in the trees.

I love nature.

This week was Vappu week here in Finland.

The difference this week was that Prerna got to attend the putting the hat on Havis Amanda ritual.

Havis Amanda is a bronze fountain statue of a young woman rising from the sea, located at Market Square (Kauppatori) in Helsinki. The statue represents the city of Helsinki herself.

Students in Finland get the cap after passing the matriculation exam. And they wear it proudly throughout the years - especially on Vappu.

We had planned to go have a picnic at Toolo lake. But we ended up celebrating it the Finnish way - alone.

I made Biryani though. And it was awesome!

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Seeing the Crown Bridge

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Three years ago, as my then room-mate and friend, and now avid reader of this newsletter, had gone back to India to bring his wife to Finland with him, I was looking for a new flat for myself.

I had been to India as well, and had met Prerna by then. We were going to get married as well, so I needed to move out and find a place for us.

One of the flats I saw was in Kruunuvuorenranta. It was a new apartment, with a beautiful view to the sea and a K-Market nearby. The problem was that there was a long winding road to get to my office. I would have to take a bus. During the summers I could have cycled. But still. The person selling renting me the apartment had mentioned that a bridge would soon get built directly linking this place to the city centre. Then, the rents in this area would go high and so on.

I did not rent out this apratment. I did eventually find an apartment in Matinkyla, where we lived for the next three years, before moving back to Helsinki.

Today, I went and saw the apartment via the bridge that was supposed to be constructed soon.

Kruunuvuori Bridge is Finland's longest bridge and it links Kruunuvuorenranta in the eastern suburb of Laajasalo with central Helsinki. The bridge opened last Saturday. I saw a bunch of posts on social media. The bridge opened to pedestrians first and then to the cyclists in the evening.

If you know me, you know I don't like crowds, so I had decided to visit the bridge sometime next week, i.e. this week. A few other people seemed to have had the same idea. I saw a bunch of people with their cameras out, taking pictures with the bridge. It reminded me a bit about crossing the Brooklyn Bridge without the Manhattan skyline. Of course the crown bridge is shorter. I know.

It was a windy, rainy day today. It had been sunny all through last week. So of course, there's rain and some snow today. What's spring without some snow in April?

I wanted to recreate my walks from my time living in Helsinki (in Merihaka). I took a tram to Hakaniemi and decided to walk from there to the bridge.

The crown bridges project is three bridges in total - Merihaansilta (connecting Merihaka to Kalasatama), Finkensilta (connecting Kalasatama to the zoo) and Kruunuvuorensilta (the crown bridge). Merihaka and Finke bridges were open since long. This was my first time using these bridges though.

Walking through Merihaka and toward the first bridge, I kept feeling like this was a new place. My memories of this place are from a time when they had dug up this entire place, and I would walk through a new route every few weeks. It felt settled now, I could almost imagine a tram going through this area, making it hip and cool.

This place would always feel like home to me. And so I'm happy it's cool now.

I continued walking and went past the public sauna that has always been there. I went past the Helen power plant - I had seen huge ships docked here, unloading coal perhaps. How would that work now? I wondered. Did they shut down the plant? This place might have been at the periphery of the city at some point, it isn't now. People don't want polluting plants in the middle of the city.

And just like that, I was in Kalasatama now. I remember how long getting to Kalasatama had been in the past. Bridges, people! Bridges!!

We have had so many lunches in Kalasatama, it used to be my dream location to live in Helsinki. I saw it from a different side now. Just passing by. I saw the places we had sat in. I saw the Mustikkamaa island from a far. I saw the bridge that went from the island to the zoo. The bridge that I had not crossed then. I was at the Korkeasaari Zoo now.

All this after passing the second bridge - Finke.

I continued walking and was soon at the star of the show.

The crown bridge is beautiful and elegant. It is a cable stayed bridge, with one tall tower in the middle, cables running from which support the deck.

The left side of the bridge had tram lines running through it. The right side was for pedestrians and cyclists. Right side if you're going from the zoo side.

There were joggers and cyclists going about their routines. There were also people like me, who were here to see the bridge.

I climbed to the middle, and wondered if I should return from here. I decided not to and went down to the other side. It had started raining by then. I stood under a shade for a bit. Waiting, and wondering where was the flat I had come to see. I opened up my map and found a singular K-market right across the sea from me. I remembered where the house had been.

And I wondered if I had made the right choice then.

I did not dwell too much on that though. The rain had dissipated for the time being. I wondered if I should take a bus from here. But the bus would take 38 mins to get to where I needed to go to. See what I mean?

So, I decided to walk back up the crown bridge and the other two bridges after that.

If you do come to see the bridge, the view is better from this side, the Kruunuvuorenranta. You get to see the Helsinki skyline in the distance - the church, the massive ferries waiting at the dock, the three skyscrapers in Kalasatama.

As I said earlier, walking on this bridge reminded me of walking on the Brooklyn bridge. I think people visiting Helsinki will similarly be walking on this bridge.

I can't imagine hawkers selling stuff on this bridge as they do on the Brooklyn bridge though.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

City Biking Through the Summer

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

The woman in the yellow jacket slowed her bicycle to a crawl, then slowly, gingerly put her foot down, then the other. Other bicyclists passed her by, as she slowly moved the cycle perpendicular to the bicycle track, facing the zebra crossing.

The light turned green then, and the bus I was sitting in started to move. I smiled at this. She was old, and frail, and yet she was riding this bicycle with two bags hung on the racks of her white bicycle.

I do the same, not as gingerly as her, nor on a white bicycle. I use city bike - the 35 euro per season service that the cities of Helsinki and Espoo provide every summer.

Once subscribed, you can take a bike from any of the many stations around the cities, and ride a city bike for 60 mins. It is a great solution for last mile connectivity in the cities.

In my case, it is a great way to travel to and from work each day.

On Tuesday, I bought the subscription after trying to get this ticket since before April started. Whenever I tried, it said, there was no card added to my account.

I checked my HSL account, removed the existing cards, and added the Wise card again. It looked OK on the HSL app, but I was just not able to buy the subscription.

On Tuesday, after dropping Savya, I decided I will ride a bike to work today. I stood, in front of the station at Kumpula campus and tried to this one more time. I would take a bus otherwise.

It did not work. It gave the same error. This time, I scrolled down, and saw that there was a section for cards in this web page, and there was no card added here.

HSL and City Bike operate independently from each other. Or that was my experience. You need to add a card on the city bike page as well. Why is that? I don't know.

There are two ways to reach my office in Vallila - via the E75 or via the little bicycle track that goes through Kumpula - Kumpulantaival.

On Tuesday I had taken the E75, on Wednesday, the bicycle track. The bicycle track was calmer, through nature, fun overall. On my way back I was singing out loud while riding the bicycle. I'm smiling now, as I write this, thinking about that.

I was going downhill, going uphill is a little different.

I know my route now, so I get to enjoy the ride, without worrying where to take the next turn. That helps.

All through the summer, I have been wondering whether to buy this bike or that, but I think this provides me with the best of both worlds.

I get to enjoy doing the thing - riding the bike, without worrying about maintaining it, or worrying about where to park, and so on.

But the same thing, can manifest in different ways. Like the same freedom that allows me to park this bike at any station means, I need to find a station and then walk a little bit extra to where I need to be.

It also means, that a bike needs to be available at the station, for me to take a ride. Which has been a little problem here at the campus. In evenings, for example, there are no bikes at the station. I guess the students ride the bikes to the station in the morning and then leave in the evening.

It has not been a problem till now, but can be.

Oh but the joy of riding a bike in the city. And that too for so cheap. For comparison, I buy a multi-journey ticket for around 10 trips for 30 euros, approx.

Back home, I had bought a Firefox bike after starting to work. I had wanted to ride it to work then as well. But riding the bike from Noida to Gurugram was not possible. Well, even if I was working in Noida, it would not have been possible then either.

The weather and the roads are not conducive to this though. I rode that bike a couple of times though to India Gate on Sundays. But then the friend I would ride with left UP and went to live in Rohini in Delhi.

And so that bike stayed in my balcony eating dust for many, many years, before I sold it to the same friend. He had a girlfriend now. They wanted to go out on rides together.

I will get a e-bike at some point. But the good ones are so damn expensive. You can get a used car for cheaper than that.

I finished reading I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan. It is exactly what it says in the title - experiences of a man who delivers parcels in Beijing. There are so many things I have underlined in this book.

There are so many meditations on work in this book. Things that one might feel do not apply to them, but they do. Like this.

But, supposing work is something we are compelled to do, a concession of our personal will, then the other parts of life—those that remain true to our desires, that we choose to pursue, in whatever form they take—might be called freedom.

On a warm sunny Friday afternoon, as part of a team day, I went and played Curling.

Do you know what Curling is? Its an Olympic sport. Have you seen those vides of athletes almost parallel to the ground, sliding some rocks across some 45m? Here's one, check it out.

There are two teams eight stones, the goal is to get your teams stone as close to the centre as possible. The team with their stone closest to the centre wins. Of course these are stones, so you may have an awesome shot and be on the absolute centre (like hitting the bulls eye) but the very next shot the other team can knock your stone away.

There is a reason its called chess on ice.

It was difficult to play. You basically put a thing on your left foot (for a righty), start with sliding the stone, then start sliding with your left leg, then keep your right knee on the ice, and then at some point leave the stone imparting it some spin. After that your team mates brush the ice trying to get it to go a bit further. After it crosses the blue line the other team tries to brush the ice so that it leaves the house.

I could not slide on the ice. I would just start and then push the stone away while falling on my ass on ice. But I managed to win two games for us. So yay?

It felt a bit like bowling. But not really.

But as I said, I had fun. I did scrape my knee though. And thanks to that, no yoga these past two days. Yay :(

After the game, we went and had pizza at Capperi. The pizza was great. The kind I like with fresh ingredients - great tomatoes, great cheese, awesome bread. It did not feel heavy at all.

I and Prerna will go there sometime this week.

The gents talked about their time in the army, and some things that happened after that. They asked about me and India, and whether service was required there. I told them it isn't. But service men and women get respect in the society. We talked about other things as well.

I finished with a tiramisu in a beautiful teacup. I loved it.

I walked down the street to a go-around and rode a city bike home from there. I needed to.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Vibe Coding April Meetup

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I saw a few familiar faces at the event today and a few unfamiliar ones. It was raining lightly, as I walked from my office to the venue - 350m / 8 mins. I saw a technician putting the bicycle stand in place above the bridge. That city bike station is in gray on the HSL may at present. If it becomes active, I may park my city bike here. It's closer.

1. "From Layoff to $9K/Month: Lessons from Building and Selling Mobile Apps" by Steven Phuc, indie developer

People are paying to use apps on mobile now
learn to build and sell
Build
- Build for yourself / what you want to use
- Build to sell / how to reach them / why use your app
- Build simple - one feature / get feedback early
- You don’t need to know everything to start building. Just build. Shoutout to The Pareto principle
Selling
- Find your mentor - someone who is maybe 6 months to 1 year ahead of you so that their lessons are useful
- Build in public
- Find your marketing channel
It takes time to build and sell

2. "Vibe Coding Without Losing Your Edge", Johanna Wäänänen, Founder, Systemic, PhD Researcher

the talk had a striking visual design - striking images with text on top
Dev work has shifted from focused to constant context switching
We go into a stressed/anxious state - reducing our cognitive state
This is a new competitive advantage - everyone will have access to the same tools - the capability to collaborate, think clearly, learn fast
how?
- Learn to know your state
- Learn to shift your state
- Create rhythm

I have been thinking about this a bunch these past few days and had a few micro posts on this - Human cost of 10x productivity was a recent one. So this talk felt timely.

3. "The Job of Product Designer in the Age of Al", Lassi A Liikkanen, PhD, Director of Product Design and Insight, Qvik Ltd.

when building products we are trying to balance a few things -
Tools are changing, process remain, designers are busy
what designers do may change, who they are won’t
How UI may change - algorithmically generate UIs
Design agent - human led, agent operated
ai makes every one feel like a generalist. Judgement matters more in this world.

HUG April Meetup

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Reproducible Developer Environments with Jumppad - Robert Barnes, HashiCorp

used to use docker compose. There were issues though like low level dependencies, brittle bash scripts, health checks were manual, etc.
They built jumppad to solve these issues
to run it you need - jumppad binary, git and docker or podman
the demo was hashi specific but this can be used with k8s as well
Will support pushing to cloud (shared dev environments)
Not a hashi product, it’s open source

Future of the Helsinki Hashicorp User Group meetup

Anoop talked about the history and future of this user group. They were sponsored by Hashicorp, but in Feb Hashicorp decided to not pay the fees for Meetup anymore. Which could turn out to be an opportunity.

I think they should become a IaC meetup group and then they can invite other people who are doing IaC work as well. I think that's a good approach.

The Four Diseases Leading to Slow Death

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

From Outlive.

Heart disease
Cancer
Neurodegenerative disease
Type 2 diabetes

Slow death moves very slowly. We need to step in sooner or better yet prevent them altogether.

Celebrating Formats

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #100 (Woo-hoo!), a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

What should I celebrate? In the past I have celebrated editions, not years. This is my third year running this newsletter. This is the 100th edition of this newsletter. That is easier to keep track of and celebrate. It feels like something more solid - malleable, something I can point a finger at.

I was reading Jack Cheng's Sunday #456 last week. In it he was wondering about the format of the thing that was his newsletter.

I'm thinking about formats today. Though, it’s more accurate to say I’m often thinking about them for this newsletter. In the past, it’s been a book publishing dispatch, travelogue, link grab-bag, weekly pieces of first-draft poetry, and other, more shortly lived experiments. Since 2021, I’ve been pretty good about including a photo with every issue, though my cadence has slipped from weekly to monthly since Rufus was born (maybe not surprising to any of you parents reading).

That made me want to think about formats as well. I settled on a format fairly quickly - something that happened in the week - a trip to a place, or an event somewhere, followed by something I had read in the week - something interesting. I reached that because of a need I had to link-blog, to share things I had read.

Those days, this blog was hosted on Ghost, and I did not have any way to publish short posts. I used to write blog posts daily then. So the links below had made sense then.

Now, I have a stream. Anything interesting that I read or find out about, I put it on the blog immediately. You can read the stream, just use RSS and subscribe to one of the feeds. So, the links below are just things I have already posted about.

I don't have to post about these things anymore. In a way, I already have. So, I am removing these from now on. If you enjoyed reading those things, write to me and I will add those back.

There are other things I want to share here. My first-draft poems maybe.

This one is called - save some money

Well how do you save money?

You make money first.
You go out into the world,
do something, that someone
else may find of value.
Have that someone pay you.
And so on.

What if you can’t?
How do you save money then?
You find one paisa here,
one paisa there,
from the money given to you,
to do other things.

Maybe you walk to the place,
you had said you would
take an auto to.
Or something costs less
than what you had thought.
And so on.

You would take me to a store,
and get me a pack of crax,
from that money.

I finished reading This and that by Ryokan last week. It is a short wonderful book of poems, translated from the original Japanese. Ryokan was a monk, who sat and saw the world through his ageing eyes.

Poems? No way
when you see that my
poems aren’t poems,
then we can talk poetry.

Could we do this now? In this day and age?

I was sitting with Prerna the other day. She had Instagram open. A reel came on the screen next - just a floating image, with some music and text on it. It was talking about how, after a doctor had asked his patients to dry their clothes in their bedrooms all of them had gotten asthma after that. Then there was a ton of description below the video - caption. Which was mostly bullshit. But it sounded scientific enough. Prerna took her time reading that caption.

And I thought, this is how they can change your mind and your thoughts - a little bit at a time. Reels are a perfect format for this. I had this thought yesterday when some far right type of reel was up on my screen.

I had thought then that reels are a perfect format for this. 30 seconds. Just enough to say what you want to say. With no one there to rebuke you, or question you. That's the magic of these things, there is no time to rebuke, or even think. You see one thing, digest it and bam comes the next one.

With books, you sit with the ideas. You have time to think. You can question both the ideas in the book and your own ideas.

Videos were a distillation of this - 10/15/30 min videos. They were about knowledge. What are reels about?

Empty calories.

I like comedy reels. I open them from time-to-time.

What I do most of the time is read. Read people! Read more. Read more often. Read every time.

Just go. Read!

What am I reading now? I Deliver Parcels in Beijing and All that we see or seem. I will have the reviews up soon enough.

Here's some ducks in the bay.

On a different day, a bunch of them passed overhead, flying into the bay. Slowly, one after the other landed in the water and started swimming.

I used to play a game on my oldest controller, which came with a gun accessory, where you pointed it to a TV and just shot these ducks that came flying out.

In my mind, ducks swim, not fly.

It was funny seeing them fly overhead with their big bodies, quaking about.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Devops Finland Meetup

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The space

The meetup was at the Hoxhunt offices near Ruoholahti. I decided to park at home and then go back using public transport. I could not find any OK parking place near the venue and it was far away that I couldn’t just walk from the place.

Hoxhunt have a nice space. As soon as I entered I noticed the Table Tennis table kept to a side. There were a few people sitting around what I assumed was the presentation area. There were two rows of black plastic chairs kept on the ground and then steps for people to sit, covered in a blue fabric. The top most level of the steps had cushions against the wall, so I took a place there.

I picked some pizza and drinks next. They had four different kinds for vegans/vegetarians.

And then, as I finished typing these lines, I looked up and it was time for the first talk of the evening.

Dangers in Kubelet permissions / Martti Leppänen, Director of Platform Engineering @Hoxhunt

How things are not as innocuous as they seem. The good news was that this vulnerability was fixed in latest releases.

Terraform Blocks You Don't Know / Lauri Suomalainen, Head of Cloud Development @ Teamit

Provisioner
Ephemeral - used to create temp resources. Not stored in state, does not show up in plan files.
Check - check on outside conditions. Failing does not block plans or applies. Use postconditions if you require operations to be blocked on failure.
Dynamic - create multiple nested blocks in a resource.
Import - instead of running import in cli.
List
Moved - rename a resource.
Removed - to remove a resource you don’t want to use. With lifecycle destroy=false. Just replace the resource block with removed.
testing

And finally about terraform stacks - which I did not understand much.

Azure and Friends April Meetup

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I’m back at the Nordcloud offices for another Azure and Friends meetup. The weather today was nice - sunny and chilly (thanks Finland!). There was fresh pizza and drinks.

There was a nice introduction by Azure and Friends - who they are and a call to give talks. They reminisced about some of the talks they have had about giving these talks, for example - a fairly meta thing to do.

Digital Sovereignty on Azure by Jari Lietzen (Nordcloud)

Jari talked about sovereign cloud - what is it, why do you need it and how can it be implemented in an Azure context.
An interesting discussion took place after the talk about the costs of Azure local for a small SaaS company - the costs really add up and you need people to manage the services. The consensus was that local was always meant to be a niche product, and it will change over the next few months - but not that much.

Bicep Console by Teemu Tapanila (Mallow)

The console command provides a repo environment for bicep expressions.
Teemu took us through different examples that build up to him using a custom function to set the lifecycle rules for a storage account based on environment.
Why does this exist? For AI to quickly validate bicep.

One More Thing About Doing Yoga

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

One more benefit of doing yoga, first thing in the morning is that it lets me think about my body, health and wellbeing.

I get to concentrate on my body, the different parts. I get to tell them all, and in unison, that I love them/it. I get to thank them/it for all that they do.

These past couple of weeks I was not able to do that. We were sick, recuperating. I was feeling irritated and had less trust, hope and good feelings about my body and my self.

You don’t even realise these things when they are not there. But they are at the back of your head, eating away at you.

I’m back doing yoga now, and I felt some semblance of hope and good feelings yesterday as I did yoga. More so today.

New Things

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #99, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I started reading Wanderlust this week. I had kept it in my to read list for a long time. For most of the time I had it in my bookmark list, I could have picked it up any time. It had mostly been available to borrow.

The subheading for the book is - 'A history of walking'.

I guess that tells you all you need to know about why I wanted to read this. I am about 50 pages in, in a 400 page book. And it feels like a book where I want to highlight everything.

Like this,

To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train. Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.

I wrote about this, once upon a time in why I walk the same route everyday.

The thing that I have noticed now, walking the same route everyday, is the little buds sprouting from the branches on the trees on the way. I took a picture today. I could not get the camera to focus on the little sprouting leaf.

But my eyes saw them just fine.

It was beautiful. We moved here in autumn, so I haven't yet seen this path I walk on, full of the green of the leaves.

I can't wait.

On waiting and other things, I read today - Advice to Young People, The Lies I Tell Myself - Jason Liu by Jason Liu

In the short term, you would be much happier if you accepted and admitted to yourself that the reason you don't have what you want is simply because you do not want it badly enough. The sooner you accept that, the happier you'll be. Then the next question is: Do you want to be happy or do you want to achieve what you want? It's not the last question, but it definitely is the next question.

And this section above seemed so serene.

I find ourselves struggling with this now. Me and Prerna. Do we want to achieve what we want? Mostly, yes. Then we need to work. And that might not make us as happy as we would, sitting next to each other on the couch, lazying off. But that is what we need to do now.

Two other things changed this week.

1. I replaced Net News Wire as my RSS reader of choice and installed current in it's place.

I have thoughts. Of course, I do. I am getting to use the new ways of doing things, getting to terms with the new mental models. One thing I miss, is control. The way I used to use NNW, was go to each source, read whatever I wanted to read, mark the rest as Read.

Current works differently. I am in a stream/river/feed. I release whatever I don't want to read. Whatever I read, gets marked as read. And so on. There are no unread counts in the app. I can dip in, read what I can and then leave.

What I find myself doing is reaching for inbox zero. To ensure that there are no items in the river. I think it will take time to change the way I read. And be a little bit calmer.

I will report back on how this experiment goes.

2. I replaced my keyboard. Say hello to Nuphy Air 75

Savya broke the USB C connector on my Keychron K2. I was happy to use it in wireless mode, but the battery discharged and I just could not charge it. I reached out to Keychron support and a few hardware stores in Helsinki. No one wanted to fix it. Keychron said they could ship the part for free, but I would need to pay for shipping and of course fix it myself.

I have not soldered in my life. I could start now. But I guess it will be cheaper and better to get it fixed the next time I am home, in India.

And so, after all that, I ordered the Nuphy Air 75 V2. I talked to Claude, it suggested some keycaps that I would enjoy for writing. It came, and I had kept it in a cupboard for a couple of days. I had wanted to unbox it, type on it, but there were so many other things to do - taxes, home maintenance stuff, walking, reading.

It is such a joy to type on. So much better than the Keychrons. I love it. And it looks good too. I love it. So far so good.

/five things to share

1. Anthropic essentially bans OpenClaw from Claude by making subscribers pay extra by Jay Peters

Using OpenClaw with Claude AI is about to get a lot more expensive, thanks to Anthropic’s new policy changes. Beginning April 4th at 3PM ET, users will “no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw,” according to an email sent to users on Friday evening. Instead, if users want to use OpenClaw with Claude, they’ll have to use a “pay-as-you-go option” that will be billed separate from their Claude subscription.

Capacity management is a real problem for these companies. This past week was the first time I hit a limit while using Claude Code. My usage is fairly nominal with Claude so it was surprising. But they are struggling with managing the increased usage of their tools.

The second thing I wondered was this - the problem with using a service like Claude is they can keep tweaking the limits as they wish and they get all the data. They are in a growth phase now, but they will look to enshittify it at some point in the future. How will things look then?

A scary thought.

2. Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny’s Podcast by Simon Willison

People talk about how important it is not to interrupt your coders. Your coders need to have solid two to four hour blocks of uninterrupted work so they can spin up their mental model and churn out the code. That's changed completely. My programming work, I need two minutes every now and then to prompt my agent about what to do next. And then I can do the other stuff and I can go back. I'm much more interruptible than I used to be.

Kind of goes against the whole deep work principle. Times sure are changing.

3. This even smaller credit card-sized e-reader has one tragic flaw by Andrew Liszewski

I was thrilled to find the X3 fits perfectly on the back of my iPhone 16 Pro, and then once again disappointed to discover its magnets aren’t strong enough to keep it securely in place. Magnetic accessories like PopSockets or the OhSnap Snap Grip have a satisfying “thunk” when attaching them to your phone. Attaching the X3 to my 16 Pro feels more like the devices are exchanging a weak hug. They don’t remain aligned when holding the two together, and on several occasions the X3 fell off my phone while being inserted or removed from a pocket.

I want to buy a phone sized device which can help me read. The problem is what I read. Not just books. I Use RSS to read from the web. That, is the missing component in this and all the other devices like this.

But damn is it tempting.

4. What Are the Routines of So-Called Super-Readers? by Kelsey Rexroat

Super-readers read on lunch breaks and before bed, on buses and in grocery lines, and sometimes—confessed sheepishly—during meetings with the camera off. [..]

Phones and e-readers make this possible, turning idle moments into opportunities to microdose literature. Reading is not scheduled so much as threaded throughout the day.

I find doing this myself.

For this article, the writer did not include people who read audiobooks. I use audiobooks extensively though.

Whatever works.

5. For $200 more, you can get a MacBook Air by Joanna Stern

It was January 2008, and Steve Jobs had just pulled the MacBook Air out of a manila envelope onstage at Macworld.

Within minutes, Windows PC executives everywhere lost their minds. They grabbed the nearest office envelope, tried to shove in their plastic laptops, and tore straight through the paper. Engineers were summoned. Assistants were dispatched for larger envelopes.

A fun read. Through three transitions, the following event remains the same - race to become the MacBook Air.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

For Those We Love

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #98, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I am working on my next book. It will come out before the novel I thought would be the second book. Because I still don't have the story for that one.

It will be a collection of poetry, similar to A Year of Mornings but on a different subject - my mother.

I have written some poems by now for this book. I am writing this book mostly to remember her. I keep finding that there are fewer things I remember about her now. I want to have this thing then. That's the motivation, the why of the book.

And this came out of nowhere. I was not planning on doing this. But that's how these things happen.

Something seeped through as I wrote the last poem. A fear perhaps, that I've had in me since long. I cried. Almost.

There are so many things we don't know about the people we love.

Some of it may have sincere origins - the not wanting to put unnecessary burden on the people we love. I am a father now, I know I would not be putting unnecessary stress on my child.

But you grow out of that over time. The relation a child and a parent share. It blossoms. Once you move out of the house, start working, marry, have kids. There are things that you would not have talked about once, that you may talk about now.

Time. It takes time. And sometimes, you don't have that time.

I read this excellent post on Seth's blog :

If you show up for the audition, your first TEDx talk, your early blog posts, the job interview or your start up hoping to see what happens (“I’ll commit if I get picked”) we can tell.

On the other hand, when it’s clear that you’re going to keep on showing up, it’s an invitation to get aboard now.

Follow-through doesn’t always work. But it always works better than the alternative.

If you keep showing up. If you promise that you will do the work. They will notice that in you, and they will have to give you the chance.

The effort is key though. Committing, before you know.

I finished read Dune this week. It took longer than I would have wanted. But I bought this book on Audible, so I could put in hold, while I read the books from the library.

The why of I picked up this book:

Dune is of course one of the best books written in the sci-fi genre. I had come across this title many times in the past. This, and Hyperion. Which is another series I need to read at some point. So why did I pick this book?

I think it was the movies. I had started to watch it on HBO at some point, without finishing the movie. And I was interested in what I had seen then. Enough to know what the story was. I belong to the camp of books are always better.

And finally, on Friday, a dear friend of ours had a housewarming party. They are from Bihar, and so they had kept the celebration in a similar fashion.

The pooja had started at 17:00. We reached a bit later than that though. Then, after dropping Prerna and Savya at their home, I went out to go pick up the food from a different place.

I have seen these friends work hard for this home. They got it built themselves. There was a lot of work involved in this one.

And I felt so happy for them.

We sat on the ground and had food served to us - bhoj style. The food was onion/garlic free. It was yummy.

/five things to share

1. Live-service games are such a mess even Fortnite is struggling by Andrew Webster

The best-case scenario is that the layoffs at Epic serve as something of a wake-up call for the industry. Previous studio closures and game shutdowns didn’t do much to slow down the release of new live-service games; Sony and Bungie just had a splashy launch for the extraction shooter Marathon, for example. But it’s clear now that live-service games, at least at the size and scale of something like Fortnite, are not a sustainable venture. If even the biggest game is struggling, there’s no longer much of a goal to chase after.

I never got into them. Maybe PUBG mobile at one point. I like my games to be story driven large open adventures.

2. Apple is testing a standalone app for its overhauled Siri by Andrew Liszewski

Apple’s efforts to rebuild its Apple Intelligence AI platform will make its debut at its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 8th. A new version of Siri that transforms the voice assistant into a “systemwide AI agent with deep integration across applications” will be announced at WWDC 2026, according to a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

But why? The only way this would make sense is if Apple as the platform owner does not give the same access to other apps.

I’m not sure if they can build a better app.

3. More qualifying for free daycare

No daycare fee is charged if a family's combined income falls below a minimum income threshold. As of 1 August, that threshold will be 6,399 euros for a family of four, up from the current 5,956 euros.

This is for Vantaa.

4. Apple Maps Might Start Showing Ads

Ads in the Apple Maps app would not be the traditional banner ads that you see on websites, but rather paid search results. For example, a fast food chain could pay Apple to appear near the top of the results when a user searches for "burgers" or "fries." Many similar apps already offer search ads, including Google Maps, Waze, and Yelp.

A bad sign of things to go.

5. OpenAI Discontinuing Sora AI Video App

We're saying goodbye to Sora. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing

I never used Sora. And now its gone from this world. But is it really gone? I keep seeing these shitty AI slop videos on Instagram. I guess someone is making money on those.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Nothing to Say

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #97, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Prerna and I were at the FAUG: Zero to Hero event this week. It was a fun experience. There were five talks covering data, app development, infra, security and the state of azure, with a snack break thrown after the app dev talk. Almost all the talks talked about what you needed to do to get a job. I was not expecting this, when I had registered for the event. I had expected something which talked about the basics of the platform, like a training session.

The last talk of the event was ostensibly about security by Jussi Roine, but it ended up meaning more. Jussi talked about many things - how security landscape has gone from put everything in a private network behind a firewall to now, when nothing is with us.

Identity left the building first, with Entra ID becoming the default and hybrid identities everywhere.
Then, data left the building with all the SaaS applications, and things in the cloud.
Finally, decision making has left the building with all the AI models taking decisions on the data that had left.

Then he went on to talk about the technical stack - giving an example of a new user being onboarded.

Almost out of nowhere then, he had slide which talked about being awesome to work with - not just smooching upto your manager or CEO or whatever, but actually being awesome to work with. That felt like a jolt.

He had less time, all speaker had less time. And maybe, this was a talk for a different place, a place where he had time. As he spent the rest of the time skipping over slides, slides which looked interesting to me. And finally, before ending he talked about these things again. These things that I hold dear to me - about continuous learning, about building things, experimenting, and then sharing it with the world.

He ended with the same slide - be awesome to work with.

When Jussi had started talking, he had that obligatory slide about who he was, and there was a thing there about him being a podcaster with around 300 episodes of his show out in the world.

He circled back to that toward the end of his talk. In the section about just getting started. He said it's awesome most of the time, but during Christma time, or Easter or during these summer months, he often wonders - do I have to put it out this week as well? He then went on to say, if you want to have a podcast, maybe start with one a month.

But that thought, that sentence stayed with me.

Do I have to put it out this week as well?

Nothing happened this week.

Nothing.

We were sick the last week. On Monday and Tuesday, I was working from home, recuperating. On Wednesday I was in office.

I had registered for the FAUG event a long time back. Then, I had asked Prerna to register as well. As the event drew close though, I was not sure if this event would have anything for me. I am not starting in Azure, as Prerna is.

On Tuesday night, I cancelled my spot for the meetup. On Wednesday night, I saw a post from the FAUG page on LinkedIn where they had talked about this event, and how you were welcome to come. And I thought why not?

On Thursday, I logged in a little early, did some work, then left to attend the event with Prerna in tow.

Nothing happened in this week. I did not know what to write about in this edition of the nordletter.

Prerna and I took a couple of walks around Kumpula. One of the walks happened while the sun was shining. It felt nice.

Then on Wednesday, as I was out with Savya on the walk, the wheel broke off from his pram. When I took the pram to the cycle shop, the shop owner said he had no idea how to fix this, but they will try.

I don't know if they will fix it. I hope they do. I will know more on Monday. I love going out on walks with Savya. It's our time. Sometimes, and now that spring is here, Prerna will be tagging along as well.

On Saturday and Sunday, I stayed back with Savya while Prerna went and studied at Oodi. Usually, I would go walk with Savya and then unwind with him at Oodi in the play area. It felt weird not doing that this week.

300 episodes don't happen without recording on the days when you don't have anything to say,

/five things to share

1. I'm OK being left behind, thanks! by Terence Eden

I feel the same way about the current crop of AI tools. I've tried a bunch of them. Some are good. Most are a bit shit. Few are useful to me as they are now. I'm utterly content to wait until their hype has been realised. Why should I invest in learning the equivalent of WordStar for DOS when Google Docs is coming any-day-now?

Starts with talking about the Crypto revolution and Pyramid-scam-esque FOMO they were peddling. There is a similar FOMO now.

2. ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’ by John Gruber

The web is the only medium the world has ever seen where its highest-profile decision makers are people who despise the medium and are trying to drive people away from it. As Bose notes, “A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.” It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites.

I had an interaction with a reader sometime back on a blog I had written about in the problem with read-it-later apps. They had mentioned then that I write what I want and don’t shove ads in your face as you tried to read - which was obvious to me. Reading is the thing you’re here to do.

But I myself don’t read on the web anymore. I use RSS to read. And that provides a great ad-free uniform experience to read.

3. Starfield is coming to the PS5 and getting a pair of major updates in April by Andrew Webster

After lots of rumors, it’s now official: Bethesda’s sci-fi epic Starfield is coming to the PS5. It’ll launch on Sony’s console on April 7th, and that day will also see the debut of two major updates for the game — one paid, one free — a combination that Bethesda describes as “the biggest update to the game since launch.”

It’s official now. This was the one game I wanted to play, but it was available only on Xbox. Happy it’s here now. If only I could make time to play now.

4. Windows 11 is finally getting a movable taskbar by Tom Warren

Windows has had a movable taskbar for decades, but Windows 11 removed this functionality at launch in 2021. I initially hated the new Windows 11 taskbar because it lacked functionality like displaying the time and date on multiple monitors, small icons, or the ability to move the taskbar around. The taskbar was so bad because Microsoft rebuilt it for Windows 10X, which was originally going to run on dual-screen devices before being reworked into Windows 11 for laptops.

I like to have my taskbar to the right. After the upgrade to Windows 11 I could not do that anymore. I felt mildly offed about that then. I’m happy to have this back.

5. Grief and the AI split

AI-assisted coding is revealing a split among developers that was always there but invisible when we all worked the same way. I've felt the grief too—but mine resolved differently than I expected, and I think that says something about what kind of developer I've been all along.

Saw this shared in a million different places. A good essay.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

FAUG Zero to Hero Meetup

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I had fun attending the Zero to Hero FAUG event at Microsoft campus in Keilaniemi. Around 130 people had registered for the event, but there were a few no-shows. I was going to be one of those, not no-shows, but rather cancelled a day-befores. I was not sure what this event would have for me, but I decided to go. Prerna was going anyway and just last night I saw the post from FAUG on Linkedin, and somehow it made me want to go.

There were five talks covering data, app development, infra, security and the state of azure, with a snack break thrown after the app dev talk.

Sakari started the event off in his usual charming style. The takeaway from his talk was the Azure heat map which shows a dynamic map of services Microsoft updates.

Vesa was next, and he talked about new-to-me One Lake and how it acts as the backbone for a bunch of data services. He ended with his trademark - did you learn something.

Next up was Jouni, who had a bunch of interesting questions and answers about this new Agentic Engineering future we all are living in now. The takeaway for me was Azure SRE Agent - which is not ready yet, but is evolving.

Then we broke for snacks - a sandwich and some coffee.

Jukka was up next, talking about the thing that is in my wheelhouse - infra. He talked about Developer Landing Zones which let developers work in a heavily regulated industry and with a little bit of burden on them to figure out network stuff.

At last, we had a talk by Jussi, which was ostensibly about security, but actually about being a good person to work with. That was my takeaway from this talk, that and keep growing, learning and building new things.

We rushed out of the venue then as we were a bit late to pick Savya from his paivakoti.

Opening by Sakari Nahi

State of Azure, but mostly AI
if I’m coding, I want an agent planning. If they’re coding, I want to be reviewing.
Talked about AI coding approaches - vibe coding, spec-driven, context and harness engineering.
Microsoft Foundry enables these approaches (other than vibe-coding)
Learn Foundry
Azure heat map is interesting to track it shows the services Microsoft is updating

Data by Vesa Tikkanen

you can not pick up one tool and be done, instead learn about general tools and metrics that matter to your organisation.
Core mathematical skills are not going anywhere
Learn Microsoft Fabric
One Lake has capability to integrate with different sources including on prem, sql db, etc. Once data is in one lake, it can be shared with everything - fabric, ai, etc.
Delta-Parquet is the common format in which all data is saved
Mirroring copies data from source to one lake
Shortcut is like a symlink to other sources. AI transformations are directly built into OneLake.

App by Jouni Heikniemi

You’re going to be even more full stack than before
loves nethack, keeps rebuilding it - to learn new languages. Now with Agentic Engineering.
Spec-driven development - tell what you want in markdown.
can cause Feature slop - you create all the features.
Every feature is a maintenance liability. Saying no is a core engineering skill now.
Pencil.dev for ux design
Azure SRE agent - to help with ops. Not ready yet, but evolving.

Infra by Jukka Koskelin

plenty of authorities determine the regulations we need to follow - dora and then other baselines and frameworks.
the one talk that was perhaps more in my wheelhouse

Security by Jussi Roine

things changed - ID, data, decisions went to the cloud
we need to understand what the business does/wants
when transition happens - be in the room where decisions are being made - how are ids managed, how to maintain compliance during cutover, etc.
your job is to translate business asks into things you implement

Spring in the Air

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #96, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Spring is here! Really, truly here.

I resumed going out for my walks with Savya this week. On the first day, the roads were still full of snow and slippery in places, especially the patch around the back.

The next day, the weather changed, temperatures shot above zero (1-5 degrees) and the ice started to melt away.

Slowly, over the week we are now at a place where most of the path we walk on is soil and gravel now.

On the third day, while walking past the tram station, under the bridge I saw some kids on their skateboards. And I thought spring is here. And I remembered distinctly having written about spring. I tried to search for it and found this NordLetter - NL4, which was about spring. But not really about spring. Then I searched for spring, and lo and behold I found it!

As I walked further, toward the beach area, I could hear the birds somewhere up above, chirping. The grass had turned green! There was moss on some stones, on tree trunks. There were more people about as well.

And I thought, is this why they call it spring? Because nature springs back to life, from the death of winter?

I had the same feeling as I walked past the kids and all the people who were walking on this trail beside me. Spring is here. Spring everywhere - from the crows sitting on that patch of land, to all the grass visible now that the ice has melt, to all these people out and about. Spring is here, now.

It was a big week in the household.

Prerna went to three women-celebrating events - one organised by Microsoft, one by AWS and the final one by IWF. The last one to support a friend of ours.

There is value in these events. But whenever I have been to any tech events, I have found the lack of women there galling.

Whenever I go to these events, I go sit, listen to the talks, eat and drink a little and come back. Prerna talks with folks at these events. She makes genuine connections with people - following up with them afterward on Linkedin. She met some inspirational people in these meets. And she told them how she felt about them.

It is not easy. I am working on it.

During a Python event, Prerna went and talked to an organiser and wondered the same question about lack of women in the event - there were two other than her. Next she talked to him about getting mentored. He said he did not have time right now, but he will talk to a friend. The next day, Prerna went and had a chat with her mentor at Oodi.

It was awesome! I have wanted a mentor in my life. I guess, everyone does. But I haven't went and said it to someone. Even though asking for help is one of the principles I believe in deeply. I don't find talking to people as easy. But I am working on it. Hopefully, I will find a mentor next.

I finished reading a few books this week - Zen in the art of writing, Die with zero and System Collapse.

I loved Zen in the art of writing. The essay on feeding your muse was particularly interesting to me. From the review -

Feed your muse.

Read a poem a day

Read essays - learn about the smells, sights and tastes people may feel in different places

Read stories and novels - things you want to read and don’t.

TCS has a bibliophile group. I had joined it, but never cared much for the events in it. They asked me to lead a talk, and so I joined a session to know about the format. It was fun. There I got to know about the book - Jaya, a retelling of Mahabharata. I am reading it now and enjoying it. We had watched the Mahabharata series that came out on Star. I find myself placing the scenes from that Mahabharata, while reading this book. Perhaps the first time I am feeling this. It's awesome.

/five things to share

1. What do coders do after AI? - Anil Dash

But there are people who have spent decades honing their craft, committing to memory the most obscure vagaries of this computer processor or that web browser or that one gaming console, all in service of creating code that was particularly elegant or especially high-performing, or just really satisfying to write. There's a real art to it. When you get your code to run just so, you feel a quiet pride in yourself, and a sense of relief that there are still things in the world that work as they should. It's a little box that you can type in where things are fair. It's the same reason so many coders like to bake, or knit, or do woodworking — they're all hobbies where precisely doing the right thing is rewarded with a delightful result.

Compared to those who see this just as a job, are not passionate about it, and seem like people who will be replaced by AI.

2. Software Bonkers by Craig Mod

So after years of pain, I finally sat down last week and started to build my own. It took me about five days. I am now using the best piece of accounting software I’ve ever used. It’s blazing fast. Entirely local. Handles multiple currencies and pulls daily (historical) conversion rates. It’s able to ingest any CSV I throw at it and represent it in my dashboard as needed. It knows US and Japan tax requirements, and formats my expenses and medical bills appropriately for my accountants. I feed it past returns to learn from. I dump 1099s and K1s and PDFs from hospitals into it, and it categorizes and organizes and packages them all as needed. It reconciles international wire transfers, taking into account small variations in FX rates and time for the transfers to complete. It learns as I categorize expenses and categorizes automatically going forward. It’s easy to do spot checks on data. If I find an anomaly, I can talk directly to Claude and have us brainstorm a batched solution, often saving me from having to manually modify hundreds of entries. And often resulting in a new, small, feature tweak. The software feels organic and pliable in a form perfectly shaped to my hand, able to conform to any hunk of data I throw at it. It feels like bushwhacking with a lightsaber.

I have built similar things for myself. I also tend to ask it to create a script instead of doing the thing itself. A script or code that you have seems more than letting CC do something.

3. “This Is Not The Computer For You” · Sam Henri Gold

This computer is not for the people writing those reviews — people who already have the MacBook Pro, who have the professional context, who are optimizing at the margin. This computer is for the kid who doesn’t have a margin to optimize. Who can’t wait for the right tool to materialize. Who is going to take what’s available and push it until it breaks and learn something permanent from the breaking.

Loved reading it. Reminded me of the shitty PC I used to play RE4 on.

4. About the Macbook Neo

The Essence of a Machine by Om

Customers and reviewers alike look at a laptop and ask all sorts of wrong questions. How much RAM? What GPU? Can it run Final Cut in real time? Nobody stops to ask what they actually need it for.

The spec sheet becomes the thing. The benchmark becomes the measure. The webpage becomes a place to extract every cent. Every human relationship on Instagram an opportunity to transact. And somewhere in all that maximization, the person using the machine disappears.

Also, John Gruber’s review was fun to read.

And I can buy one, just like this one, for $700. That’s $170 less than an 11-inch iPad Air and Magic Keyboard. And the Neo comes with a full-size keyboard and runs MacOS, not a version of iOS with a limited imitation of MacOS’s windowing UI. I am in no way arguing that the MacBook Neo is an iPad killer, but it’s a splendid iPad alternative for people like me, who don’t draw with a Pencil, do type with a keyboard, and just want a small, simple, highly portable and highly capable computer to use around the house. The MacBook Neo is going to be a great first Macintosh for a lot of people switching from PCs. But it’s also going to be a great _secondary_Mac for a lot of longtime Mac users with expensive desktop setups for their main workstations — like me.

I have three devices as well - the iPhone 16 Pro, MacBook Air M1, and iPad Air. I so want to use the iPad - it is great as a focus device, but would I miss it if I did not have it anymore? I think not. I have not started drawing on it yet though. Maybe I would after that. I used to read on it, not right now though. But in that case I would have two devices - the Mac and the iPhone. Both of these are essential to me.

5. Finnish sweets giant Fazer plans to enter Indian market

Fazer said it has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Indian branding firm Reliance Consumer Products Limited (RCPL) to make that happen. according to a company press release.

This is the brand of chocolate I take to India whenever I travel back home. Fazer is awesome. Good move.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Holi Week

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #95, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I asked Claude to give me a structure for my NordLetter posts. These posts are either travelogues or about going to events. Mostly.

Claude gave me something which I kind of already did know and what I thought of was the structure for these posts.

You start with the setup - the why of the thing.
Then the confrontation/middle of the thing - the smells of the place, the sights and so on.
And then, finally the conclusion of the thing.

I think this is a good structure to follow.

It was not a given, unlike the years past, that we would be going to the BJPF Holi event this time around. As I had said in NL94 that it had been a busy few weeks since I returned from home.

We did not know if we had it in us to go to this event. We registered for the event on the very last day, eventually deciding it would be a fun outing, and we would not have to cook. That is always a good bonus.

The Holi event was at Leppävaaran nuorisotila. As with every other place, I had to find the parking for our car, after having dropped off Prerna and Savya. It took longer than usual here. I had to drive around the parking space a couple of times, after which I found one spot.

The parking space and the space around the venue was full of slush, the dangerous kind, the see where you put your feet or you may slip kind. I walked through all of it and reached the venue.

I heard, 'Papa', and 'Savya you don't have to go there' almost simultaneously. I took off my shoes, left it at the entrance among other shoes, took off my jacket, put it on a door hinge, and went and hugged Savya.

The cultural part of the event had started already. Chandji was quizzing the kids - what Holi was, how it was celebrated back home, who was Hiranyakashipu, and so on.

I went and picked up a samosa and a tea from the snack/food counter. The venue was basically split in two halves - one a room where the kitchen, some sofas, and a bunch of games were kept, and the other where the cultural event was happening.

I stood at the boundary of the two rooms and ate my samosa and then had my tea. Savya was hovering around my feet. The samosa was awesome. Meanwhile Chandji continued talking about Holi, Holika, lathmar holi among other things.

Prerna called me then, a space had opened up next to her. I went and sat next to her. Chandji invited Kalpanaji on stage and she gave a short talk. Then followed the pre-planned, rehearsed, performances. Both the performances were good - one a devotional dance and the other a song about saving water.

Then Bhavesh ji took the stage and started calling couples on stage to dance - the non-planned part of the evening. It was good fun. Then it was time for the Bihari boys to take the stage. I went along with Savya. We danced on a bunch of songs. Then the women came, and I recorded Prerna dancing. Then joined her on stage to dance some more.

Sudhanshu took some pictures. I took some more pictures. And videos.

We had lunch after that - paneer, pulao, dahi-bhalla and rabri-pua. I loved the first bite of panner that I had. It was magical. It would have went well with flavourless normal rice or jira rice max. It did not work with pulao. But I understand why they had to serve pulao.

Savya had 2-3 puas. He likes puas.

We went out and stood in the slush as the others took care of the venue - sweeping, putting garbage in the bags, cleaning and so on. Then it was time to play Holi!!!

We assembled in the parking area. What started as civilised putting colours on each other's cheeks, turned into a wrestling match of sorts. It was awesome!

I got colour everywhere. Savya was super sleepy by this time. He slept the moment I got the car out of the parking.

We went and bought some groceries after that. Then returned home, had dinner and now, I am writing this, inspired by that Claude comment on how to structure the NordLetter.

The second Holi party happened on the day of actual Holi. A party for two - three if you count Savya, but I think he does not know or care about Holi at this point.

Prerna was in the kitchen since early morning. She made puas. She had made dahi-vadas a day before. Making puas took most of the time. She changed recipes somewhere in the middle. Mixing banana in the batter did the trick. Then rice, dal and mix veg.

We ate. Meanwhile, I continued working.

In the evening, we changed and took some pictures.

The final party of the Holi week happened at Smitaji's place. This happened on a Friday.

This was the type of gathering I enjoy - four families. Enough that you can call it a party, and have conversations.

I talked to a couple of friends about AI, the things they were building if any, and the general state of the world, which, spoiler is in a bit of a disarray right now - thanks, Mr. President.

The food was awesome. Lots of starters. Food is the main thing people go to parties for, that's my theory. The star was the samosa chat. It reminded me of the samosa chat we have in Bihar. It tasted the same. Just the right mix of tangy, spicy and sweet.

I like their home. It is a 1BHK, tastefully decorated. The kitchen is a room of it's own, they have a dining table in the kitchen. The bedroom and hall are fair sized. The bedrooms in Finland are usually small in size. Not theirs, or the one in our home.

It was our second time at their place. We were last here for Diwali. There were more people then, less conversations.

There is an optimal number of people for these things - otherwise people just split into smaller groups and you don't get to talk to everyone. Which is fine, I guess. But not my idea of fun.

The main course after everything was a formality at this point. But it too was great.

/five things to share

1. What We Lose When We Gamify Reading by Marissa Levien

But even if we’re reading more, all this quantifying is forcing readers into harmful patterns. First and most obvious, when we read to hit a goal rather than simply for pleasure, everybody reads as fast as possible to hike up their numbers. It’s like the entire reading public is a high school freshman trying to cram To Kill a Mockingbird at midnight the day before the assignment is due. We technically finish the book, but we retain nothing. Ask someone what they thought of A Guardian and a Thief, they’ll say, “Who knows? That was ten books ago.” More worrisome, when we read fast, we experience nothing. The book does not have a chance to burrow into our heart.

I have felt this once or twice - not often, but enough like reading The secret of secrets at 1.5x. That was driven more by the duration of time I had the book borrowed from library for (14 days).

The second problem is: it’s less and less likely that A Guardian and a Thief is even on a person’s list if they’re shooting for a tally of, say, one hundred books a year. If we’re trying to read fast, the best strategy is to pick books that read easy. Generally this means books that are prose-light, plot-forward, and propulsive. It means we’ll forego a Moby Dick or a Middlemarch in favor of five declensions of A Court of Thorns and Roses. (Before the pitchforks and torches emerge, I should mention that I adore fun, propulsive books. We need these kinds of stories in our life, for the joyous escape of it. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read A Court of Thorns and Roses. I’m saying you shouldn’t only read it.)

Again, not faced this problem, but I can see it happening. I usually chose what to read next thanks to lists. What I add to the list is dependent on a bunch of factors - but mostly is it interesting?

I don’t have a goal though. I am happy with whatever I end up reading. Like I read more books in January because I had time to read. There are more important things in life than reading.

2. Console exclusives might be making a comeback by Andrew Webster

The near future of game consoles could look a lot like the past. Once a hallmark of the industry, over the last few years console-exclusive games have steadily become rare, as the likes of Sony and Microsoft experimented with offering titles on multiple platforms. Heck, who knows what an Xbox even is anymore? But it seems that the experiments haven't paid off. Signs are pointing to the return of exclusives, as companies lean on other ways to entice new audiences.

I was happy when Microsoft started offering their games on PS5. I was looking forward to play Starfield on PS5.

I never cared for Sony games on PC, because I have a PS5.

I think games should be like Podcasts, play wherever you play your games. Consoles will have a future in such a world. They provide excellent value for those who don’t care about tinkering with their gaming systems. It’s plug and play. That has a ton of value.

3. Say hello to MacBook Neo - Apple

Apple’s all-new MacBook features a durable aluminum design, a stunning 13-inch Liquid Retina display, the power of Apple silicon, and all-day battery life — all for the breakthrough starting price of just $599

The Neo does not appeal to me. For one, the display has huge bezels. The RAM is fixed at 8GB, the storage started at 256 GB, goes up to 512GB. The price was a surprise to me, in a pleasant way.

But I loved the announcement video and I think it is meant for the students - those who would pick up a Chromebook perhaps.

This may be an excellent device for schools. A good device against the chromebooks. I want a Pro. Maybe the next one with touch. I may get that. We shall see. I don’t have any reason to. My M1 runs fine.

4. Apple gives in to temptation and renames its CPU cores

Apple announced its new Fusion Architecture today as well, which allows the company to mix and match different “chiplets” in a single package. This is another esoteric chip thing (is there any other kind?) but it has real ramifications for the future of Apple’s chip designs. It means that Apple can be a bit more modular with its designs, building a standard CPU set (for the M5 Max and Pro) while offering two different GPU variants with 20 (Pro) and 40 (Max) cores. I’m also curious what this means for a future Ultra chip, assuming there will be one whenever the M5 Mac Studio is announced.

I had the same thought. This is the same architecture we were hearing rumours about, some years back. Maybe memory upgrades won’t cost that much now.

5. What Do Social Media Companies Fear? Time Management. - Cal Newport by Study Hacks

When you’re following an intentional schedule, your efforts are oriented toward goals that you find important. You also feel a satisfying sense of self-efficacy. These realities engage your long-term reward system, which can override the urges generated by its short-term counterpart, dissipating the drive for quick gratification from activities like glancing at your phone.

This seems to put too much of an onus on individuals and very few of the responsibility on these social media companies. The products are addictive by design. We can’t keep expecting people to not be enticed by the product.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Birthdays and Claude

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I am trying a new thing here. This is a meta beginning of sorts - a look behind the curtain if you will.

I usually start writing a NordLetter on a Saturday. I have a 2-3 hour window during which I write whatever I want to write. I upload the images on CloudFlare, then schedule the post on Buttondown, and finally post the NordLetter on my website.

It is hectic. Especially with the looming Sunday deadline. Sometimes I don't know what I want to say in advance. Which to be honest is most NordLetters. I don't like that pressure.

There is this newsletter I follow - Installer, among others, which has a section that lists out things their readers are into. The callout for that goes out every Thursday.

And so I thought, let's bring some professionalism into this. If they start drafting their newsletter on a Thursday, I can too.

And so, here we are.

While I was in India, and Prerna was the one dropping him at his päiväkoti, he was not crying. In fact, he would be laughing, and waving her goodbye.

I am not so lucky.

For most of last week, since I've returned, whenever I would drop Savya at his päiväkoti, he would cry. Which is not new. He used to cry while I was dropping him at his päiväkoti. The anomaly was these three weeks while I was in India.

Anyway, on Tuesday, as I went and dropped him at his daycare. I heard a cacophony of voices coming from inside the play area.

Savya.
Savya.
Savya.

The other kids in his Sade group, were calling out his name - laughing as they did so. As I put Savya down, the little babies started making their way out of the play area toward him. All the while laughing and calling Savya out.

Savya.
Savya.
Savya.

I smiled at that.

Savya was laughing that day as I left him with his teachers in the play area. I was laughing when I got in my car and drove away. Oh, the joy!

We had celebrated Savya's birthday on 18th Feb. Editions of NordLetter came and went, but I did not say anything about it. I guess that says as much about it as anything I could have said.

I love the decoration we did. It came out really well. One aspect of living here, and maybe even in India now, is that the decoration is still there on the wall. Every day I look at it and smile a bit. It was the same with the decoration for Prerna's birthday or mine. We have three Happy Birthdays up in our home now - two in the hall and one in this secondary bedroom/study-room/work-from-home-room.

There was good food, a lot of children - and I don't think I talked to but one person, the father of a friend of Savya's from his päiväkoti. There was a lot of shouting and running around. Plus the bound to happen tussle over who gets the new cool car.

I guess that's how children's birthday parties go!

It has gotten slippery here these past couple of days. We had great fluffy snow in the morning and then, it started raining in the evening. I had gone to pick up Savya and then thought to myself, this will be a mess soon.

And guess what, it was. It became. Whatever.

I took the long way out today when I was bringing Savya back from the daycare. Somehow I went down through the danger route. Not back though.

Allowed me to have a bit of a walk too.

Another thing I did over the weekend was that I used Claude Cowork to fix my Obsidian vault. Obsidian is where I write. Obsidian is where I think.

These were things that I had on my task-list for a few months. To be clear, I could have done these things by myself at some point. I was originally planning to do these things with Claude Code, but again never got around to it.

Claude Cowork provides a nice UI to Claude Code, perhaps making it a little more accessible. You basically point Claude to a folder and tell it whatever you want it to do.

Since, the Obsidian vault is basically just markdown files, it works like magic.

I asked Claude to:

Fix the metadata on all posts.
Create an archive from my daily notes and remove the daily notes after the fact.
Make it come up with any links from all the micro posts I keep writing.

It did those things surprisingly quickly. Next up I want to run some open source models locally. It is again something that I have been wanting to do since a long time. My Mac has just 16GB RAM though, so it would not be very good. It will just be a PoC of sorts.

Fun times ahead.

/five things to share

1. Speaking is quick, listening is slow - interconnected

The human uses voice and the computer uses screens. I mean, it’s rare that my phone is beyond peripersonal space so we can assume it is only rarely not present. A screen is way higher in terms of information bandwidth than listening. Let’s use it!

Super cool idea. We are always on our phones with us. We can use both - the screen and voice. The software needs to be smart though, to understand intent.

It makes sense why Jony and OpenAI are building their device.

2. Anthropic accuses DeepSeek and other Chinese firms of using Claude to train their AI by Emma Roth

DeepSeek, which caused a stir in the AI industry for its powerful but more efficient models, held over 150,000 exchanges with Claude and targeted its reasoning capabilities, according to Anthropic. It’s also accused of using Claude to generate “censorship-safe alternatives to politically sensitive questions about dissidents, party leaders, or authoritarianism.” In a letter to lawmakers last week, OpenAI similarly accused DeepSeek of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other U.S. frontier labs.”

I remember there being similar comments being made when Deepseek had first come out. But hey, you did not ask for permission when you trained on the world’s data.

All this fear mongering and for what?

Also, I’m in a weird position re: Anthropic. I use the Pro plan and am their customer. With the way things are you are bound to feel some sense of loyalty toward the company. You may feel the need to defend them. They’re better than OpenAI!

Not really.

The way these companies have built their tools is generally shitty. The products are useful though. Make of that what you will. I had read recently a post by Cory Doctorow which talked about this.

Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what's better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust:

That’s where I stand. My dream is to be able to run these tools locally. I don’t want to send my data out to these companies.

3. Continue local sessions from any device with Remote Control - Claude Code Docs by

Remote Control connects claude.ai/code or the Claude app for iOS and Android to a Claude Code session running on your machine. Start a task at your desk, then pick it up from your phone on the couch or a browser on another computer.

Seems interesting. Not everything I have runs on a remote git repo.

I have ideas about how I want to use it for my obsidian vault. But I have not been able to make time to start playing with this there yet.

I have loved using CC on web. Asking it to do things as the ideas come to me, from wherever. This would be like that. So fun.

There are limitations - like not being able to start a new session, but that’s OK.

Before I let it lose on my obsidian vault, I need to have my backup strategy in place though.

4. Pluralistic: The whole economy pays the Amazon tax

Without billionaires who would happily support concentration camps in their back yards if it means saving a dollar on their taxes, fascism would still be a fringe movement.

Loved this line. All movements need money. That money must come from somewhere.

The crux of this article is this - Amazon forces sellers to raise prices everywhere, if they want to raise prices on Amazon, because of the cut Amazon takes.

5. Phantom Obligation

Email's unread count means something specific: these are messages from real people who wrote to you and are, in some cases, actively waiting for your response. The number isn't neutral information. It's a measure of social debt.

But when we applied that same visual language to RSS (the unread counts, the bold text for new items, the sense of a backlog accumulating) we imported the anxiety without the cause.

I have wondered about this myself. My current practice involves reading what I want to read and then marking everything else as read with prejudice. It’s not ideal. There is this feeling of guilt I have, of a task that needs to be done, quite like email.

There should be a different design, a different paradigm. Maybe I should write my thoughts in a place.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

An Anniversary Visit to Porvoo

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #93, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

The past week was a busy one. I travelled back on 13th Feb. 14th Feb was Valentine's. 15th was our 3rd anniversary. On 16th I rejoined the office - which had its own challenges. 18th was Savya's second birthday.

Busy week.

I wrote a valentine's day poem for Prerna on the flight back to Helsinki. We had just had a conversation about Valentines day in Finland and the poem just came to me.

We have been super busy with travel and Savya, so it was nice doing this thing for Prerna. We were so tired for our anniversary that we ended up cutting the cake on 21:30 on 15th. We had wondered out loud if we even needed to.

I think we do. We think we do. The small things matter.

a trip to Porvoo

For our anniversary, Prerna wanted a drive to Porvoo to visit the Runeberg home museum. And so, we did.

Throughout winter, I have been scared to drive on snow, so we haven't gone anywhere, outside of the trips to Espoo.

This was a nice drive. There were snow covered pine trees on both sides of the road. The road was cleared and dry most of the way to Porvoo. I have driven in snowy conditions once this season and that is not fun.

We had been to Porvoo in the summer of last year. We had visited the old town, had lunch at Cafe Kiva and picked some souvenirs at a trinket shop. It had been a fun trip.

We drove straight to Runeberg Koti, parked our car on the side of the road. Savya had fallen asleep on the way over, so we put him in his pram, and made our way to the house/museum.

about the Runebergs

Johan Ludvig Runeberg is Finland's national poet. He was a Swedish-speaking poet, writer and academic.

His most important work is Fänrik Ståls sägner (The Tales of Ensign Stål), published in two parts in 1848 and 1860. It's a collection of poems romanticizing the Finnish soldiers and common people who fought in the Finnish War of 1808–1809 against Russia. The opening poem, Vårt land ("Our Land"), became the Finnish national anthem. The way Runeberg portrayed ordinary Finns — farmers, soldiers, everyday people — as noble, brave, and deeply tied to their land gave Finns a sense of shared identity and pride at a time when Finland was a Grand Duchy under Russian rule.

Frederika Runeberg was his wife, and Finland's first female writer. She wrote novels while Johan wrote mostly poems. The famous Runeberg pastry is attributed to her, though her original recipe was lost through the ages. More people (like Prerna's Finnish teacher) now consider her to be more talented than her husband.

trip continued

The Runeberg Koti sits on Aleksanterinkatu in the old town of Porvoo, right in the heart of the charming wooden town district. We had visited nearby places in our last trip. Not that Porvoo is that large.

It is a wooden house, painted in yellow. There are accompanying houses and a garden that is open in the summers. The house has old furniture from Runeberg's time adorning it.

The wonderful staff at the Koti, helped us get in through the wheelchair entrance, the main entrance had the stairs and no lift or easy access. We bought the tickets at the museum shop, passed the main entrance, left our jackets, and shoes in the hallway and then were on our way.

The kitchen was small. There was an accompanying room/cabinet full of utensils from their time.

The fox skin chamber was next. There were ten fox skin pelts on the wall along with hunting guns. But that was not the interesting part for me. It was the three bookshelves full of books and papers.

Then came Frederika's room. This was her study. There was a bust of her child in a corner, among other paintings and objects.

Next was the massive hall. There were large paintings on the walls. The furniture was a wedding gift from Frederika's mother. So many years, and it was still here. There were more busts and sculptures in this room. The drawing room had these nice big leafy plants. All, cuttings from Frederika's plants.

We slipped into the bedroom next. The bed felt small, but we realised it had a construction which allowed to be elongated as needed. There was a mirror on the wall which allowed Mr. Runeberg to do bird-watching in his olden days.

The final two rooms were the guest room and the exhibition room. If the bedroom was red, the guest room was blue. It felt nicer than the bedroom. There was a display case that contained their personal items. The exhibition room had a table with many Finnish words and sentences. Prerna took what she knew and put it in one of the frames, while I sat at one of the chairs and looked at the books on the bookshelf.

All through the house, in almost every room, I found a table and a chair of some sort. I had fun imagining Mr and Mrs Runeberg sitting at the table, looking out, writing.

We bought a trinket from the store and were on our way out after that. We took a bite at Yatra - momos, samosa and a sizzler. We talked about what we had seen, how the home had felt. The food was OK. Most of my attention was on making sure Savya did not break anything.

Back in Helsinki, we went on a walk, came back and then cut the cake. I managed to get Savya to laugh and then click a picture. It came out nice!

How do you celebrate your anniversaries? If you have them, that is.

/five things to share

1. Japan Is What Late-Stage Capitalist Decline Looks Like by Ellie

Japan’s conditions create a map of where the U.S. is heading unless significant structural changes occur. We’re seeing intensified overwork culture in a stagnant job market, parasocial intimacy becoming a substitute for human connection, and convenience replacing domestic life. There is slow collapse of dating, shrinking fertility rates, and a pattern of young adults dropping out of social life under economic pressures.

Similar pressures exist in India as well, where all you’re doing is sleeping, getting up, going to work, coming back, sleeping and so on.

Finland is better at this. For now.

2. Memberships Year Seven, Nuclear Bombs, Solar Power — Roden Newsletter Archive by Craig Mod

Laptops kinda ruined this. I find it hard to focus on my laptop, the wondermachine it now is. So: I’m typing this on my “modern” word processor — the cheapest iPad Mini I could find, stripped of anything fun, with an Apple Bluetooth keyboard, in Obsidian. It’s been working pretty well for me. iPadOS is so bad (at this point they’d need to do a full reset to make it feel whole and / or interesting) that it makes doing any kind of “fluid computing” impossible. So it’s best to just stay in Obsidian and write.

I was thinking about this just yesterday as I was writing the last nordletter on my Mac. For the past month I had carried just my iPad and the Logi keyboard with me to India.

iPadOS is bad - just jarring enough, to break the flow, that you can continue to write. I find less desire to do something else on the iPad, not so on my Mac. It’s easier to find something to read, something to browse on the Mac.

3. The Only Moat Left Is Money - Elliot Bonneville by

Reach is also gravitational. Past some threshold it accumulates without you — posts find people, people find posts, the thing feeds itself. Below the threshold, identical effort produces nothing. Same quality, same idea, same work. Zero. Not because it was bad. Because you showed up on the wrong side of the line.

4. OpenAI’s first ChatGPT gadget could be a smart speaker with a camera by Jay Peters

OpenAI's first hardware release will be a smart speaker with a camera that will probably cost between $200 and $300, according to The Information. The device will be able to recognize things like "items on a nearby table or conversations people are having in the vicinity," The Information says, and it will have a Face ID-like facial recognition system so that people can purchase things.

Sounds like the iPad on a swivel home device Apple has been rumoured to be making since quite some time. Given Apple’s manufacturing chops they are more likely to turn it into a hit product.

5. PILK #3 | Facebook is absolutely cooked by

The first post was the latest xkcd (a page I follow). The next ten posts were not by friends or pages I follow. They were basically all thirst traps of young women, mostly AI-generated, with generic captions.

Not on Facebook, other than when I have to log in to get to the marketplace. I decided to scroll my feed after this. It is different from what this post talks about. Not heavy on AI generated slop, though IG is like that. Reels upon reels of AI generated story sort of things - of grandmas being eaten by tigers, that sort of thing.

The thing Zuck wants after all. And what Zuck wants, we all get one way or the other.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

This Valentines Day

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

You said, in Finland,
they celebrate friendships
as well, on this day,
in this week.

It’s love that they celebrate,
regardless of form.

Let us celebrate that,
this valentine’s.
Let us celebrate,
our friendship.

Friendships are different,
from what we share usually.
Friendships are lighter though.
Less burdensome.
Lesser expectations too.
They provide a similar relief though,
a similar sort of love.

Let’s celebrate that too,
this valentine’s.
Being able to talk,
without worrying too much.
Being able to laugh,
at mostly stupid stuff.
Being able to dance,
with or without the music.

Let’s celebrate it all.
Let’s celebrate our friendship,
this valentine’s day.

Friends

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #92, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

This one arrives a little later than usual. I was travelling back to Finland this week. And that has meant among other things, a lot of things to write about, but not that much time to write those things in. And so, here we are on the Air, at 22.46 on a Sunday. A Sunday that happens to be my 3rd anniversary.

I love you Prerna.

friends

We are a group of five friends. We were six in college, but then one went away and well what can you do.

What I try to do is call everyone of these people once a week - Saturdays usually. Usually one or two of these friends picks up and then we have a little chat.

After leaving college, we were lucky enough that all five of us were in the same city - Delhi - for a time. We would meet once every month at Sarthak's place or mine. We would sit, eat, talk, play some Counter Strike.

These meetings took time and effort to set up. We were all working now. I would get angry if someone was not able to make it. Eventually, I realised it did not matter. We all had our lives. We all had priorities. So, the thing we agreed on was this - we would have a meeting once a month, we would publish it, and then if you could make it, great, if not, then that was also fine.

That has been my principle for these calls as well. Great if you can make it. Fine if you can't. I will talk to whoever picks up.

Saurabh, the friend who got married now, was not in any of these calls since maybe the past two years. We would often talk about what was going on. If anyone knew what was going on.

Sarthak and I met him for a bachelor's of sorts a few days before his marriage. It felt as if we had just picked up from where we had left of. He was so happy, visibly so. I was so happy to share this space with them.

Uchit arrived from Japan on 8th. We met on 10th, a day before Saurabh's wedding reception in Delhi. On an unconnected note, receptions are boring. Nothing happens. You eat, drink and maybe dance. Have cocktail parties instead.

Back to Uchit. I am physically meeting Uchit after five years, maybe more. We talk on phone. But the stars never seemed to have aligned in the past. They did this time.

I had messaged Sarthak in advance that we will have a bonfire on his roof. A thing we used to do in winter months in Delhi. There are so many memories I have of these meetings.

So we did. We sat around a bonfire. And we talked. There was a nip in the air around us. But the fire provided the requisite warmth. And we were happy.

Someone said that we don't get to do this anymore. Maybe it was me. I don't have friends I can sit around a bonfire with. I don't have friends I can bare my soul to. And I miss that. I could talk about anything with these friends of mine.

And just for a little while, I was back in that little pocket of time, when I could. And it was pure bliss.

The return to Finland was a tense affair.

I had left home three hours before my flight. I should have kept more. The Indigo counter was full of people. I tried talking to some people, but they just said, they will call out when end time is near.

They did. My luggage was over limit. 32 kgs is the absolute maximum they will allow in planes. I had to do an emergency shuffle. I was sweating and angry. In the end I had to carry a bunch of books in my arms through immigration and security.

The flight was delayed by around 90 mins. Half of my layover was spent in the plane. I spent the rest rushing through the Istanbul airport. Thankfully, I did not have to go from F zone to A.

I landed in Finland around six in the evening. I got into a cab and was home by around 19:30. I changed, ate a little and was in the sauna by 20:00.

The sauna felt nice at the end of an approximately 16 hour travel.

It's nice to be back here. The snow just makes the dark months a bit brighter.

/five things to share

1. Stop generating, start thinking - localghost

In the wake of the Horizon scandal, where innocent Post Office staff went to prison because of bugs in Post Office software that led management to think they’d been stealing money, we need to be thinking about our software more than ever: we need accountability in our software.

Nice write up. I see the same points that I’ve seen elsewhere. I don’t think it’s the engineers driving this revolution though. It’s the business leaders doing that. There is a fomo in the industry - people are committed to AI without having any use case for it.

Regarding accountability it will fall on the reverse-centaurs, the people left to deal with the large amounts of AI generated work. Nobody will say Claude made a mistake, it’s the employees who made mistakes by not verifying what was generated. It will not be a great place, but we are barreling toward it.

2. How iPhones Made a Surprising Comeback in China by Zeyi Yang

But Apple’s product strategy wasn’t the only important factor here. The iPhone 17 was priced low enough to qualify for a massive electronics subsidy program launched by the Chinese government last year. To help stimulate the economy, Beijing spent some $43 billion subsidizing domestic purchases of electronics, appliances, and cars in 2025. Smartphones sold for less than 6,000 RMB (about $860) were eligible for up to a 15 percent discount. Apple listed the iPhone 17 in China for 5,999 RMB, ensuring price-sensitive buyers would be able to benefit from the government policy.

A combination of good product, subsidies by the government and people being in the upgrade cycle since their last phones were the iPhone 13 series.

3. Vibe coding Nothing’s apps is fun, until you try to make them useful by Robert Hart

The second issue is a potentially fatal hurdle for a project like this: me. I’ve been reporting on AI tools for years, and one pattern keeps repeating—no matter how capable a system is, the hardest part is knowing how to use it to its potential. I immediately ran into that using Nothing’s Essential App Builder. It seems very capable and has great potential, but I didn’t always know what I wanted, and when I did, I didn’t always know how to ask for it. An ecosystem built on vibes is a great idea, but sometimes vibes aren’t enough.

Good to know that there may yet be a future for us techies.

4. Pluralistic: Europe takes a big step towards a post-dollar world (11 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Once Trump tried to steal Greenland, it became apparent that the downsides of the dollar far outweigh its upsides. Last month, Christine Lagarde (president of the European Central Bank) made a public announcement on a radio show that Europe "urgently" needed to build its own payment system to avoid the American payment duopoly, Visa/Mastercard

5. Threads’ new ‘Dear Algo’ feature lets you tell the algorithm what you want to see by Jay Peters

To use the feature in a public post, type “Dear Algo” and then a description of what you want Threads’ algorithm to show you more of. Once you make your request, the change will stick for three days so you can see how it changes your feed. If you want to see more of the new content in your feed over the long term, interact with those posts.

It sounds like a good feature - a good use of LLMs. It is still opaque though.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

The Wedding Edition

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #91, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I like going to weddings. I like the food - obviously, but I also like looking at the actual wedding - the rituals, the decorations, the different characters involved in turning it into a success, dancing in the baarat and so on.

We are a group of five close friends (brothers?). I have known them from the first year of college (and one from the second year). One theory I have about college friendships being the ones that last, is because we all grow together during this time - we get more responsibilities, we grow.

I have grown with these people.

Four of us are already married. The last remaining friend got married on 5th Feb.

It was a 2 states situation - the girl from Karnataka, the boy from Uttarakhand. It was also a destination wedding of sorts - the boy’s family (11 of them) travelled from Delhi to Sirsi, plus the three of us and two more people.

Sarthak and I had took a flight from Delhi to Bangalore and then drove from Bangalore to Sirsi with Pankaj.

At the T3 terminal there is a nice bronze statue of a man in the different poses of the surya-namaskar. Not a new installation, mind you. I had seen it earlier as well, the difference this time around was that I have been doing surya-namaskars for the last three years now. So there was a little bit of recognition and fondness there.

The drive to Sirsi was good for most of the time. The last 60 odd kilometres were a mess. The entire section was under construction. We were running late and it had gotten dark by the time we got to this section. All the content in our stomach got thoroughly churned.

We reached Sirsi at twelve in the night. Saurabh was waiting for us at the parking place, holding the door, making sure we had a place to park the car. We did, picked up our stuff and went to sleep.

The thing about South Indian weddings is that they start early (we had to be ready by 7:40) and end by lunch time.

I could not sleep. The thing that I had been dreading for the entire trip happened now, at the worst opportune time. My stomach had gone rogue. I kept turning in place, waking up my friends a couple of times. Finally, around 04:30 I managed to sleep. At 06:30 I was up.

The benefit of it being a day wedding was lost on me. I was as sleepless as I would be in a night wedding.

The wedding was held at a hall in a temple complex. This was a five minute drive from where we were staying. Sirsi is a small town. We had brought a speaker with us per the groom’s request. We took it out, put up ‘Azeemo shaan shehenshah’ as our friend got down from his room. We danced a bit to some Garhwali songs, finishing up with Lungi dance - the three of us were in lungis after all.

We had a similar smaller duration dance at the venue. But the girl’s father came and requested us to enter and we did. I remember dancing for two hours in front of Uchit’s in-laws, ditto for Sarthak’s wedding. My friends danced at my wedding for two hours. This was different here. Overall, the wedding went very smoothly.

We entered the venue after that. It had seats arranged in two columns with the stage at the head. After some rituals involving the groom we were told - breakfast awaits. The meal room had many rows of tables and chairs, with the people sitting on two adjacent rows facing each other. The breakfast was served on a banana leaf. Men and mostly women went around carrying idlis, vadas, sambhar, and chutneys. It was delicious. It reminded me of how bhoj used to happen in my village back in the day. There was a certain charm in that. Sitting on the ground, and having people serve you. If it was your function, you wanted to be the one serving. It was a thing.

The marriage started in earnest after that. I did not understand what was being said, everything was in Kannada. I caught translations from time-to-time, as the bride’s side explained certain things. But I could draw parallels between how things happen on our side. How some things were the same and some different.

Before the varmala ceremony, for example, they had kept a white cloth between the bride and the groom as the priest chanted some mantras. I was standing there waiting for the cloth to drop and capture the photo of the groom looking at the bride.

This was not standard in our weddings, but in the north, all of ours weddings have been Punjabified in that way. We have all picked things from the Punjabi weddings. Which is good in certain ways and tiring in others.

There was none of that here. The pressure of pre-choreographed dance steps was thankfully absent.

Some other rituals followed. The bride and the groom put rings on the other’s fingers. The groom put those rings in the fingers of her feet. I was asked to do this in our wedding. It was a fun thing that drew many comments from Prerna’s side. None of that here. Then they walked over some pan leaves kept on the floor. This must have some significance. In my wedding Prerna had to knock over some soil figurines which also had a significance.

Finally, Saurabh took a ring and put sindoor in the bride’s maang (parting of hair). This too was different from how we did things in my wedding. We put a lot of sindoor in Bihar, from the nose up to the maang.

Then, they moved from the stage to the ground and the wedding continued around fire. I took a chair and sat in front of the pair. I was a little surprised that I got the view. Once I did, I did not move from my place. Whenever the pair caught my eye, I kept reminding them to smile. The pictures remain through out your lives after all.

Saurabh would lose his smile from time to time. The bride was smiling though.

After the wedding was done, we left for lunch in the same room. We ate on the banana leaf again. One after the other, the servers kept adding items to the plate. Finally, as the rice came, we were ready to eat.

It was again a sumptuous meal. I love South Indian food. Rasam warms your soul in a way nothing else does. I enjoyed also the sweet dish.

They received guests on stage after that. Which was not something that made sense to me. The bride’s makeup was a bit off thanks to all the sindoor. But then, sometimes weddings in the north get delayed because so many people want to take pictures. Make of that what you will.

We took the same bus from Sirsi to the airport in Hubbaali. It was through a different road which was not broken. For some reason no shops were open, so we could only stop for tea after reaching Hubbaali.

The airport at Hubbaali is small, though work is ongoing to expand it. I heard somewhere that there are six daily flights here - all operated by Indigo. I did not mind waiting as the rest of the people went through the security check. I would not be able to do this at Delhi airport for example.

I watched Rebel Moon on my way back. It is a bad movie. I could see what the director/writer wanted to do, what the story beats were, and that’s never a good sign. I finished the second part after reaching home and it was worse than the first part. After watching it, I realised how difficult it is to tell a good story even in these bombastic action genre movies.

/five things to share

1. Anthropic didn’t want us to know that they were destroying millions of books to feed their software - Lithub

Project Panama capitalized on that loophole. Anthropic spent a bundle at libraries, online secondhand stores, and used bookstores like The Strand to build out a massive library—the Post’s article includes images of huge warehouses filled with books. Anthropic then hired “an experienced document scanning services vendor to convert from 500,000 to two million books over a six-month period,” according to the proposal sent out to vendors.

Two things here.

Who names these things? Project Panama?
This just seems so bad. It makes it visceral in a way scraping off the web isn’t. They literally rip apart the books after they’re done scanning. I’m sure they are not alone in this.

2. Six Selfish Reasons to Have Kids by Kevin Kelly

Children are entertaining, much better than any other streaming option you might pay for. The questions they ask, their antics, watching them play, witnessing or being the recipient of their creativity, sometimes on a daily basis, is the best streaming there is. Their creativity is often inspiring. They can be creative in negative ways, too, but in all ways they will not be boring, and they are right there in your presence.

3. Claude Sonnet 5 Is Imminent — And It Could Be a Generation Ahead of Google by Alex Morgan

Industry insiders point to cost-efficiency as a likely centerpiece. Inference expenses may be reduced by half compared to current market leaders—a shift that could reshape how organizations integrate and scale AI technologies. For many, these savings are just as crucial as technical prowess, since lower costs can unlock AI access for businesses and individuals who once found it unattainable.

What came out was Opus 4.6 instead. And GPT 5.2.

4. Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now by Simon Willison

Moltbook is Facebook for your Molt (one of the previous names for OpenClaw assistants).

It's a social network where digital assistants can talk to each other.

I can hear you rolling your eyes! But bear with me.

The Facebook, Zuck wants to build.

Moltbook went from a cool place to a cybersecurity hellhole pretty fast. But that’s to be expected for anything to do with AI. It moves so damn fast.

5. SpaceX wants to put 1 million solar-powered data centers into orbit by Terrence O'Brien

SpaceX filed a request with the FCC on Friday seeking approval to put a constellation of 1 million data center satellites into orbit. While the FCC is unlikely to approve a network that expansive, SpaceX’s strategy has been to request approval for unrealistically large numbers of satellites as a starting point for negotiations.

This feels wrong. Like we are closing the doors on exploration. Like we will be stuck on a worsening planet.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Write a Letter to Your Child

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

From Bird by bird.

When stuck, or unsure what to write, write it as a letter to your child. Tell them whatever you want to tell them, however you want to tell them.

That might just be enough to get you writing and finding the story.

Lunches and Monkeys

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #90, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Are there fewer things to write about?

I started reading Bird by bird last week. One of the exercises in the beginning of the book (and this is not a book about exercises by the way) was to think about the lunches you’ve had in school and write about those. As an exercise. Writing of course is different from the dreams one has of being a published author. Writing is a daily thing - a practice. This book is about the lessons and improving the practice.

While reading this section about lunches, I thought about my own lunches at school. We did not have specific lunch rooms in our school. You either ate lunches in the classroom, or the dustbowl that was our playground. We were very health conscious then, burning all our lunch calories, running around the dustbowl, till the bell rang and we had to be back in our classrooms.

All of us had similar lunches. A few had different lunch-boxes. One for example had a little maze game in the cover. I remember wanting that as a child. I always had tasty food in my box. But it was mostly roti and sabzi in my lunch, sometimes sandwiches. I don’t remember too many of these lunches. Do you? Eating lunches was not the highlight of our days.

There is one memory I have though, of a particular piece of lunch someone else used to bring.

I had a friend. He would have this crust-removed white bread cooked in milk. It was sweet and so damn yummy. There was no youtube in those days. My mother did not know how to make it. She could not google it. I remember she would sit during the tapings of Khana Khazana making notes on some of the things she wanted to make.

Do you have memories of your lunches in school? Think about those, write about those.

Lunches in Finland are different. We are older now. I still carry my lunch box with me, as do some others. But I see many Finns sitting in the cafeteria eating their lunches. It is the norm here that they don’t bring lunches. Some may. But most don’t.

We sit on a table, and share our food. I have friends from different parts of India. I get to enjoy their food. They get to enjoy mine.

Most Indians eat lunch around 13:00. Most Finns start around 11:00 and are done by 12:00. By the time we get down to eat, the cafeterias are mostly empty.

In Finland, every morning, I get up, freshen up, take out my mat and do yoga.

While on vacation, I have tried to keep a similar routine.

For the longest time, if I could not do yoga at the fixed time (early morning) I would not do it. It felt wrong somehow.

It took me several rounds of Prerna yelling at me, to be fine with that. With doing yoga a bit later on some days. Here, I wake up late. Once I do though, I go out get the mat and do my yoga.

Today, while doing pranayama, I realised my mind did not feel rushed. In Finland, by the time I get to the pranayama, I have half an hour or so left to get ready, take Savya and leave. My mind, no matter how much I try, is filled with a ticking clock. Even during the weekends, there are things to be done.

I would often wonder, in passing, how it would feel to do this if I did not have to be somewhere, do something.

I know now. It’s nice!

The thing I am here to do, the main thing, well actually there were two, maybe more.

OK.

One of the things I am here to do - my friend’s marriage, is this week. He is marrying a Kannadiga, in Sirsi. I will be travelling to Bangalore on the 3rd, then travel to Sirsi with my friends - a road trip of sorts. It will be fun.

I shopped for the outfit for the wedding while Prerna was here.

Last week three of us (the other two are in Japan and Bangalore) met to celebrate his wedding. A bachelor’s party of sorts, though I would have wanted it to happen in Goa, and then travel from there to Sirsi, it’s closer that way. Any way, that did not happen. We are all parents now. We all have work. We do what we can.

We ordered food from Bistro, a Blinkit service which served good food. We got some vodka and gin from a place near my friend’s work place. There are so many of these shops in Gurgaon.

A monkey stole a chips packet from a shop, tore it open and ate the chips. It was surreal.

It was fun. I had fun.

I don’t drink that often. I got drunk a little too quickly - drunk-dialled Prerna at some point, told her I loved her, drunk-dialled our friend in Bangalore, tried to call the friend in Japan, but he must have been sleeping, and we are scared of his wife. One friend was logged in. He had a P2. I took his laptop, rebooted all the servers. The issue was resolved before anyone could say ‘bridge’.

Or so I hoped would happen. My friend was not as drunk as I was.

/five things to share

1. 12 Distractions to Leave Behind in 2026 by No Sidebar

After a long day, your brain wants relief. Culture offers the fastest version: endless content.
But relief and restoration are not the same thing. Scrolling often leaves you more restless than when you started—because it never resolves anything. It just fills space.
Try a different question this year: “What restores me?” Then do that instead.

Wonderful list of things to get rid of, like shutting off push notifications, avoiding multitasking, etc. Seeing it as a list, helps imagine how wonderful it would be to leave these things behind.

2. Finland starts work on national segregation prevention programme

According to the economic affairs and employment ministry, segregation refers to "growing differences in the population structure of neighbourhoods, where deprivation and advantage increasingly cluster in specific areas".

It said that segregation in Finland has deepened in recent years, particularly in larger urban areas.

"The aim of the programme is to reduce segregation and its negative impacts. It emphasises a comprehensive, knowledge‑based and strategic approach, as well as wide‑ranging cooperation between the central government, cities and other partners," the ministry's release read.

Diversity is good. Without interaction with different people we tend to perpetuate the prejudices.

3. Tesla discontinuing Model S and Model X to make room for robots by Andrew J. Hawkins

Tesla will discontinue the Model S and Model X in the second quarter of 2026, Elon Musk said in an earnings call with investors today. No advance word was given about the cancellations, making it an abrupt ending for Tesla's two original flagship EVs.

Makes sense. Tesla is clearly losing the EV game to the Chinese manufacturers. There is simply too much competition there. Makes sense to pivot to something no one else is doing.

4. Apple's New Split iPhone Launch Strategy Corroborated in Latest Report by Tim Hardwick

The report also notes that Apple is facing additional pressure as some of its suppliers have shifted resources toward AI companies like Nvidia, Google, and Amazon. Notably, Apple explicitly mentioned iPhone supply constraints during its recent earnings call on Thursday.

If this goes on, we might get to a point where they may not be the best, top of the line for consumer products and we may end up with shitty tech to use.

5. How to do morning pages via Gina Trapani

Morning Pages are three pages of longhand writing done first thing in the morning. They're one of Julia's toolkit for unblocking creativity, and I have the pleasure to confirm that they work.

I wondered after reading this if I should have morning pages in my life. I have something similar, that is I have daily notes, where I write things at the end of the day, like a journal. A journal is not this though.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

How to Craft a Story

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There are three acts to a story - beginning, middle and end.

Consider a 100K word novel.

You spend 25 K for the beginning, 50 K for the middle and 25 K for the end.

Each scene or chapter should ideally be around 2K words. Why? Because readers can’t quit in the middle of a chapter. 2K words is a good enough length, a potato chip length, where the reader will keep reading one more chapter.

This comes out in terms of scenes - 12 for the beginning, 25 for the middle and 13 for the end - more or less.

There are fifteen scenes that each part needs to have -

Inciting
Complication
Crisis
Climax
Resolution

So that’s 15 scenes done. Now, for the rest of the 35.

Same and Different

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Noida! This is NordLetter #89, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. The twist this week and the next three is that I am in India. There will be a different flavour to these for this time hence.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Homebound

I had to take a connecting flight from Helsinki through Istanbul and on to Mumbai. The flight to Istanbul arrived late in Helsinki and hence was late to arrive in Istanbul. The gents sitting in the seat behind me were in no hurry to land as their flight had already left Istanbul. There was one person who took out their bag and went to the front of the aircraft even as the flight was taxing. I assume their flight was about to leave. I was fairly relaxed though given the two and a half hour layover. I had a pang of anxiety as I listened to all these people missing their flights and so I rechecked everything in Calendar and on Flighty - an excellent app which shows flight statuses and so on. An app I had heard about in other places but had no use for, till date. I had time. And so, I took my time to get down from the plane.

Istanbul is a huge airport. And I think I saw most of it. My flight landed in the F zone. My connecting flight was from A1 terminal. That meant walking, and walking and then walking some more, going up through the escalators, and then climbing down a different set.

When I had booked this flight, I had thought I would have time to kill at the Istanbul airport. Somebody had suggested I could use the excellent lounge at the airport.

As I reached the A1 terminal, there was already a line of passengers queued up to board the plane. The thought I had on seeing the queue was - leave it to Indigo to pick the cheapest option available. We were shepherded onto buses (reminded me of my earlier travels) and driven to where the Indigo airbus was parked. This was at a fair distance mind you. It felt a bit jarring - international travel is not supposed to be like this.

Anywho. I had the middle seat and was not too happy about it. For the Istanbul leg of the journey, I had requested for and received the aisle seat. For the India leg of the journey there was no such option.

I got lucky.

The person next to me requested me to shift to the aisle seat in the same row, he had wanted to sit with his wife. I was happy to oblige. The persons sitting next to me wanted to swap seats too. That happened toward the end as well.

I could not sleep during either leg of the journeys. I had left home at 09:00 and only 5 hours had passed since. What I did instead was watch movies and read a book and take some notes. I had seen two in the Istanbul leg - Jurassic Park and Sinners. Indigo does not have entertainment options yet. Maybe they will one day. I watched some stuff on my Netflix.

Landing in Mumbai

I was spent and tired when I landed in Mumbai. I had booked a cab in advance. I got to the back seat and slept.

I wrote about the 2025 letters by Zhengdong Wang and Dan Wang earlier. Maybe because of that, I was thinking about the changes to India I may or may not notice.

Mumbai felt the same. I was trying to remember the route we had taken many years back when I had travelled here with my sister. I could not place anything. But that is to be expected. I don’t live in Mumbai. I don’t know Mumbai. Mumbai is not my city.

I was thinking about what I would do once I reached Pune - what would I eat. Eating is the main joy of travelling to India after all. My driver took a break as I was thinking this. Or after some time, I was dozing in and out of sleep at this point. I asked him if they had vada pav here. He said yes. I got myself a vada pav and tea. The pav was fluffy and light - stuff we don’t have in Helsinki and I am not a baker - yet. The vada was OK. I have made better.

Pune

Prerna and Savya arrived the same day from Patna. At the airport, Savya took a little time to place me. But then he held out his arms and I took him in.

It has been a joy since then, listening to him say ‘papa’. He was not speaking with intent earlier. As I write this on a sunday, they have already travelled back to Helsinki. And I miss the words and his smile.

We were in Pune to meet my nephew, two months old now and to celebrate my sister’s birthday. This was on the same night we had travelled.

We cut a cake at 00:00. I was glad that it was not my birthday - so I did not need to dress up. We were all tired. I could feel a massive jet lag coming. My sister joked about cutting the cake at 23:00. We did not of course. Before that we had gone out and got my sister an Apple Watch. I knew the model I wanted to get her - the SE3, which is my recommendation for anyone who is new to the Apple Watch ecosystem. It has all the default features you may need, without the extra bells and whistles, which are not essential to the experience.

We cut the second cake the next (same) day at night. We decorated the home a bit. Prerna had brought some decorations with her. We invited a couple of their friends over. It was nice. Since it was the middle of the week, they could not stay for long.

Missal madness

I had McAloo tikki and Pizaa McPuff the day I had reached Pune. They should make McAloo tikki universal. Make it everywhere! It tastes way better than the soya based veggie burgers we get in Helsinki.

The next day we went and had missal pav. There are three varieties in Pune, based on the spice levels. We had the spiciest one at Jogeshwari. The next day we had planned to get something else, but ended up trying out missal at Someshwar. I liked the vibes and presentation at Someshwar but the food was better at Jogeshwari.

In the end, food quality and taste wins. And I guess we like spicy food.

I felt Pune was the same I had remembered from the last time. The same shops - the McDonald’s, Burger King, Dominos, at the ground floor in the same apartment complex. The car parking my sister has moved from the basement to the ground floor. A shop had closed and was occupied by a different shop (different name, same everything else). But not much else had changed.

But I don’t live in Pune either. I don’t know it.

Cities are different though. There are things that tell you where you are. You of course need to have lived at the place for some time. Because to recognise the changes, you need time and familiarity. A two day stopover is not living at the place.

From Pune, we travelled to Bangalore for a day before stopping at Noida. It was an incredibly hectic week. Today, after I woke up after Prerna and Savya had left I had some time to stop and think.

You need the silence to reflect. Without the stillness you can’t keep your mind quiet enough.

Most things remain the same though. That was my thesis after having travelled through three different states in a week.

The pollution is stifling. I could feel it burning my lungs in Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Delhi. It rained after we arrived in Noida, lowering the AQI to mid 300s - what a relief.

In some places there is cleanliness, in most there isn’t. There is beauty everywhere though. And I kept feeling the same thing - we do not have pride in ourselves and our country. We lack civic sense. Things are changing, and I am hopeful. India is beautiful - we just need to clean it up. This lack of cleanliness hurts.

The incessant honking and noise is weird, coming from Helsinki.

I guess we get used to these things, but none of these are great things.

The food is awesome though. Anywhere I go and eat, I will have better food than if I tried to research and find a restaurant in Helsinki. It’s just next level. I am of course talking about the food we eat.

And that is all, folks!

/five things to share

1. Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots

Like every generation of students, there are good students, bad students and very brilliant students. It will always be the case, people evolve (I was, myself, not a very good student). Chatbots don’t change anything regarding that. Like every new technology, smart young people are very critical and, by defintion, smart about how they use it.

Interesting read.

2. Spotify is testing a feature that syncs audiobooks with paper editions by Jess Weatherbed

Using Page Match will require users to unlock or purchase the audiobook on Spotify, and own either the paper or ebook version of the same book. The feature works by scanning the page you’re currently reading with your device camera, using optical character recognition (OCR) to identify passages that are then matched to specific timestamps in the audiobook.

I wrote about a similar idea in mixed format books. It would be good to see it out in the world.

3. If the future of e-readers is getting weird, I’m here for it by

If I were Xteink or any similar hardware developer, I’d be looking hard at giving support to the CrossPoint project and then focusing my efforts on making a device with simpler controls (fewer buttons!). Adding lighting and potentially a touchscreen would make this interesting, too. There are a lot of directions this sort of product could go—so let’s get to experimenting.

I was similarly looking at this device. I had seen it somewhere on threads and thought this looked cool.

But then I looked at the feature set and given that most of my reading is happening via the e-library app. It did not make sense.

4. Finland sets tougher guidelines: No social media or smartphones for under-13s

The agencies recommend that children under the age of 13 should not have smartphones of their own or be allowed to use social media. The recommendations cover youngsters’ free time, not homework or other school-related tasks.

For younger kids, no screen time at all is recommended for children aged under the age of two, with a maximum of one hour of screen time daily for those aged 2–10, rising to two hours for kids aged 11–13.

After reading this I was not sure if this is a done deal or it’s just a recommendation like the dietary guidelines?

I think it’s the latter.

5. 🌻 claude code psychosis by Jasmine Sun

It will soon cost near-nothing to have whatever app you want. Vibecoding is already shifting the build vs. buy calculus: maybe we’ll all spend less money on SaaS (and more on Claude credits instead). And because it’s economical to build custom tools for narrow personal, small business, and community use cases, exiting enshittification is easier than ever before.

And then this.

The second-order effect of Claude Code was realizing how many of my problems are not software-shaped. Having these new tools did not make me more productive; on the contrary, Claudecrastination probably delayed this post by a week.

If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you’re a software developer everything looks like a software problem.

It’s not.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Indiabound

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #88, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Tomorrow, I will be travelling to India.

While I was writing the last nordletter, I had wondered if I should put in a programming notice - a little something to tell you all that I will be on vacation and there will be no nordletters for the duration.

But I would be home. I would have my iPad with me. And I had thought I could send out one letter a week.

I tend to overestimate the things I can do.

It has been a month since Prerna travelled to India. When we were planning the trip I had thought I would finally have the time to play Red Dead Redemption on my PS5. Maybe even complete DS2 and start Ghost of Yotei.

I played once, maybe twice during the entire time. And now, I am travelling.

There was supposed to be a lesson here, a thing that this taught me. But this is not LinkedIn. Not all stories need to have a lesson.

So many stories that we read as children, in school had a lesson at the end. It used to be a question.

What is the moral of the story?

I started reading as a child. In the summer breaks, we would go to our village, and I would get a set of 10-12 comic books. And then be done with it in a day or two. Then came Champak. I would go through the old editions that these bookshops would have.

I feel so happy to have found some of the way back there. Not comic books but books.

That's what I did this past month. I read books. And, I watched movies on Netflix. I used to have choice paralysis (when we wanted to watch a movie that is, which was not too often). But I decided to just watch the first item in my list.

Here's the how to:

Keep a list
When it comes to pick what to read/watch next just pick the next item in the list
Delete that item from the list

I finished reading How to win friends and influence people and Lords of uncreation this week.

There is a bitter-sweet feeling I have on having finished Lords of uncreation. It is the third and final book in the Final Architecture series. I remember not finishing a TV series because I knew it would be coming to an end.

I had a similar feeling about the characters in this book - about Solace, Idris and the gang. I can no longer spend time in this universe and that, is a bit sad.

I wrote about maybe going over the frozen bay in the last nordletter.

I did that. It was not as scary. There were a couple of people already there, which encouraged me. It felt OK to walk there.

I stepped out onto the frozen bay, and started walking toward the islands at a distance. These things have a way of being deceptive though. I had thought I would reach there, but no matter how far I walked, the island still seemed just out of my reach.

I opened the map and saw how far it actually was and then decided to return.

/five things to share

1. Gemini is winning by David Pierce

In 2022, when ChatGPT launched, it was clear that Google had been caught flat-footed. But credit where it’s due: For a company not exactly known for its ability to focus on a coherent product strategy, Google managed to marshal its considerable resources in a single direction. Now, if chatbots are in fact the future — and most of the AI industry continues to bet that they are — there is simply no other company currently set up to truly compete with Google. Google has the models. It has the resources to improve them. It now has the distribution necessary to get people to use its bots, and the data required to make them uniquely personal and useful. At least for now, ChatGPT has the brand power, and the daily active users. But Google has almost everything else. Even the iPhone.

I think the deal with Apple is for the local model that would run on device. It was not clear in their announcement recently. But if some of the traffic goes to Google like the default search engine deal, then it would be a big bump in user numbers.

2. Photos Capture the Breathtaking Scale of China's Wind and Solar Buildout

Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.

Beautiful pictures.

3. Helsinki sending kids free comics to spark love of reading

The gift subscription is part of a research project led by the University of Jyväskylä that examines how regular access to printed reading material at home affects children's motivation to read.

My love affair with reading was similarly forged over reading full comic book sets during the summer holiday months I was in my village in Bihar. That was the only source of entertainment for us.

We would get a full set of 10-12 comic books and be done in a day. This seems like a good initiative. Get the kids away from the dam screens.

4. First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s general agent by Simon Willison

New from Anthropic today is Claude Cowork, a "research preview" that they describe as "Claude Code for the rest of your work". It's currently available only to Max subscribers ($100 or $200 per month plans) as part of the updated Claude Desktop macOS application. […]

The announcement video is cool too. I saw it on LinkedIn. This makes CC accessible to the masses. I like Anthropic’s product sensibilities. They are building things which are interesting to me - more in the automation space. OpenAI seems to be throwing everything against the wall and seeing what works.

I have not tried it yet.

5. Be Wary of Digital Deskilling - Cal Newport

In his 1974 book, Labor and Monopoly Capital, the influential Marxist political economist Harry Braverman argued that the expanding “science-technical revolution” was being exploited by companies to increasingly “deskill” workers; to leave them in “ignorance, incapacity, and thus in fitness for machine servitude.” The more employees outsource skilled activity to machines, the more controllable they become. […]

Boris Cherny is a senior technical lead at Anthropic who manages a large team and likely owns a significant amount of stock options in the company. Of course, he’s excited about the idea of agents replacing programmers, but that doesn’t mean we have to share his enthusiasm.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Winter Wonderland

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #87, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

After so many years of having this chair, today was the day I felt compelled to watch the video that tells me how to adjust everything about the chair.

The chair, as I often joke, is the costliest thing in this house. Yes, I just made a calculation in my head, it is the costliest thing in our home.

I had bought it during COVID, with the hope that I would be using it a lot. It would be the centrepiece of my home-office. But then COVID receded (feels like a bad dream now, doesn't it?) and we went back to our offices.

I do sit in it, from time to time, at least once every week.

Anyway, today, I found out what all the buttons do. I like videos of this sort. It tells you everything you need to know about the product. It allows you to use the product to the fullest.

Things become other things is a sad book. It chronicles Craig Mod's walks to rural (shrinking) Japan. It often contrasts his experiences growing up in a similarly shrinking American town to living in Japan.

Japan with it's social security and healthcare. It's safety nets. There are a lot of other comparisons and I am not done with the book yet.

But it is sad. These people, these generations with the young ones having left to earn, to live in the cities.

I have found many similarities to Finland in this book. I have similar thoughts about Finland and Europe in general. Maybe I am naive and I would not understand America's obsession with big things. They can provide healthcare and childcare for their citizens, but they don't. Even something as basic as this tends to divide their populace. It's weird.

I keep reading articles about Europe losing. Who decides the metrics?

I love walking in the snow. I love fresh snow (once cars and people start going over the snow it gets muddy). I love walking even though my feet and the fingers in my hand tingle. Even though water freezes and becomes little icicles on my moustache and beard.

My balcony is full of snow right now. My last balcony had glass and so this is new. This would not happen at our home in Matinkyla. Almost every day I feel like walking barefoot in the balcony, but look it's so damn pristine. I don't want to mess it up.

I find similar fluffy ice all through the route I walk on.

To the right in this picture here is a little ground for a horse and a mare. I have seen a couple of people riding them on this very path. I saw the horse further back today past the trees.

A little further out on this same path, there is a little bridge. In summer, there may be a stream that flows down there. Right now, I could just go walk over it.

One more thing happens as the temperatures dip below zero and stays there. The water bodies freeze. I had walked over the frozen Toolo lake one time. It must be frozen now. It is so much fun. It gives a different perspective to things. Here, the bay is frozen now. I often see people (I saw a mother with three children today) walking on it. I have not gotten courageous enough yet. It's dark over there. I can't swim.

I also see ski marks where I walk. I saw an old woman skiing over this frozen track. Today, it had snowed some more and those marks were under fresh snow. You could almost not make out the tracks there.

It seemed fun.

Tomorrow, I may go and jump face first in that fluffy ice. I guess I will report back in the next NordLetter.

/five things to share

1. Pluralistic: Code is a liability (not an asset) (06 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Code is not an asset – it's a liability. The longer a computer system has been running, the more tech debt it represents. The more important the system is, the harder it is to bring down and completely redo. Instead, new layers of code are slathered atop of it, and wherever the layers of code meet, there are fissures in which these systems behave in ways that don't exactly match up. Worse still: when two companies are merged, their seamed, fissured IT systems are smashed together, so that now there are adjacent sources of tech debt, as well as upstream and downstream cracks. […]

For if AI code – written at 10,000 times the speed of any human coder, designed to work well, but not to fail gracefully – is the digital asbestos we're filling our walls with, then our descendants will spend generations digging that asbestos out of the walls. There will be plenty of work fixing the things that we broke thanks to the most dangerous AI psychosis of all – the hallucinatory belief that "writing code" is the same thing as "software engineering." At the rate we're going, we'll have full employment for generations of asbestos removers.

2. The man who made India digital isn’t done yet by Edd Gent

At 70 years old, Nilekani should be retired. But he has a few more ideas. India’s electrical grid is creaky and prone to failure; Nilekani wants to add a layer of digital communication to stabilize it. And then there’s his idea to expand the financial functions in DPI to the rest of the world, creating a global digital backbone for commerce that he calls the “finternet.”

3. 'The Downside To Using AI for All Those Boring Tasks at Work' - Slashdot

Roger Kirkness, CEO of 14-person software startup Convictional, noticed that after AI took the scut work off his team's plates, their days became consumed by intensive thinking, and they were mentally exhausted and unproductive by Friday. The company transitioned to a four-day workweek; the same amount of work gets done, Kirkness says. The underlying problem, according to Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, is that businesses tend to simply reallocate the time AI saves. Workers who once mentally downshifted for tasks like data entry are now expected to maintain intense focus through longer stretches of data analysis.

This is an interesting problem. I see little discussion of it elsewhere. What will happen? Will we continue to work the same hours doing more, or will we be working less doing the same.

Knowledge work is highly cerebral in nature. That requires down time, in order to continue working at a high level.

4. Grok turns off image generator for most users after outcry over sexualised AI imagery by Helena Horton, Dan Milmo and Amelia Gentleman

Grok, Elon Musk’s AI tool, has switched off its image creation function for the vast majority of users after widespread outcry over its use to create sexually explicit and violent imagery.

5. Survey: Majority of Finns do not use AI at work by

A survey by recruitment and HR firm Barona has found that just 32 percent of people in Finland use artificial intelligence (AI) at work on a weekly basis.

A mistake that I often make is think that the world is filled with me. It’s not. I work in the IT industry. The majority of the world does not.

Hence, it takes a moment for me to say, yes, this makes sense.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

2025 Letters

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

2025 letter by Zhengdong Wang

One way to think about computation before computers is through the work of Herbert Simon, the only person to win both the Turing Award and the Nobel Prize in economics. He explained that firms, like computers, are information processing systems. Firms have hierarchy, limited cognitive power, and bounded rationality. Firms also have learning curves, where unit costs fall predictably with cumulative production. In a way, humans organized themselves to be better information processors long before computers. We might extrapolate the trend before Moore’s Law to 400 years ago, with the invention of the joint stock corporation. […]

2025 letter by Dan Wang

Startups don’t need dissent; they want workers who can grind until the network effects kick in. VCs don’t like dissent, showing again and again that many have thin skins. That contributes to a culture I think of as Silicon Valley’s soft Leninism. When political winds shift, most people fall in line, most prominently this year as many tech voices embraced the right. […]

Chinese founders talk about AI mostly as a technology to be harnessed rather than a fickle power that might threaten all. Rather than building superintelligence, Chinese companies have been more interested in embedding AI into robots and manufacturing lines. […]

Big Tech might enjoy the monopolistic success smiled upon by Peter Thiel, coming almost to genteel agreements not to tread too hard upon each other’s business lines. Chinese firms have to fight it out in a rough-and-tumble environment, expanding all the time into each other’s core businesses, taking Jeff “your margin is my opportunity” Bezos with seriousness.

If you have to read one, read this one. I loved it. Especially the comparison between the USS and China, but I guess that’s the whole theme behind Dan’s writing. Reading it, I felt the need to read something of this sort about India, and how it is changing.

I felt that also because Zhengdong wrote about his trip to India, and that the US, China and India are changing so much that you could visit them every year.

I visit India every year and I thought maybe I could write a longer thing each year. A similar thing perhaps.

Happy New Year

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #86, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

2025 recap

Good bye, 2025! What a year that was.

I am starting a new thing here (not entirely new), a recap of everything that I did and some things that happened to me. Everyone does it. So why not.

Work things

I am still at TCS. Toward the end of the year, my role has shifter a bit. I have tilted toward the dev side more. I am excited to work on new tech.

I don't know if it is technically a work thing, but it's work-adjacent at least. This was the year, I embraced Meetups (both the app and the events). I have written about them in the past, maybe I will create a tag for it. I have enjoyed the Vibe Coding events the most. I am looking forward to more of these in the coming year.

Writing

I published A year of mornings. It was a big thing, a big goal I had, since forever. I learned a ton - about self-publishing in general, about ISBNs, and getting ISBNs, about designing a book, the differences between formatting for a physical book vs an ebook.

I started hosting Shut Up & Write (on a hiatus because of our move and year end). It started as mostly a way for me to block an hour and a half each week to write. But I met some interesting people along the way.

I moved my blog from Ghost to Astro generated markdown files this year. I wrote about it while I was doing it. I started that in May and am still not done completely. But I guess I will never be done with it fully. I will change. I will have new ideas about how things should look and function. But it is done now - this version of it.

I posted a NordLetter almost every Sunday. I continue to write how I want to on my blog. I have a 31 consecutive week streak active right now! Writing helps me think. My website provides me a space to do that out in the open. It also leaves me a place to say hey, look at the books I read - they are so awesome! Everyone should read more. I read 37 books this year.

AI stuff

This was the year when AI started popping up everywhere. Why is it in my recap? Because the reason I decided to move my blog, because I felt I finally could outsource the coding to someone(something?) else and think about how I actually want things to be.

Claude is my agent of choice. I settled on it after testing everything. OpenAI has nice UI, but they seem evil. I don't know why. Gemini has a bad UI. I could never make it work.

Personal things

I performed at India Day this year! Both the act of performing and the countless training that went into it was awesome.

I voted in a municipal election here in Finland. The person I voted for did not win, eventually but whatever, that was not the point. Voting was the point, for me at least.

We visited Manhattan. It was a great trip, other than the bouts of illness almost all three of us had, at different times. NYC is so damn massive - no city like it. But the public services are meh, especially coming from Helsinki.

Prerna started her Masters at the University of Helsinki. This is her news not mine. But there are no strictly my or her news in our household. Everything is shared.

We moved to the campus, thanks to this above bit of news. My office is 10 mins from here. Savya's daycare is like a 5 minute walk from home.

Raising Savya continues to be at the same time so damn tough and so damn joyful. He has grown (starting to speak now) and every new day is a new day with him.

Closing notes

A funny thing about looking back at how the year went was that you realise you only truly remember like the past month or so. I guess a roundabout way to say I am thankful that I have a place to look back at, a place where I make notes, which allows me to remember. That and the photos library.

I had a good year. There were some bad things too. But that happens. Everything passes if you have good company. And I have the best company.

On new year

There were a lot of firecrackers going off during the new year celebrations, which was a bit surprising to me. It felt like Diwali for a brief 10 minutes or so.

There were people bursting crackers during the evening while I was walking. The next day there was a nice pile of burnt boxes and crackers kept next to the dustbin.

That pile is still there.

It finally snowed this week. I love it. I will not love it after it rains and the ice gets slippery. But December had not felt like December till this point. It finally does now.

/five things to share

1. 2025: The year in LLMs by Simon Willison

My tools.simonwillison.net collection of HTML+JavaScript tools was mostly built this way: I would have an idea for a small project, prompt Claude Artifacts or ChatGPT or (more recently) Claude Code via their respective iPhone apps, then either copy the result and paste it into GitHub's web editor or wait for a PR to be created that I could then review and merge in Mobile Safari.

I have been doing this a lot this past year as well. Most of the site was done this way. First using cursor, then Codex and finally using Claude.

2. Art, Money, and AI - Hugh Howey

The writing brain is bemused or ambivalent. It finds joy in writing and sees AI writing not as a threat but as something completely different, not the same game, not in the same universe. So there’s no threat. If a person wants to create a book entirely with AI, the most a writer brain might feel is the confusion over why someone would want to deprive themselves of the unique thrill of noodling it on their own. But an enlightened writer might realize that not everyone is looking for that thrill. Some people just want to read a book that doesn’t already exist, and however it gets created is not important to them. The book is the thing. Not the process.

3. Elif on the How I write podcast

I absolutely loved listening to Elif on the How I write podcast. Maybe David should have more female writers on the podcast.

It was riveting. They talked about writing of course, and censorship and nature - there was this beautiful anecdote of nature being pregnant in April. It made me emotional for some reason. I loved it.

4. A ‘tediously accurate scale model’ of the solar system

Space is scary! The scale of it is mind-boggling. Sometimes, I catch myself looking up at the sky and wondering. Then I pull myself back from the edge of the abyss. Space is scary.

This is an accurate model of the solar system. I saw it on mobile and as you keep scrolling you realise most of space is just that empty space.

There is a button in the bottom right, click on it and something fun would happen.

5. I started reading Things become other things by Craig Mod

I had reserved the book at Helmet. I love hardcovers and this is one. I will have more to report once I have finished reading it. I have enjoyed all of what I have read till this point.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Books I Have Read This Year

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Last year, this post was a way for me to list out all the books I’ve read in one place. This year, I already have all the books I’ve read in one place - the bookshelf page.

Even though that listing part is not there, the looking back at the year in reading part is still there.

I have read 37 books this year - which is more than double the 16 I had last year. That's good. Somewhere mid-year I had not thought I would even reach the sixteen I had reached last year.

I used to do my reading while I travelled from and to work. I used to read in the metro. At home, it was difficult to read. Then, I bought a car sometime in May and the time I had to read while I travelled went away.

For the next two-three months, I did not read anything. Then I thought - let’s give audiobooks a chance. I downloaded Audible - got subscribed to premium and started listening to books.

This was weird for me. Reading books is reading books. You are doing something while you are reading. You are engaging with the text. Your brain is dreaming up scenarios, how things would look.

Listening is a bit passive. You are not really doing anything. You are just listening. I had this thought in my head that it was not the same. I would be doing less, somehow. And I don’t reread books. So it felt like I would miss out on reading the book for the first time, if I used a audiobook.

The first book I tried was in fact badly done and so I found more reason to not do it. Then, I tried again, this time with - Abundance: How We Build a Better Future. And I found myself coming around to audiobooks.

I realised reading some books as audiobooks is better than reading nothing. And wanting for the perfect time and method to come. That does not happen. We make do with what we have. Our condition does not change, we change.

And I changed.

This was the year I embraced audio books.

A majority of the books I’ve read this year have been audiobooks - 20/34.

I love my bookshelf page. I keep coming back to it again and again. I love looking at the books I’m reading, books I’ve read and so on. The bookshelf page does not have a list of all the books I’ve read, just the books I’ve read since I started taking notes on books.

I may try to get some of the books from goodreads. Maybe I will. Maybe not. Everything requires work. There are just so many hours in a day.

Some stats

Because who does not like some stats?

Format	Count
Audio	21
ebook	7
hardcover	6
paperback	3
Grand Total	37

Rating	Count
like	30
love	6
nope	1
Grand Total	37

Here’s a list of the books I’ve read this year:

Fiction

Non-fiction

Ultraprocessed Food Is Designed to Be Irresistible

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

How?

Bliss point - the amount of an ingredient (salt/sugar/fat) which optimises deliciousness
Texture - soft foods require less chewing, so we eat more food
Marketing - Colourful packaging, cartoons to market to kids, etc.

Ultraprocessed food uses all of these things to be just irresistible. The industry uses many of the items from the cigarette industry playbook - denying addiction, different packaging and so on.

I saw this documentary (Irresistible: Why We Can't Stop Eating) which talked about these points in detail.

The Route Circle

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #85, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

We moved to our new home in Kumpula/Helsinki on 8th November. Since we moved here, I had not felt at home. Something felt amiss.

I have lived in three (four if you count the hotel in Kamppi) places since moving to Finland - Merihaka, Matinkyla and now Kumpula. At all these places, sooner rather than later, I had figured out a route for me to walk on.

I love walking. I prefer walking the same route everyday. I also prefer it to be a circular route. You end where you start. Which is obvious in a way. But you could go half the distance and just return from there, walking the same path twice - back and forth. I do not like that. Ideally, I want to walk the entire route once.

I had routes like this in Kamppi, in Merihaka (around the Toolo lake), and in Matinkyla (around the Matinkyla beach.)

I had not found a route here. Here, we had went out and walked. There is nature and trees behind our homes, a route that cuts through the suburban sprawl of single family homes.

But no looking at fresh water. No circular route.

That had bugged me. That had made me not want to go out and walk. And you know me. I love walking.

On Wednesday, I found myself with some time on my hands. Prerna is in India right now, and we had Christmas/end-of-the-year holidays.

So, I went out with a want, a quest if you will to find the waterfront. I knew there was a waterfront, beyond the Arabia mall. I had seen it in the map. I had planned going there. I had imagined it in my head. But it had felt so distant.

In fact, one day me and Prerna had gone there, crossed the tram lines but since we had to pick some groceries, we had taken a different route.

Not on Wednesday mind you.

On Wednesday, I walked the same path, past the #13 tram line, across the road. I looked at the map and continued walking. I walked past the blocked roads and construction equipment. And then I saw it - the trails, the trees and the serene waters of the Vanhankaupunginlahti (Gulf of Finland).

We are in the middle of winters here in Finland. That means the sun goes down around 15:00. Hence the dark pictures of the bay and the route.

But you know what? I don't care. I was so happy when I found this route. I was worried also. This felt far away from our home. I was not sure how to get back home, how to close the circle. I kept looking at the map, thinking which route to take. I had to pick some groceries on Wednesday as well. But I paid it to no heed. I kept walking.

And then some. Till I got to a bridge. At which point I cut across the park, across the little road, then through another park and finally across the E75. It was here, that I saw the little outing which took me back to the little roads which cut through the suburban sprawl of single family homes.

I had been here before. I knew how to get back home from here. My circle was complete.

Here's the route. That's a sweet little circle is it not?

I finished reading a few books this week - Two nights in Lisbon, Steal like an artist, Show your work and Keep Going.

Perhaps inspired by that or by what I'm reading now, I wrote a few things:

Check them out.

/five things to share

1. On Paperbacks and TikTok - Cal Newport

Here we find a parallel to our current moment. As the platforms of the digital attention economy transition from social network models to providing maximally distracting short-form videos, more of the content available online is devolving toward that paragon of low-quality forgettability, commonly referred to as slop. Who will listen to a podcast or read a long essay, many now fret, when Sora can offer countless videos of historical figures dancing and X can deliver an endless sequence of nudity and bar fights?

If we return to the paperback example, however, we might find a small sliver of hope. Ultimately, the explosion of these cheaper, often lower-quality books didn’t lead to the elimination of more serious titles. In fact, the opposite happened. Vastly more hardcover titles are published today than they were before the Pocket Books revolution began.

A nice little history lesson here on paperbacks.

2. 2025 LLM Year in Review by Andrej Karpathy

LLMs are emerging as a new kind of intelligence, simultaneously a lot smarter than I expected and a lot dumber than I expected. In any case they are extremely useful and I don't think the industry has realized anywhere near 10% of their potential even at present capability. Meanwhile, there are so many ideas to try and conceptually the field feels wide open.

A nice read, if a little longer. Perhaps the reason why I had not gotten to it yet.

3. Remote Work is Officially Dead, Says the World's Largest Recruiter - Slashdot

"You have to be very special to be able to demand a 100% remote job," van 't Noordende told Fortune. "That's increasingly the story. You have to have very special technology skills or some expertise." The equilibrium appears to be settling at a hybrid model of three to four days in office for most workers.

That has been my experience too.

Also even before the Covid pandemic, the fully remote option was there for high performers or edge cases, where people had specific requirements to work from home and were good enough that they could not be kicked out of the job.

4. Our interfaces have lost their senses by Amelia Wattenberger

Think about how you use physical tools. Drawing isn't just moving your hand—it's the feel of the pencil against paper, the tiny adjustments of pressure, the sound of graphite scratching. You shift your body to reach the other side of the canvas. You erase with your other hand. You step back to see the whole picture.

A beautifully illustrated thing.

Everything happens on screens. There is no variability in our experiences of doing different things.

5. ChatGPT’s yearly recap sums up your conversations with the chatbot by Emma Roth

ChatGPT is joining the flood of apps offering yearly recaps for users. It’s rolling out a “Year in Review” feature that will show you a bunch of stats — like how many messages you sent to the chatbot in 2025 — as well as give you an AI-generated pixel art-style image that encompasses some of the topics you talked about this year.

The only one I did this year was the LinkedIn one. I did it because I saw a friend do it. I posted the one where it says who have you interacted with most this year. For me it was Prerna, and I guess hence the post.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

How to Read

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Read anything and everything.

Anything that draws you to it - whether you like the book’s cover or a blurb or its description or the writer.

Have a wide funnel.

But you don’t have to finish every book you start reading. If you don’t like it, drop it.

Have a sharp filter.

This idea - wide funnel / sharp filter - came across it while reading The art of spending money.

Write for One Person

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Write for one person. It’s difficult to make every one happy. If you try to write that way you will not be able to write anything. So, write for one person - the person you love. Try to make them happy.

Hemingway thought the same (from Ernest Hemingway on writing).

I believe that basically you write for two people: yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that, then wonderful. Then you write for who you love, whether she can read or write or not, and whether she is alive or dead.

Limitations Mean Freedom

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I had this thought a couple of days back about time-limits.

I have had this thought a couple of times in the past, mostly with regard to my writing. About having a deadline, a shipping date by which I have to ship a work.

This recent thought I had was with regard to reading, specifically the type of reading I am doing now - using e-kirjasto (e-library). Compared to the traditional books I borrow from Helmet, I borrow e-books or audiobooks from the e-library. Both of those are borrowed for 14 days. That time limit forces me to finish the book in this time. I find myself reading whenever possible. I have mostly stopped listening to podcasts now. I read ebooks while eating lunch or whenever I have time.

I find this applies to other things as well - like figuring out what to learn. It’s good to limit yourself to one or two things, using two or three resources. The technology landscape is huge and limitations are good. This limitation is not the time-limitation I talked about in the last paragraph. It is a different limitation - of choice.

Winter Solstice

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #84, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Sunday was winter solstice. This is when the switch flips and the days start to get longer.

A friend of my sister had landed in Helsinki on Saturday. I had thought I would show them my love - the Oodi library, and maybe the Toolo lake.

I had called them in the morning. They had agreed to meet. I had left the apartment and a station from Central (where I was supposed to meet them) they said, they need to take the ferry instead.

'OK', I said.

I had planned, to be in Central in advance. I had planned to walk around the lake. I had planned to walk and think - about the second book I will write. I need to finish the first draft by February. I have been thinking about this since that past two years at the very least. Now, I need to put some words on paper - digital paper.

And so, us not able to meet was not too much of an issue.

I got down from the No. 6 tram, crossed the street and had a walked a little bit toward Oodi, when I thought - lets go see the Christmas market.

This was my second year at the Christmas Market. I wrote about the earlier visit here. You could say that the charm had worn off for me.

It was a different experience today. Last year we had visited it after dark. There was a ton of wind, temperatures dropping below zero.

This time I visited it while the sun shone - it was a cloudy day, the sun was there somewhere behind the clouds. But still there was light. The temperature was comfortable. I did not feel the need to run away. I was not pushing a pram. Prerna was not there - she travelled to India this past week - a story for another time perhaps!

It was a different experience. I think I preferred the night time trip. The lights and the experience is better then.

I did not eat or drink anything. I did took my time going through the stalls - checking out their wares, comparing where these shops were in the past year's iteration. I enjoy doing that - pattern matching.

I enjoyed the walk after.

At the lake, I met three people with a little stand. I was going to not make eye contact, and keep walking - the thing I usually do. But they called out, so I walked to them.

They were spreading some Christmas cheer. They offered a warm cup of glogi or coffee. I took some glogi and a cookie.

We had a little chat. They had planned to do this last year, but one of the people was not in the country and they could not do it. But here they were.

It feels a lot like Christmas!

/five things to share

1. Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work by Simon Willison

A computer can never be held accountable. That's your job as the human in the loop.

Almost anyone can prompt an LLM to generate a thousand-line patch and submit it for code review. That's no longer valuable. What's valuable is contributing code that is proven to work.

I liked the way Simon said it - your job is to deliver code you have proven to work.

2. China figured out how to sell EVs. Now it has to deal with their aging batteries by Caiwei Chen

Typically, one of two things happens when an EV’s battery is retired. One is called cascade utilization, in which usable battery packs are tested and repurposed for slower applications like energy storage or low-speed vehicles. The other is full recycling: Cells are dismantled and processed to recover metals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese, which are then reused to manufacture new batteries. Both these processes, if done properly, take significant upfront investment that is often not available to small players.

One of the countless other things where China has the lead and the world is waiting for them to innovate.

This is an interesting part of the equation. Ideally you want to be able to just replace the batteries. The whole design of the car should be based around that.

Or, the car makers need to subsidise people when they go back with their cars. And we are into a new she when people keep their cars for shorter periods, like phones. That can’t be environmentally sustainable.

3. James Webb Space Telescope Confirms 1st 'Runaway' Supermassive Black Hole - Slashdot by

Astronomers have made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a runaway black hole 10 million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second)

This scares me. My metal image was that black holes were steady wherever they were in their frame of reference. But this.

4. iRobot filed for bankruptcy

After 35 years, the maker of the Roomba robot vacuum filed for bankruptcy protection late Sunday night. Following warnings issuedearlier this year that it was fast running out of options, iRobot says it is entering Chapter 11 protection and will be acquired by its contract manufacturer, China-based Picea Robotics.

Who can compete with the Chinese at manufacturing cheaper (and increasingly quality) stuff?

5. OpenAI launches new ChatGPT Images

OpenAI and Google seem to be one-upping each other these days. Nano Banana and Nano Banana Pro are what is causing a deluge of AI generated videos and images on IG these days. This is supposed to compete with that.

Image generation is not my use case. After reading Empire of AI I am a little miffed at the company in any case.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Birthdays and Efficiencies

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #83, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Whenever I am assigned a task - by my boss at work or home (winky face) - the first thing I think of is, what is the best way to do this.

Best in most scenarios means the most efficient way to do something. So, for example if I have to pick groceries from Prisma, and some from Indian store, and also I have to go on a walk, and take Savya to Oodi, I take some time, in my head, to figure out, which station I would get down at, which route would I walk on, how I will reach Oodi, and so on.

Why am I talking about this today?

Not sure. I just had this thought - where is this coming from? This quest to be efficient. Why do I do this Sherlock Homesesque planning the full thing in my head?

I did not have an answer to this. Society expects this of you. There's so much productivity and self-help pushed in our faces. You are supposed to do everything, be everywhere, become so many things.

I love my bookshelf page. It keeps a track of all the books I'm reading (or have read). At any time, I am reading more than one book. Most of the times I am happy with that. Somedays though, I feel like asking myself - why? If this is not fun, why? Why am I pushing myself so?

Last Sunday, I was at the HOAS Pikkujoulu (Little Christmas) party.

There was a ton of Christmas food - some cookies, porridge, chocolates and glogi.

Glogi is awesome! I haven't had alcoholic glogi yet. But I like the non-alcoholic one just fine.

There were Christmas songs going on in the background. Some people were playing chess. Others were sitting around talking. There were paper cutouts to created these wonderful 3-D pictures.

I painted! After what must have been a decade or so. There were printed pieces of paper and coloured pencils. Suddenly the adult colouring genre made sense to me.

It felt calming, somehow.

Prerna's birthday fell on a Saturday this year.

On Friday night, I took out the balloon air machine and got down to work. I wanted to make an arch, but midway through I realised I did not have that many balloons. Also, why an arch? But all youtube videos are about arches anyway.

Savya was asleep by then. I got Prerna some roses. We cut the cake - just the two of us. We ate that cake. Then we sat on the sofa eating some chips. The cake gets too sweet on its own!

In the evening on Saturday, Prerna's friends had come to celebrate.

On Monday, Prerna has her exams. For the next two years, or rather next one year now, we will not be able to celebrate her birthday without worrying about upcoming exams.

Snow is here! In mid-December.

This was supposed to be a super-cold winter.

It's been anything but.

I was walking my old Toolo trail today, and the top layer of the lake was just starting to freeze. It was beautiful!

/five things to share

1. Vibe coding is boring

For apps that I want to ship to the world, for this website, for apps that are using an interesting tech stack, I will be driving development, because I like it, and I have enough experience to have opinions on how they should be built.

But for the apps where I just care about the final output, that’s what vibe coding is for, I suppose. I don’t ever want to rely on it so much that I lose my own skills, but it is nice getting those results faster if I truly don’t care how something works (which is rare, but I have a few projects in the pile that are finally built now, so yay). But yeah. It’s not fun. It’s just another tool in the tool belt. And it’s really boring.

This is the way we think about things that we ship. I care about the stuff that goes on the blog, so I will not use AI to write the words that go on the website.

The website though, is a different matter. I care about the technologies involved, the stack, but I don’t know enough that I can build it myself. I do care about the end product. So, AI tools are a good match here. Sure the repo may be a mess, but it works as it should. It looks as it should. And that odd enough for now.

2. Why RSS matters by Ben Werdmuller

RSS has always worked quietly in the background. In a moment when the web is being reshaped by enclosure, consolidation, and algorithmic mediation, its reliability is exactly what we need. It offers a simple, durable way for publishers to keep control of their distribution and for readers to keep control of their attention, without permission, platform lock-in, or hidden agendas. If we treat RSS not as a relic of an earlier web but as the strategic infrastructure it already is, it can continue to anchor a more open, more resilient, and more humane internet for decades to come.

I love RSS. I want a new way to read though. The current way of NetNewsWire is a little taxing. Maybe someone creates a new way to view the feed? Daily feed can also get bogged down if you have a fire hose feed.

3. Nothing’s community-designed Phone 3A adds some color and matching dice by Stevie Bonifield

The Nothing Phone 3A Community Edition revamps Nothing’s usual monochrome look with a 90s-inspired design infused by pops of color. It’s updating the basic 3A’s transparent backplate with a teal tint, plus yellow and magenta buttons.

Looks pretty!

4. Foreign students face financial ruin after agents sell false dream of 'world's happiest country'

The reform meant that students coming to Finland from outside the EU to study at third-level institutions were granted a continuous residence permit for the duration of their studies, instead of having to re-apply for the permit every year, as had previously been the case. They could also bring their families with them — with spouses now eligible to receive state support such as unemployment benefits and housing allowance, even though students themselves are not.

From personal anecdotes I’ve heard - some have received scholarships, some have borrowed money to come, some are working for Wolt, etc. What I did not know was the role of this change in law in this situation.

5. Oxide's internal tips on LLM use

As conversation length grows, each message gets more expensive while Claude gets dumber. That's a bad trade! Use /context and /cost or the statusline trick above to keep an eye on your context window. CC natively gives a percentage but it's sort of fake because it includes a large buffer of empty space to use for compacting.

Aligns with my experience. It’s better to start a new chat than trying to continue in the same chat hoping for a fix.

Also has a nice list of resources at the end.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Kid Fest at Oodi

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #82, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Yesterday (today, as I type this) was the Finnish Independence Day. Also, a Oodi Kid Fest at, you guessed it, Oodi Library.

I knew about one of the two things as I left home with Savya on Saturday morning.

During the weekdays, Savya has a barrage of things to do at his päiväkoti. There's the play time in the play area, followed by play inside the day care, then lunch, nap time, followed by snacks and finally play time in the play area. On the weekends, or on holidays it is a challenge to keep him engaged. One solution, I have realised now, is to take him out to play. I never felt I could while we were living in Matinkylä. Helsinki felt like a different place. Now, since we have moved to Kumpula, Helsinki feels like the same place. And so, travelling to Central Helsinki feels like a doable thing.

I have written about Oodi in the past. I love Oodi. On the third level, is a kids play area. The plan for today was to go on a walk around the old haunt (Toolo lake) and then have a stop at the library.

Savya was sleeping when I left home. I took the #6 tram (I love trams!) from Kumpula Campus toward city centre. I got down at Hakaniemi. I wanted to relive the glory days, my old walking route around the Toolo bay area. Hence, getting maybe two stops before I should have, if I wanted to get to the library.

It was drizzling. The rain relented a little when I got down at the Hakaniemi station. Just a little. I walked around the lake and just as I was reaching the library, I heard Savya quip (He does that these days). I smiled. Just in time!

We entered from the back entrance. And as soon as we did, it felt a little weird. There were too many people in the place! But I ignored it, I had entered from the back after all, where the restaurant is, so maybe, there were lots of people having lunch.

I took the elevator to the third floor.

As soon as I left the elevator, I realised the folly of my ways! The place was stuffed with people. There must be something going on here.

My first thought was this - lets just go. I don't like crowds. My second thought was this - now that I'm here, lets just see what the fuss is all about. Content for the nordletter!

We parked the pram next to the elevator exit. I got Savya out from his halari, removed his snow boots, removed his gloves. I picked him up, went past the crowds and took him to the centre of the kids play area.

Two people - a child and an adult were having a conversation on a makeshift stage. They were speaking in Finnish, so I did not catch much of it.

I looked around and on one of the monitors in the space, I caught a glimpse of the descriptions of different events going on.

I looked around. There are two rooms to the back. Usually they are empty but they had done some decorations for the event. Unfortunately there was a long line of parents and children waiting in line to get up. Upstairs there was something else going on. The line felt to my eyes, a little shorter upstairs. And so, I thought lets go there.

It was a challenge, holding Savya still in my arms. Other children - both younger and older were either standing in the line or in their parent's arms. Not Savya though. He had to go somewhere, do something. And I thought - here I am, waiting in line for something, something that I hope he will enjoy, and this little guy would rather do something else. I thought, soon, he would be the one pulling me and telling me I want to go here. And then, whether I want to or not, I would need to go stand in line at all these places.

Just in case it was not clear - I do not like standing in lines.

I fought him, as he kicked and screamed. I let him on the floor for a little bit. He went and touched the safety net, got his hand out and waved to the masses below. And just as he thought he had gotten away, I pulled him back.

I was waiting in line for the space themed workshop. I was waiting because it was space themed.

This was an experience inside a black, air-filled ballon type thing. You walked in through the door and on the ceiling they had projected our solar system - the planets and the sun. There was some fancy light show sort of a thing and a soothing music to go along with it.

We went in and Savya wanted to get out just as fast. The space was dark. I held him, tried to get him to rest on the floor and look at the ceiling, like how you would the night sky. It did not work. But we stayed, his head in my lap, looking at the stars and the planets, and the changing light.

I do not know how Savya felt. I hope he enjoyed it though.

On the other side of Oodi, I could see a lot of crowd from the distance. After leaving the space workshop, we went there. Small children were singing there. By the time we got there, the performance was done though.

We roamed in the library some more, but then got on the elevator and to the first floor. It was getting late and Savya needed to eat.

On the way out, after the restaurant and before the exit, there was a small obstacle course. Savya will enjoy this for sure. And so I got him out of the outer layers again. He did, a little. For some reason he did not jump on the balloon as much as I had hoped he would. I took his hand and guided him through the rest of the course.

Just in front of the library, as soon as I had exited, I saw four buses parked in front. Four buses in wonderful paint jobs. I wanted to go home. I wanted to take a left and walk to the tram station. But the paint job and the colours. I was intrigued!

These were mini-libraries! Full of books and a little space at the back of the bus to sit in! I went and asked the staff what this was. Was this a one off thing? They said - no. These were mobile libraries. The four buses belonged to different localities - Helsinki/Espoo/Tampere. These buses follow a routine! I was surprised and inspired and so damn happy to learn this.

On my way out, I got a paper bus. Isn't it pretty?

And on the topic of the Finnish Independence Day, there were no parades - that's not how Finns do things. Instead, there were many protests around the Toolo area.

I caught one from a distance.

What were these people protesting? No clue.

/five things to share

1. Netflix wins the bidding war for Warner Bros. by Dominic Preston

Netflix is poised to purchase Warner Bros.’ studio and streaming business after being selected as the winner of the bidding war for the media giant.

I can’t really imagine this going through. To be honest, any company that is big enough to purchase WB, should not be allowed to purchase, with the exception of perhaps Apple.

But hey I already have Netflix so great if the HBO stuff is available on Netflix.

2. Early childhood education teachers increasingly lack qualifications, Etla study finds

The number of early childhood education teachers has risen by around 20 percent, but during that same period the number of teachers with qualifications had only risen by three percent.

The situation is a bit dire. There are temps that fill the void at times. And I know there are many people who are learning Finnish who temp for some time - maybe a month or so.

3. Transparent Leadership Beats Servant Leadership by kqr

The middle manager that doesn’t perform any useful work is a fun stereotype, but I also think it’s a good target to aim for. The difference lies in what to do once one has rendered oneself redundant. A common response is to invent new work, ask for status reports, and add bureaucracy.

A better response is to go back to working on technical problems. This keeps the manager’s skills fresh and gets them more respect from their reports. The manager should turn into a high-powered spare worker, rather than a paper-shuffler.

Interesting comparison between parenting and managing people here.

4. Bad Dye Job - Daring Fireball

John Gruber had some thoughts on Alan Dye leaving Apple.

The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. (If you care about design, there’s nowhere to go but down after leaving Apple. What people overlooked is the obvious: Alan Dye doesn’t actually care about design.)

It was an honest, scathing view of things. I like Liquid Glass on iOS. But on MacOS it is a mess. There are bugs. So many bugs. Hopefully we go back to design is how we do things and not how things should look.

5. Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead by Emma Roth

The brand’s shutdown is a huge blow for PC builders and hobbyists, who are already dealing with skyrocketing RAM prices linked to a surge in demand from AI companies. OpenAI, for example, struck a deal with SK Hynix and Samsung to make up to 900,000 DRAM per month for its Stargate project.

I had bought crucial SSD some time ago. They would provide comparable performance at lower prices. Sad.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Fun at Biitsi

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #80, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Last week, just after I had sent out NL80, I felt I should put more effort into this, into writing the [[202503052322 NordLetter|NordLetter]].

I usually start writing this on a Saturday. After I start it takes around anything from an hour to two to get everything done. The writing, a little bit of re-writing, uploading pictures to Cloudflare R2, pasting things in the Buttondown client, scheduling the post, doing a git push on my own website and so on.

The first two thing here were about the writing. The rest is just admin work.

This is the longest thing I write all week. I used to be able to write a little while I commuted to work. That stopped when I got a car.

Most of what I do during the week is maybe write a paragraph here, a few words there. I assume no one reads those. Or rather, the only thing I am sure some people read is this NordLetter. This realisation came when a friend said they get news about us from this newsletter. Prerna's friends have said the same thing to her.

And so, I started writing this edition on Thursday. I wrote the first two lines and then the rest I am typing out on Sunday.

I attended the November edition of the Vibe Coding Finland meetup on Wednesday. It was held at the Architecture and Design Museum. The location was the thing I was most excited about. I could not go in advance and checkout the exhibits before the meetup. I saw just enough during the break though that I want to visit it again.

The talk that gave me the most to think about was by Roope Rainisto. He made me rethink what stories were, how they changed, what they are now, and where can we go.

I am not sure I agree with everything that he said, but that's the thing - you don't have to.

On Saturday, we were at Biitsi courtesy of our friends at the housing association. Biitsi is located at Underground at the Mall of Tripla. You go down to P4, and from there, follow the signage that leads you to it.

The temperature was a nice and warm (and humid?) 26 degrees. There was a surf area (a different area to which we did not have access), three volleyball courts, sandy areas to sit in and play some games in, a couple of beach side bars and all around fun!

We took a wrong bus and so were a little late by the time we got there. The housing association had booked one court and one sandy area for us. Two groups were already playing beach volleyball when we got there.

Four others were playing cornhole when we got there. So we joined them. In cornhole, you take a little pillow filled with corn(?) and try to make sure it falls in a hole on an inclined bench. I overshot the four times I tried.

Then, it was time to play beach volleyball. It was fun. The guys and gals were kind. Everyone got a chance to serve, everyone played in every position. Beginners got two serves. We started bad, but ended up being the undefeated champs of the court.

I had fun. I had played volleyball back in school. It was the default sport that was picked for me, even though I actually liked and was pretty good at table tennis. This was for the subject of Physical Education. Where our school got good marks in the practical by serving samosas and coke to the examiner and chatting them up. Or at least that was the story.

Savya woke up and Prerna went and sat with him for a bit.

After living in Finland for more than four years, and having a sauna in my home, I took my first sauna. And it was nice.

The air felt hot and heavy. But I felt light. The hiss of the water as someone poured hot water on the coal. We sat there, not in total darkness and I could feel the steam inside my lungs. And I thought to myself - this is nice, I will do thing where they take a dip into freezing lake water, then run to the sauna, then run and take a dip in the freezing water.

Savya enjoyed himself in the sauna too. There was a little discussion around whether he was too young to be in one. But I heard someone say that Finns used to give birth in saunas. So not too young then.

/five things to share

1. Part 1: My Life Is a Lie by Michael W. Green

The second earner isn’t working for a vacation or a boat. The second earner is working to pay the stranger watching their children so they can go to work and clear $1-2K extra a month. It’s a closed loop.

This hit me like a ton of bricks.

This is a must read.

2. Stranger Things is ending, and so is Netflix’s reliance on tentpole shows by Charles Pulliam-Moore

Rather than launching massive tentpole originals designed to get everyone watching the same thing, Netflix has invested more of its energy into projects that feel more targeted to specific audiences, like fans of anime and live sports.

You can’t make everyone happy is the one advice you keep hearing as you are creating something. Netflix is like a collection of niches. They have different things that appeal to different people. That is good, I think.

3. Warner Music Group partners with Suno to offer AI likenesses of its artists by Emma Roth

Warner Music Group has struck a licensing deal with the AI music creation platform Suno. Under the agreement, WMG will allow users to create AI-generated music on Suno using the voices, names, likenesses, images, and compositions of artists who opt in to the program.

All the suing was for this. OpenAI did this long back with the newspapers. It had started with the music industry now.

4. AI CEO – Replace Your Boss Before They Replace You

Just for the LOLZ.

5. Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult by Simon Willison

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 this morning, which they call "best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use". This is their attempt to retake the crown for best coding model after significant challenges from OpenAI's GPT-5.1-Codex-Max and Google's Gemini 3, both released within the past week!

I did not have preview access to Opus4.5. Nor do I need it for the things I generally use LLMs for.

With the base text only models, I guess there is no more step change now. They may show benchmarks that they are the best model for coding, but it’s single decimal points. It does not really matter.

What matters more is the features they add - like when Anthropic added the skills feature. What you can do is more important. And yes I still believe it will be human in the loop situation. Will we be centaurs of reverse-centaurs is an open question.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Vibe Coding November Meetup

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The thing that I am most excited about this meetup is where it is happening, at the architecture and design museum.

The last one was at a wonderful venue as well. The organisers clearly are on top of their game.

During the five minute break between sessions I had a chance to look at a couple of exhibits, and it seemed interesting to me. Perhaps, we would be back here.

## 1. "How AI can bring back the original tradition of storytelling" by Roope Rainisto

Originally, stories were told orally. Storyteller was a performer, interpreter and editor - changing things based on the listener feedback. This remained the case even in 16th/17th century.

The change started in the last five hundred years or so. Technology came and detached the story from the story-teller. The story does not change anymore. Stories are dead artifacts now, being copied and distributed across the world.

Games are a break from this fixed form. The player can influence the story.

But games are still dumb. They are on rails. Either you click through the cutscene and go to the game (shoot stuff). Or they are sandboxes where you can do a bunch of stuff but there is no story.

D&D or LARPing are examples where you have freedom and story progresses as well.

AI may bring back the intelligent story-teller. It can bring back story-telling as performance. There are a bunch of things which are possible.

The artist can be present by describing the story world not just the story. What are the ideas, the thing that you want to tell. The player needs to feel like they came to the realisation on their own.

2. "Stop Prompting. Start Commanding: How Agent Armies Build Better Systems" by Rolf Koski, Co-founder & CTO @ Elexive

The same SDLC principles should apply even now with vibe-coding. Specs must capture the requirements.

Use markdown documents to steer the AI, about your choices - stack, naming, patterns. Progressive discovery is key here - protect your context window.

There are different agent patterns -

Loop over itself to create a output
Parallel execution which results in a output

Rolf prefers Kiro and Claude Code. One alternative to Kiro is OpenSpec. I liked the idea of spec-driven development. Something to experiment with.

3. "Three Gains from Integrating Vibecoding into My Workflow", by Christoffer Weiss, Chief Avatar Officer @ Avataria

Make whatever software you want to use
Single person team
Never start from zero

And per usual, here's a pic from outside the venue, after the talk.

Happy Birthday to Me

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #80, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

It was (is?) my birthday today.

When I was young, I would be excited about my birthday. I would know and talk about it a month out. I would say November is my birth month. I would count down to the day my birthday would be. I would be excited for my birthday party. I would be excited for the gifts I would get.

Now, it feels like just another day. Now, I can buy whatever I want. I'm not excited by it though. It feels like I've grown out of it.

And yet, Prerna spent a better part of three hours in this extra bedroom (study/art-cave) we have. For three hours, I held Savya as he dozed off, while she kept at it, in that closed door. Three hours where I did not see her. She would pop out from time to time, but I was not to go in the room.

And then, at twelve, I did.

Here's how it looked.

There was a cake.

In case it was not clear, I love purple.

Prerna, I love you. Your excitement, zest and zeal for life is truly infectious.

Helsinki city opened up the Christmas season with a parade down Aleksanterinkatu. The parade began at Senate Square, at 16:00. By the time we reached the place, the parade was over. A whole throng of people were walking back from the streets, while another throng of people were walking toward Aleksanterinkatu.

Central is always a high density area compared to the rest of Helsinki. But whenever I see this many people in a place, I feel icky.

Not today though. The weather was cool, but not super cool. And because of so many people in the same small area, it felt warm even. Or maybe it was the body warmer I had on.

This was nothing compared to the crowd we had seen at Times Square.

We trudged along, walking, stopping, taking a picture and then continuing. We walked where trams usually run. I knew by then that the parade was long over. But we continued walking toward Senate Square. The weather was magnificent. And for whatever reason, neither of us was particularly salty about having missed the parade.

For most of this season, and the last, the Helsinki Cathedral has been covered due to renovation work. The renovation work is done now! The cathedral looked gorgeous, with the Christmas tree just ahead of it.

Prerna had planned as the final thing for my birthday, a dinner at Street Canteen, a Malaysian restaurant in Helsinki.

The restaurant is at the corner of Mannerheimintie, opposite Forum. You enter through the Kaivopiha entrance, or from the other side near Clas Ohlson. We missed this entrance, and then had to walk back.

I loved the feel of the place - a plastic elephant held the cutlery, the walls were covered in vibrant, classic wallpapers (ice cold Coca Cola sold here!!), the menu was in the shape of a magazine.

The food was good. It was my first time eating Malaysian street food - and this was that - so maybe I am a little inexperienced. But I loved the food. It was better than all the Indian food we've tried in Helsinki.

We eat Indian food all the time at home. And it's not like the Indian food we eat in ravintolas here are any good. So makes sense to try out different cuisines when we go out.

I will leave you with a few pictures now. Enjoy!

P.S. Loved the Goreng Cauliflower and the noodles!

/five things to share

1. Microsoft Mitigated the Largest Cloud DDoS Ever Recorded, 15.7 Tbps - Slashdot by

On October 24, 2025, Azure DDoS Protection detected and mitigated a massive multi-vector attack peaking at 15.72 Tbps and 3.64 billion pps, the largest cloud DDoS ever recorded, aimed at a single Australian endpoint. Azure's global protection network filtered the traffic, keeping services online. The attack came from the Aisuru botnet, a Turbo Mirai-class IoT botnet using compromised home routers and cameras. The attack used massive UDP floods from more than 500,000 IPs hitting a single public address, with little spoofing and random source ports that made traceback easier.

2. Cloudflare explains Tuesday’s outage that temporarily took down ChatGPT by Richard Lawler

the query change caused its ClickHouse database to generate duplicates of information. As the configuration file rapidly grew to exceed preset memory limits, it took down “the core proxy system that handles traffic processing for our customers, for any traffic that depended on the bots module.”

My website is hosted on Cloudflare pages. It was down for a bit. As were a bunch of other websites - udemy, safari (o’Reilly) and so on.

It seems like a bad time for these cloud providers. First it was AWS, then Azure, then Azure had a DDoS attack and now this.

It truly seems like a matter of when and not if.

3. Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3 by Ethan Mollick

Three years ago, we were impressed that a machine could write a poem about otters. Less than 1,000 days later, I am debating statistical methodology with an agent that built its own research environment. The era of the chatbot is turning into the era of the digital coworker. To be very clear, Gemini 3 isn’t perfect, and it still needs a manager who can guide and check it. But it suggests that “human in the loop” is evolving from “human who fixes AI mistakes” to “human who directs AI work.” And that may be the biggest change since the release of ChatGPT.

Google announced Gemini 3.0 which takes it closer to the state of the art with respect to other models. They claim it’s better than the rest. In this field, that’s a little subjective.

It has given me an interesting headache though. I was planning to take yearly subscription of Claude. I will test this out instead now.

4. We’re learning more about what vitamin D does to our bodies by Jessica Hamzelou

Our bones are continually being broken down and rebuilt, and they need calcium for that rebuilding process. Without enough calcium, bones can become weak and brittle. (Depressingly, rickets is still a global health issue, which is why there is global consensus that infants should receive a vitamin D supplement at least until they are one year old.)

Take your supplements!

It's that time of the year for us in Finland at least.

5. Screw it, I’m installing Linux by Nathan Edwards

Linux has been a perfectly viable desktop OS for ages. But gaming on Linux is now viable, too. Valve’s hard work getting Windows games to run well on the Linux-based Steam Deck has lifted all boats. Gaming handhelds that ship with Windows run better and have higher frame rates on Bazzite, a Fedora-based distro, than they do with Windows. And after reading about the upcoming Steam Machine and Antonio’s experience running Bazzite on the Framework Desktop, I want to try it.

Microsoft has enshittified Windows 11 by putting AI everywhere.

There should be a way to say I don’t want any AI features. There are no different versions of the OS. Everyone gets the same OS. For those who don’t want it, there should be a way to opt out of it.

If not, people can try Linux.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

The Joy of Coding

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I wrote a solution to a python exercise today. With the University of Helsinki MooC, a fun thing that they do is they have an option to show model solution. I guess some LLM provides a solution for the exercise as well.

Most of the times, the model solution is more elegant. This time, I looked at my solution and I was like - I like mine better.

That gave me joy.

Anywho - the program was a fairly simple piece of code - create a square based on the text and the length of the square provided by the user.

For example for "ay", 3, output would be:

aya
yay
aya

Yeah, that's a square.

Moving

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

A week is a long time! I felt that today, right now, as I started writing this and looked at the calendar. The last NordLetter went out on 2nd November. This one will go out on the 16th. There is a reason for that.

I tend to underestimate the effort and time to do certain things. We moved from Matinkylä to Kumpula, a stone's throw from the Physicum building of University of Helsinki, Kumpula campus.

I underestimated the effort it would take to do the move. I had hoped I would sit down and send out a NordLetter on Sunday. Oh how wrong I was!

A week from then, I feel comfortable enough to get back to the routine. And so here it goes!

Hello from my home in Kumpula! This is NordLetter #79, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this post. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I wrote about the trepidations of having to move in NL74.

Most of my worries were handled by a to-do list in Obsidian.

/before the move

We got the keys to the new apartment on Monday - 3rd Nov. Prerna took the keys from the K-Market at Redi mall. I went and picked her up from the mall, after going around trying to find a place to park - there was none. We went and saw the apartment after that.

The room was dark. The electricity contract for this place was not active yet. You need to buy the contract for the place when you move. We inspected the apartment in the torch light of our iPhones.

We loved the place. It is 66 square metres compared to 50 square metres of the old one. There is an extra bedroom - which will become my work/play space.

After inspecting, we had some momos - soup and chilli.

The next day Prerna did a proper inspection - with pictures and video.

On Thursday - 6th Nov, I packed and unpacked six suitcases full of clothes at our new home.

Friday - 7th Nov was Savya's last day at his daycare. They had also arranged a celebration for father's day on the same day.

I spent some time with Savya in his daycare - drawing a little - playing a bunch. Savya does not like to draw. He does love to run around though!

Savya's daycare shared a wonderful picture with his teachers and all the kids and a lovely message - in Finnish and Hindi for us to have.

the day of

We had hired for the transport to come at 14:00.

From the morning, we were busy packing. To be honest, most of the packing had already been done in boxes and suitcases since the past couple of days. And yet, somehow there was more work to do, more things to pack.

I spent the better part of the morning undoing our bed and our dining table. This was the reverse of building your own furniture. It felt a little weird. A little nostalgic. A little sad.

We have had these moments throughout the past week - while walking, while going to his daycare, when Savya's teachers said they would miss him.

After that was done, I packed up our TV, the PS5, the desktop monitor I had and so on.

Then we ate and waited.

Then came the van and the helpers to pack everything we had and owned. Multiple trips later, we had packed everything that we could in that van.

In three hours we had packed up our lives in a van, and unpacked our lives at our new home.

the days after

We unpacked.

Then we did some cleaning.

Then we unpacked some more.

Then we slept.

Rinse. Repeat.

I took a picture of our new home in the middle of all this. It felt pertinent somehow. I wanted to have this memory.

This was on Monday - the 10th. We had spend Sunday cleaning up the old home. On Monday I was back at the office, while Prerna was with Savya at the daycare. The house was a mess.

There is a little slice of time, when, the new home is foreign to you. Where it is not your home yet. Where you miss home. For the first couple of days, I could not sleep properly. The home - nice as it was - airier, bigger, better in every way felt weird.

The things that we were used to - our routines, the places things are supposed to be in. Nothing was in place. It felt weird. We were on edge.

And we did not have time. We moved on Saturday. We worked on Sunday. And we were back to the grind on Monday. Maybe we should have moved during the weekday and taken some leaves.

This Friday, I went back to our home in Matinkylä to pick up some things. On this day, this old our home of ours felt foreign to me. I guess we get used to our surroundings fairly quickly.

/five things to share

1. I know you don’t want them to want AI, but… - Anil Dash

I don’t know why today’s Firefox users, even if they’re the most rabid anti-AI zealots in the world, don’t say, “well, even if I hate AI, I want to make sure Firefox is good at protecting the privacy of AI users so I can recommend it to my friends and family who use AI”. I have to assume it’s because they’re in denial about the fact that their friends and family are using these platforms. (Judging by the tenor of their comments on the topic, I’d have to guess their friends don’t want to engage with them on the topic at all.)

AI is not going anywhere, so we better contribute to better ways of using the tool.

2. OpenAI Releases GPT-5.1, Along With Renamed and New Personalities

Robot was the personality that changed how I felt about ChatGPT. Before, I found ChatGPT useful but frequently annoying; after, I’ve found it purely useful.

I have not changed these settings in the past, which is to say, I keep it at default. After reading this, I’ve set it as efficient, just to see if I like it better.

3. Oedipus is about the act of figuring out what Oedipus is about

So I believe that Oedipus Tyrannus, the original auto-whodunnit, is the ur-exemplar of this razor: what Oedipus tells us is that we can search and search and search for the meaning of a story, and search some more, and ultimately what we’ll find is ourselves, searching.

4. University education as we know it is over by Simas Kucinskas

AI now solves university assignments perfectly in minutes. Students often use LLMs as a crutch rather than as a tutor, getting answers without understanding. To address these problems, I propose a barbell strategy: pure fundamentals (no AI) on one end, full-on AI projects on the other, with no mushy middle. Universities should focus on fundamentals.

Take home assignments are useless if the end product of it is a report. Of course you can use LLMs to do everything. Focusing on the fundamentals with no AI use makes sense. Focusing on full AI use also makes sense. With the amount of workload a student is usually under, it might not be possible to not take a shortcut for all subjects.

5. Maintenance versus making | Note to Self

Challenging beliefs like this is a major part of my personal productivity detox. The idea that building new things is more valuable than maintenance or care is some capitalist bullshit, and it’s worth deprogramming.

I tend to think this way too, unfortunately.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Chath Celebrations

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #78, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

BJPF had organised a chath event this saturday at the EIS campus. Last year, we were at home, celebrating Chath in Bihar. The year before that we were part of the celebrations. It was cold, snowy. We had to walk from the train station to the school where the event was organised at. We did not have any spikes on our shoes - I don't remember why. We had enjoyed ourselves during that event. But I was not writing Nordletters then. So it's almost as if, if did not happen. If a tree fell in a forest and no one heard it fall, did it make a sound?

We were there this time though. And what a sound it made!

The event proper started at 14:00. There was a Madhubani art workshop organised before the event. Prerna was there since around 11:00 - as she was part of the decoration team. I was out on a walk, near the beach with Savya.

We met at EIS, in the darkness of the theatre. The same theatre where in the past I had seen a few comics - Bassi, Rahul S. and others. This time, there were dancers performing Indian classical dance.

I went and took a seat with Savya. We clapped as the performance ended. We cheered on as the kids took stage - with a skit showcasing the days of the Chath Puja.

We left the theatre after that. Turns out children don't like dark spaces too much. I left Savya on the floor, he quickly met and made friends with a few kids and they started running around. That meant, we got time to click a few pictures while keeping a distant eye on Savya.

We popped back in for a singing performance. I heard a couple of songs being sung in maithili, before popping back out again. I enjoyed the descriptions of the songs - the yearning a mother feels for her child and the way she tries to get her child to visit her.

There was also a short address by the ambassador. There was also an impromptu - we had not prepared for this in any way - performance by the erstwhile Bihari Boys. I was included in the group in an honorary role.

Last Counter was up on stage then. I was looking forward to their performance. I enjoyed it in the same way I enjoyed the rest of the event - in bits and parts. But the parts I witnessed were awesome.

Then it was time for our fashion show. I don't have any pictures of that either, because I walking the ramp. More next week perhaps. We had met a on a past couple of Saturdays to prepare for the walk. It was a fun experience.

The women of BJPF gathered on stage at last. There was some sindoor, some dance at the very end.

We had the venue till 18:00. What followed was people eating and then everyone helping each other pick up the trash, put it in the bags, clean the tables, mop the floor and be out of the door before the time ran out.

The wall to the right of this picture had a exhibition from two painters of madhubani art. I could not take a picture of it. The paintings were beautiful.

/five things to share

1. Why Stories Make You Smarter Than Self-Help Books by Joan Westenberg

The young read fiction because they haven't yet learned to be embarrassed by imagination. The genuinely brilliant read fiction because they've looped back around to understanding that pure information transfer is the least interesting thing a book can do. But there's a vast middle ground of people who have just enough education to feel insecure about it, and these folks read non-fiction exclusively. They read because they love being seen learning, more than they love the process of it. I know. I’ve been one of ‘em, at various points in my life.

My reading pattern or the pattern I try to implement is one non-fiction book, followed by a fiction book and so on. I find fiction books work better with audio format and since most of my reading is that, I think I will dip more in that pool.

Maybe.

2. Elon Musk’s Grokipedia contains copied Wikipedia pages by Jay Peters

According to a ticker at the bottom of the homepage, Grokipedia has over 885,000 articles; Wikipedia currently maintains around 7 million English pages. However, this is an early version of Grokipedia — it has a v0.1 version number on the homepage.

I did not know this was happening.
Who decided what these 885,000 articles would be?
What a weird name!

3. DeepSeek may have found a new way to improve AI’s ability to remember by Caiwei Chen

Instead of storing words as tokens, its system packs written information into image form, almost as if it’s taking a picture of pages from a book. This allows the model to retain nearly the same information while using far fewer tokens, the researchers found.

It also uses older or less critical info in slightly blurred pictures.

A picture is worth a thousand words after all.

4. Austria's Ministry of Economy Has Migrated To a Nextcloud Platform In Shift Away From US Tech

Even before Azure had a global failure this week, Austria's Ministry of Economy had taken a decisive step toward digital sovereignty. The Ministry achieved this status by migrating 1,200 employees to a Nextcloud-based cloud and collaboration platform hosted on Austrian-based infrastructure. This shift away from proprietary, foreign-owned cloud services, such as Microsoft 365, to an open-source, European-based cloud service aligns with a growing trend among European governments and agencies. They want control over sensitive data and to declare their independence from US-based tech providers.

This makes sense. DF wrote about a similar move for ICJ. Europe does need to build these capabilities though. There is so much entrenchment though. And so much money on the table for MSFT and others to not do anything.

5. Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away

A very dense podcast but great to listen to Andrej talk about LLMs and the current state of things.

There is also Andrej's post on animals vs ghosts.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

MSFT AI User Group Event at Nitor

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Back at the Nitor office. At this point I feel like I should create a tag for Nitor.

Tero Niemi - Copilot Studio Lite

Tero was up first. He talked about building and using lite agents in Copilot. He showcased a couple of agents he was already using at work, using them to think and give differing points of views on subjects. He talked about the importance of continuous learning and training in organisations.

Vesa Tikkanen - Embeddings

Vesa was up next. From the moment he had said Hello, I was wondering where had I seen him before. Not just seen, because there are a few people I keep seeing at these events, but rather heard speak. By the time his talk was over, I had looked him up in my notes and found out that he was one of the organisers/speakers during the global AI bootcamp at the MSFT office.

From his talk, I learnt about a new thing - Embeddings. They are the knowledge behind your data.

Embeddings enable models to find similar things in your data. Traditional search might be super slow in a vast data sets. With the help of vectors, we can find out similar things.

Most of the talk was things I did not know. But I loved how Vesa explained the concepts.

Also he proved that Excel is not a DB, by using vector search. It was funny! You had to be there.

FAUG October Meetup

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The reason I was excited for this event was because of the palce it was being held at - PolarSquad. I had applied for a position at this organisation and even though I did not get an interview, I had received a good email back - detailing the things I needed to concentrate on. I like that. A human touch!

So I’m excited for that. Update - I met the guy who had sent that email. We talked a little. I told him the story. We connected on Linkedin.

I walked from Vallila to here, around 2.7 kms in this crisp Helsinki weather. I enjoyed the walk. This office space is next door to the Irish bar. I don’t know why that was a surprising thing to me. I don’t know what I thought these building would host. As it turns out, tech companies.

This is a cool space, a little box, with exposed brick walls, black wooden raised floor/benches, in a little U around the presentation screen, like a little classroom.

In the middle of the U are a few bean bags. I am sitting a little to the left, now considering if I should have took a beanbag instead.

A place like this looks like it would be heavily in-use by the good folks at Polar Squad to demo/teach stuff internally. A dream.

And now, we go for the event.

Building self-service for subscription vending by Juuso Saranki

Juuso started the talk with a discussion of Azure landing zones
Then moved on to why subscription democratisation is a great idea and also why it stinks.
Subscription vending provides user friendly interface and automated provisioning
This has a few components - data collection (a static web app in the demo) which triggers an azure function which triggers a commit to a repo, which triggers a deployment pipeline (GitHub workflow in the demo) to create a subscription.

AI-Native SDLC: Building the Next Generation Organizations by Marko Klemetti

Marko gave a very interesting talk on how AI will change organisations and SDLC. It was captivating enough that I did not take any notes during the talk. The demo that Marko tried to do did not work - but that was OK.

The main takeaways were this -

AI will surpass human capabilities soon, but rewiring societies will take time.
Change is inevitable. Change before you have to.
New features can be delivered in minutes using AI in different stages of software development.
Major productivity gains after going to autonomous agents/software factory models.

The pizza was great. It was super spicy with a tinge of sweetness from the onion on top. I loved it! The best pizza I've had.

One other thing was the organisers giving shout-outs to other groups doing meetups in Finland.

Distributed System Design Patterns

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

From The practice of cloud system administration.

These are the three patterns:

Load balancer with replicated backends
1. LB forwards query to backend server.
2. Backend server are replicated, so any backend should give the same response for a certain query.
3. Round-robin or slow start algorithm to assign traffic.
Server with multiple backend
1. Server receives a query and then forward it to different components.
2. The components all send their responses and then combine it to form the response the user gets.
Server tree
1. Root receives the full query and forwards eat to leaf nodes.
2. Each leaf node works on the query.
3. It allows for parallel searching of a large corpus of data for example.

Work at a Natural Pace

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There should be a varying approach to work, periods of rest and celebration, followed by periods of work.

How?

Take longer to do things

Have long terms plans - 5 years or so
Double the time taken for projects
1. Initial time estimates are usually guesses and wrong
Simplify your day to day
1. Schedule fewer meetings - If you block time for meeting, block similar amount of time for work
2. Schedule lesser work - so that you have more time to do things

How to Create a Simulated Pull Workflow

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Related to Pull vs push method for getting projects. Read about this first in Slow Productivity.

This is especially useful when you don’t have control over how work gets assigned to you.

The core of this system are the two buckets where projects live -

On hold
In progress

Every new work comes to the on hold bucket. Things you are actually working on are in progress bucket. The key point is to ensure a max number of projects in the in progress bucket - three.

Once a project is done we add a new project from the on-hold bucket. If for example, writing a book is a project in the on-hold bucket, what you pull in the in-progress bucket is ‘write chapter 2’.

When a new project request, we need to ingest it properly, by:

Acknowledging the requester
Giving a time line
Giving a list of open projects you have
Any information you need from them

The final step is to ensure proper cleanup of the on hold bucket on schedule.

Obsess Over Quality

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Have pride in what you build. Give it time and the effort it deserves.

Do Fewer Things

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Limiting missions
Limiting projects
Limiting tasks on a daily basis -

How?

By time blocking or doing certain things at certain times
By paying for services that save time and take admin work off your hands.

Hyva Diwalia!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #77, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

We are still reeling from the week that was - the week after Diwali that is.

I had seen this line on the Diwali event page that Diwali was like Christmas - we clean our homes, put up lights, make and eat delicious food.

But in the western countries, Christmas means a week long holiday - to recharge, rejuvenate, and join work after that.

Here, I was working on Diwali, and was in office the day after. In India, I might have had a half day or a holiday on Diwali and nothing after. Those who left for their homes for Diwali got a week I think. Depending on who they were, they might have been expected to work from home.

The sad thing is that we do not get holidays to celebrate our festivals because the customers are working. And when they have the Christmas holiday, we are still working because its not our festival.

None of the above stopped us from celebrating though! I talked about pre-Diwali celebrations in the last Nordletter.

Diwali fell on Monday this year. We celebrated it at home with a couple of our friends and a surprise guest. No body wants to go anywhere on Diwali night. We clean and decorate our homes, then do aarti in the evening.

We did that this year too.

Like all years, there were things that needed to be purchased, we were in our car, going somewhere. I don't remember where to or from now.

We did our pooja around 19:30 - the Ganesh arti followed by the Laxmi arti. The classics. This is what Diwali is for me - this little pooja in the evening and the sweets.

Our friends came to our place then. We took some pictures then.

They also brought with them a pack of six phool-jhadis. Fun story they had bought it last year, so we were a little skeptic if it would work this year or not. Spoiler it worked.

With that, we come to the food.

It was a perfect Diwali. I felt so full.

We celebrated on Tuesday, Diwali at the OP offices. Some more Diwali pictures in this post.

On Sunday, a week from now, we will be going to the BJPF's chath event. This time at EIS. It has free entry, so come and watch us strut around on some funky music.

/five things to share

1. Claude Code for web—a new asynchronous coding agent from Anthropic by Simon Willison

Anthropic launched Claude Code for web this morning. It's an asynchronous coding agent - their answer to OpenAI's Codex Cloud and Google's Jules, and has a very similar shape. I had preview access over the weekend and I've already seen some very promising results from it.

This was the one missing feature I cared about, that was available on ChatGPT and not on Claude.

Now that it’s there, I can go subscribe to Claude.

2. Apple adds a new toggle to make Liquid Glass less glassy by Jay Peters

The option is available now in the iOS 26.1 developer beta that Apple launched on Monday. You can access it from Settings > Display & Brightness > Liquid Glass, where you can choose between “Clear” and “Tinted.” The latest iPadOS 26.1 and macOS 26.1 developer betas also let you tint Liquid Glass

I like Liquid Glass generally, but there are a few places where I have come across a few bugs and legibility issues.

This is good I guess, but I could not figure out any differences in the screenshots in the article.

3. Rivian’s first e-bike is unlike anything you’ve ever seen by Thomas Ricker

Rivian’s micromobility spinoff Also has just taken the wraps off its TM-B e-bike, TM-Q pedal-assisted electric quad bike, and Alpha Wave helmet that represents “a breakthrough in rider safety and connectivity.”

I love how it looks too. It has a retro sci-fi vibe to it. I love it!

But it’s costly at 4500. I don’t know why I was expecting it to be cheap. I guess I wasn’t. I just wanted it to be. Anywho!

4. Bestsellers to Blockbusters: Stephen King Reflects on the Adaptations of His Work

I was just another horror-writing wannabe when I got to college, but one of those growth spurts happened while I was in a poetry seminar, where I fell under the influence of poets like William Carlos Williams, whose famous dictum was “No ideas but in things.” I was never much of a poet (although I tried hard), but Williams’s advice spoke to me. Thus, characters in my stories never swing open a medicine cabinet and see generic aspirin—they see Excedrin or Anacin. They never open the fridge and grab a beer, they grab a Bud or a PBR.

Good advice this.

5. Code like a surgeon by Geoffrey Litt

A lot of the “secondary” tasks are “grunt work”, not the most intellectually fulfilling or creative part of the work. I have a strong preference for teams where everyone shares the grunt work; I hate the idea of giving all the grunt work to some lower-status members of the team. Yes, junior members will often have more grunt work, but they should also be given many interesting tasks to help them grow.

With AI this concern completely disappears! Now I can happily delegate pure grunt work. And the 24/7 availability is a big deal. I would never call a human intern at 11pm and tell them to have a research report on some code ready by 7am… but here I am, commanding my agent to do just that!

The idea being AI works on the secondary stuff and keep it ready while you work on the primary stuff.

I found the above idea important as well, to rotate grunt work among the full team. I have had this in the past where senior members would not work on tickets, etc.

We try to make sure everyone works on everything.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Celebrating Diwali at OP

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

In what has now become a yearly tradition, we celebrated Diwali at the OP Vallila office yesterday.

I remember the first time OP had organised Diwali at their premises. It had felt true to the OP values of inclusivity and celebrating diversity. It was not something we had been expecting, so it had come as a pleasant surprise.

Over the years, it has become something we look forward to. Even though it feels routine, I think it’s important though to not take it for granted and participate, which is exactly what we did!

The event started with inspiring speeches from OP group CEO Timo Ritakallio and HE Ambassador Hemant H. Kotalwar, followed by energising performances from various employees and their families. There was good food, a photo booth, a kids corner, among other things.

I wish the Photo Booth had pages to take physical prints though, I still have mine from 2023.

Here are some pictures.

Giving Books Away for Free

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Derek Sivers emailed me (and by me I mean he emailed everyone I guess) about an offer for a week to get his books for free.

I had wanted to read How to live since some time and so this offer came at an opportune time. I went to the site and got epubs for all his books.

I finished reading Anything you want today.

As for the why, this is what he had said:

Because I want you to read them (or hear them) and gift them.

I get emails from people saying my writing has changed the way they see the world, but I know that the $75 price ($15 x 5 books) has kept some people from getting them.

Since I don't care about the money, and I do care about sharing what I've learned before I die, I'm happy to lose money this week to get you to read them or hear them.

I liked that. I want more people to read what I wrote too. I need to figure out a way to give a year of mornings away for free too.

Diwali Week

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä and Happy Diwali! This is NordLetter #76, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail. I am also posting on Mastodon.

We started pre-Diwali celebrations a little early this time around. A couple of weeks back we were at a pre-Diwali party with some of our friends from our community. They live in Jätkäsaari, a beautiful 2 hall apartment. They had put up lights everywhere, around the mirrors, on the doors, on the curtains - everywhere. It looked pretty - we went ahead and got the same lights from Jysk.

I put up these lights today. For the past couple of seasons, we have been putting the lights up in the balcony. This year, we have put them in the interiors. I am typing this with all the normal lights in the hall off, and just these string lights up. It looks beautiful now, in my home.

It was a good party. There were games. We sang and danced and laughed. We drove back home late at night. The roads felt a little different this late.

Then this Friday we had planned for a game night with our friends. The original plan was to get the kids to sleep early and then play poker.

In order to get that original plan to work, we went for a walk to get the kids to sleep. That plan was partially successful. Savya slept but our friends' child did not.

They both did sleep eventually.

We played 28. We were all playing for the first time. We ended the night in a draw. We were too damn tired to continue.

We sat and talked for a bit before going off to sleep.

This Saturday, was the Diwali event organised by Suomi-Intia-Seura in collaboration with Espoo city. The venue was in Kivenlahti, around 13 mins drive from our home at the Elämysareena.

The event was on the third floor. Savya had already slept by the time we reached the venue. And, he slept through the entire two hour period we were there.

The arena was split in two halves - the first half was where the performances were taking place - a Finnish troupe was performing when we entered. The second half was where the baazar was setup - food stalls, art and craft workshops, games, sweets and a bunch more stuff.

Suomi-Intia-Seura also organises a Folklore event during the summer. I think I preferred that event more, the flow of it. Or maybe I preferred the summer more. We were walking in that venue. The performances were in a theatre on the third floor, the exhibition and the art stalls were on the second floor, the food was a further level down - out in the open.

That of course is not possible now, all events have to be in a closed space. And maybe that's the problem. There also was a spice eating competition. A couple of our friends ate all the spices and got a certificate? Anyway.

We took food from our friends at Santripti Kitchen. We caught up with a few of our friends. We took pictures. And then we left for home.

It's Diwali week after all. And we already had a bunch of chores that needed doing.

Happy Diwali!

/five things to share

1. Apple's Smart Glasses With In-Lens Display May Feature Two Modes by Joe Rossignol

In his Power On newsletter today, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said he was told a future version of Apple's smart glasses may be able to run a full version of the visionOS operating system when they are paired with a Mac, and then switch to a more lightweight, mobile-friendly interface when they are paired with an iPhone.

This would make sense if they are connected to the Mac with a wire. A similar device exists already which connect to a PC.

2. Netflix is making a big bet on video podcasts by Emma Roth

Netflix is no longer just a home for TV shows, movies, documentaries, and live WWE matches — soon, you’ll be able to stream video podcasts, too. The streaming giant announced on Tuesday that it’s partnering with Spotify’s podcast studio and The Ringer to offer 16 series on its platform, including The Bill Simmons Podcast, Conspiracy Theories, as well as The Ringer’s shows on the NFL, NBA, Fantasy Football, and F1.

I was thinking about this a couple days ago - about how YouTube has full control over the video podcast market and how Netflix was not competing on it.

Seems like now they are.

3. Apple teases M5 MacBook by Jay Peters

Apple is teasing the imminent launch of a new MacBook with an M5 chip. In an X post, Apple SVP of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak wrote that “something powerful is coming,” and a short video in the post includes the words “coming soon” and a silhouette of an Apple laptop.

I think Apple has settled on two events per year - wwdc and the iPhone event. Everything else is just these product videos and announcements. I love the Mac and feel a little sad about how Apple perceives its importance.

Apple did launch new products with the M5 - a new iPad Pro, a base 14 inch MacBook Pro and a Vision Pro - all spec bumps. That’s all I have to say about it. Not my year to get any of these devices.

4. FSF Announces the LibrePhone Project - Slashdot

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has launched the LibrePhone Project, an initiative to create a fully free and open-source mobile operating system that eliminates proprietary firmware and binary blobs.

Will it ever work, given the Android and Apple duopoly?

5. Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP by Simon Willison

Skills are Markdown with a tiny bit of YAML metadata and some optional scripts in whatever you can make executable in the environment. They feel a lot closer to the spirit of LLMs - throw in some text and let the model figure it out.

Here’s the learn documentation.

It’s a simple feature. The bunch of things Anthropic has announced since the past one month while I’ve been on the ChatGPT train is staggering.

I am tempted to go back. The only thing ChatGPT has right now is the web ui for codex. This was ot would be free till 20th, after which the web usage will count toward the overall limits.

I think it makes sense to me to go back to Claude and try that out.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Better Than Average

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Here’s the thing - AI/LLMs may generate unoriginal stuff, things that are par for the course, unexceptional. An expert could find out flaws in them. You maybe an expert in the said field. So you may decide that it’s not that great.

The world is not full of experts.
You may be an expert in your field, but you are not an expert in all the fields.

So LLMs do increase the quality of work in all those other fields. Or, let you do work that you would nave been able to do in the first place.

That’s a win.

Devops Finland October Meetup

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I attended the Devops Finland meetup at SOK today. This was my first meetup at the SOK offices. I did not know what to expect going in. Would these be technical talks about tooling or something else.

The SOK building is at Fleminginkatu 34, massive and old, near where I walk. I crossed the street, walked past the McDonalds and the petrol pump, took a left, crossed a street and was standing in the courtyard soon. Not standing, I kept walking, it was cold.

At the reception, the security took my ID and gave me a temporary pass. This is not usual. But this was a bank after all.

I found a familiar face here, so took a selfie with them, ate some pizza, chatted a little. And then moved into a similarly ancient looking hall.

There were two presentations scheduled for today. Both the presentations ended up being meaty and left me with things to chew on. Here's a brief recap.

1. How to put strategy in developer productivity by Niko Kivelä & Jacob Lärfors

The talk was focused on the build - measure - learn cycle. Building capabilities provides features, focusing on tools distracts from solving real problems. Measuring can point us in the right direction. Communities offer a way to learn, share and engage with the engineers.

Biko and Jacob had agreed on three words they would not use in the presentation going forward or else five pushups. The words being:

Agile
Devops
Platform engineering

Niko did say the d-word and so had to do the pushups.

They also talked about communities and how,

Boundaries are good - autonomous teams form boundaries
Siloes in business are bad - everyone working on same problems
Communities bridge siloes

Development guidelines are developed using the must-should-recommended approach. Which is something I should read up more on, later.

2. Structuring teams for fast value delivery by Gaurav Bhorkar

Software is a constantly evolving thing. As the system grows the complexity increases as well. This could lead to declining quality if it is not managed. All of this happens under constrains defined by the organisation - what language you can use for example.

Organisational factors can destroy performance. Things like dependencies, staffing, structure and clarity, software architecture, etc. Companies are likely to build software designs that mimic the organisation’s communication structure.

A good team structure is one that allows for fast flow. It contributes to the organisation’s strategic direction.

Organisations need two main capabilities for modern software engineering - learning (feedback) and managing complexity.

A good teams need to have right expertise, be autonomous, have long term ownership over a domain and be strategic. Team is built of people. They need autonomy, have mastery and ownership of their domain.

How to make changes to team structure?

Observe
Find value streams - what is the team trying to do
Make changes
Rinse and repeat

Ideal team size is 5. With 7 people the number of communication pathways is 21.

This talk pulled from a bunch of ideas and thoughts that people have had many years ago (a fact pointed out by Gaurav many times during the talk). I imagine he had read these things over many times, taken notes and that has morphed into this project. I like this way of developing ideas and thinking about things. Small things become large.

How to Automate Something

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

After you’ve figured out what to automate, follow these steps -

Make sure you know how to do the thing manually.
Document the steps needed for the same
Make sure you can automate each step
Bring it together - add one step after the next and test after each addition, incrementally.

From Time management for system administrators.

What to Automate

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There are four types of things that we can automate -

Simple things done once
Hard things done once
Simple things done often
Hard things done often

It is better to try to automate simple things done often and hard things done once. We should consider buying tools for hard things done often.

From Time management for system administrators.

A Little Inefficiency Is Good

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

From Same as Ever.

Like in nature, species are not perfect. There are some imperfections.

Small inefficiencies in the work we do are similarly required - especially in knowledge work. We need time to think, to work the problem but seldom get the time to do so. Our days are filled with things - meetings, calls, disruptions.

The 9 to 5 is great if the work is formulaic and repetitive. But it does not work if you have to think.

Progress Takes Time While Destruction Is Instantaneous

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

From Same as ever.

Good things take time, they compound and that is difficult to point at and understand. Bad things on the other hand are things that did happen - a market crash, for example.

Creating a good reputation may take twenty years while losing it takes just five minutes.

Construction need engineers and planning while demolition needs someone with a sledgehammer.

Be a Rational Optimist

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

From Same as Ever.

A rational optimist is someone who knows that in the short term things will go bad, but over a longer time, things work out.

Being a pessimist or optimist all the times is not optimal. Because life does not work like that.

How to Avoid Wasting Time

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Set a timer for the thing that you want to do - for me playing a game
Once the timer rings, stop doing the thing

I have found myself getting lost while playing a game in my playstation. It takes my partner calling me out and telling me to get off my ass, that I think about shutting it off.

Gaming is not bad. It’s entertaining. There should be a limit though.

How to Decide What to Watch or Read

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Keep a list
When it comes to pick what to read/watch next just pick the next item in the list
Delete that item from the list

How to Handle Stress at Work

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

These are the things that work for me. They may or may not work for you.

If feeling overwhelmed with work, add stuff to the planner, see what can be done now, prioritise. Talk to your boss for prioritisation.
The rubber duck hypothesis- if stuck talk to anyone, sometimes just the act of explaining unlocks a problem.
Take vacations - not let me do some chores vacations- actual vacations
Walk. Do yoga. Meditate.

Risk Is What You Can’t See Coming

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Like Covid, or any of the great depressions. Sure in hindsight it seems obvious, but for people living the happening, it’s anything but.

There are two things to do then:

Plan for risk without prediction. You will not when it comes but you must plan anyway.
Always plan more than what might seem ok - like in personal finance it should feel like you have saved up more than needed for the emergency fund.

Happiness Relies on Expectation

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

By almost every metric, we are better off than we were in an earlier age, still we earn for the golden period we had earlier (supposedly).

The difference is expectation. The delta between expectation and our reality is what causes happiness or sorrow. We should have reasonable expectations and take whatever happens with stoicism.

Expectation comes from looking at what others around us have. That may or may not be what we need or want.

Also expectation is easier to manage than the outcomes.

How to Work With Your Boss

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Make your boss’s life easier. Understand the priorities, if they ask for some information or task there may be a bigger ask they are trying to accomplish.
1. If they ask you to do something go to them with solutions, or clearly ask for help.
Make sure your boss knows your career goals. Once a year have a chat. The preferred outcome is that they will tell you what you need to do.
Upward delegate only when it makes sense. When you need your boss’s authority for example to deal with other business units etc.

Malai

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #75, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

This clocktower is at the Central Railway Station. I took this picture after leaving the Azure and Friends October meetup.

This meetup was at the Nordcloud office, in the same building as the Brightly building which is where we had the the last Azure and Friends meetup.

The Nordcloud office is closer to our office space - with doors that need someone to buzz you in and so on, in part because they work in a similar space as we do.

I had fun, the food was good, I learned something new. What more could you ask for?

It inspired me to write about the best practices for presenting things.

When milk or tea or coffee starts to cool, a think layer of malai forms on top. Some people don’t like it. Some do.

I was reminded of this while pouring the coffee I had made. I used a spoon to make sure none of it fell in Prerna’s cup.

When it came to pouring my cup I made sure I poured all of it in my cup. I love malai.

That made me laugh. It’s like that meme - one person likes this the other person not that and then they get married.

Autumn colours are here. Orange-yellow-brown hues everywhere you look.

We had gone to a friend’s housewarming party last week. It was a rivitalo (rowhouse). The house was built in 1993. They had bought it in January and shifted to it in February.

There was a small tree in the front of the house. They had put some lights on it. It looked pretty. They had paid someone to build a nice wooden patio at the front and the back of the house. The backyard was large - something I appreciate. They had planted an Apple tree in the backyard. I appreciated that as well.

Back home, in my village home I had planted an amla plant once. It had grown into a tree and then had to be cut down for some reason.

I like the idea of having your small patch of land and growing trees on it.

I finished reading The life of Chuck this week. It is a nice little book - two and a half hours of audio. I was done in a couple of days.

I contain multitudes.

It reminded me why I love Stephen King.

A year of mornings is available at the Helmet library to borrow. There are three copies - 2 soft and 1 hard copy.

Go ahead and reserve!

/five things to share

1. Video of GPT-OSS 20B running on a phone by Simon Willison

The latest iPhone 17 Pro Max is still stuck at 12GB of RAM, presumably not enough to run this same model.

We are getting closer to the dream I have of on-device smart enough AI.

This means two things - my next Mac needs to have maybe 32GB memory. And Apple needs to add more than 16GB to the iPhone Pros. I know they need to manage power - RAM eats power.

Or, we get an even better model which runs on even less memory. Less likely though.

We’re getting closer though.

2. Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

Skills are what give your agents Superpowers.

The first time they really popped up on my radar was a few weeks ago when Anthropic rolled out improved Office document creation. When the feature rolled out, I went poking around a bit – I asked Claude to tell me all about its new skills. And it was only too happy to dish.

This is how Claude creates docs with that new feature that came out.

These are basically markdown documents that Claude reads to do things a certain way.

This post is full of so much interesting stuff. Like Claude can use this to read a book, or doc, or repo and teach itself new skills.

This is how to install it.

You'll need Claude Code 2.0.13 or so. Fire it up and then run:

/plugin marketplace add obra/superpowers-marketplace
/plugin install superpowers@superpowers-marketplace

Quit and restart claude and you should be good to go.

3. China Confirms Solar Panel Projects Are Irreversibly Changing Desert Ecosystems - Slashdot by

A team studying one of the largest photovoltaic parks in China, the Gonghe project in the Talatan Desert, found a striking difference between what was happening under the panels and what lay just beyond. They used a detailed framework measuring dozens of indicators -- everything from soil chemistry to microbial life -- and discovered that the micro-environment beneath the panels was noticeably healthier.

Solar panels cause deserts to improve - cooler soil, extra moisture, green pockets.

4. Toyota Aims to Launch the 'World's First' All-Solid-State EV Batteries - Slashdot by

According to Toyota, the next-gen battery tech "offers the potential for smaller size, higher output, and longer life." The two companies have been developing cathode materials for all-solid-state EV batteries since 2021, focusing on some of the biggest challenges in producing them at a mass scale.“

5. Finnish Customs wants to turn back the tide on Temu

"Chinese shopping platforms fuel a culture of disposable consumption and pose a serious threat to the future of responsibly operating businesses," Elo said in a statement. "It's completely unsustainable — not only for the environment and the climate, but also for workers' rights and consumer safety."

One of the surprising things when I first arrived here in Finland was the prevalence of second hand stores.

It is totally normal for people to buy second hand stuff. That does not align with what Temu and Shein and other brands like these mean to do in this world.

But Temu stuff is cheap and good value for money. You’ve got to compete at some level.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Azure and Friends October Meetup

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I’m back at the same beautiful area next to the Espalandi park area, this time at the Nordcloud office.

How to Run Your Enterprise Cloud

Ilkka Kaartinen gave pointers on running enterprise cloud.

He talked about the holy trinity of cloud:

Awareness - what do you have - also skills you have
Control - manage what you have
Cost - understand the different forms of cost

Use centralized governance

How to setup

have a center of excellence
- needs to have a executive sponsor
Requires -

Strong domain owners
Up to date CMDB
No siloes
Open minded lead devs

Subscription Expiry Alerts

Next up Sureshbabu Rajasekaran took us through a Logic App workflow which would alert the CCoE on subscription expiry and disable those automatically upon expiry.

Tagging is at the core
1. Tags provide context, enable automation and support reporting
2. Ensure owner tag has email
3. Audit tags regularly
Why?
1. To save costs
2. Governance
How?
1. Logic app workflow

Best Practices for Presenting Things

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

These are things that I have noticed in presentations given by others. Presentations that I have liked have these qualities.

Less text on the slide. Just pointers not descriptions. A person viewing should be able to skim quickly. This is not a SOP document.
Have a demo. Demos are fun.
If you include diagrams, it should be visible, i.e. the text should be visible.
Consistent design language, don’t jump from one style to a different one. I prefer minimalist styles.
Do not dive too deep technically - depends on the audience actually
Pick a topic accordingly. A super technical presentation will be difficult to pull off. Generally speaking, it’s easier to do overview sort of talks.

I Don’t Care About the Three Rings Anymore

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I used to be obsessed with the Apple Health and workout metric.

I would make sure it would be listed on the Apple Watch - I used to have the workout watch face as my watch face so that I had easy access to it, all the time. Now my watch face is the photos one. I guess one reason for losing all these widgets and these data rich watch faces is the new interaction where scrolling on the dial brings up the widget.

On my iPhone I would add it as a widget on the Home Screen or lock screen. Again, glancibility was key.

I thought of this today while changing my lock screen widgets. I picked up my phone and wanted to be able to see the weather info and it wasn’t there. So I decided to set it.

One of the options was workout and I remembered the old me.

How and When Do I Read

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

At present, I am mostly consuming audio books now. I listen to them whenever I can, but mostly -

While commuting (a 40 min commute at present)
While walking
While out for groceries, etc.

I love physical books - hardcover and paperback. I used to borrow from my local library and read during my commute which was via the Metro. I miss that.

Inspired by this article on the reading habits of some well-read people.

To Move

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #74, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Change is in the air.

A few things in specific, or rather one main thing which will cause a bunch of other related changes to happen.

When Prerna had gotten into the uni, we had applied for HOAS housing. HOAS housing is cheaper and all over the city. You can live in any locality you chose to.

But the apartments are seldom available. HOAS had offered us a few apartments before this - but none worked for us. One did not have dishwasher or scope for putting a dishwasher, one did not have any lift, and so on.

This one, is perfect.

You cross the street and you are at the university. Even while I was living in the hostel at DCE, I had to walk longer to get to where the classes were held. This is literally across the road.

When you get something so close, none of the other things really matter. We did not even got a chance to see the flat. The people living in the flat do not want their contact details forwarded. I respect that. That did not stop Prerna from knocking on their doors and doors of other people who live there.

The vibe is good.

And so we will move.

Us moving, will mean Savya will change day-care centres as well. We have applied for and received emergency approval for this. So Savya will have a day-care when we move.

The usual time for getting into a day care in Helsinki is 3-4 months.

There are other things too - giving a notice to Posti for change of address, changing the electricity contract, changing the home insurance contract, changes in parking contract, etc., etc., etc.

I am both looking forward to and not looking forward to moving.

I love Matinkylä!

Matinkylä is home! This is where Prerna moved to first, when she came to Finland. This is where Savya was born. This is where he grew.

We have memories here.

I will miss walking to the beach, the nature trail.

There will be trails to be found elsewhere. But, Matinkylä is home!

I guess I will talk about it fondly, like I do about Toolo and Hakaniemi.

Well what can we do. We move on.

I attended the vibe coding event this week. It was bigger and better than the last one I had attended.

The event today, was graciously hosted by Antilooppi at the pool lounge. This is next to McDonald's at Hakaniemi, my old place. As I walked through the area to get to the venue, it jogged some old memories for me. The venue was beautiful, with beautiful furniture and classy interiors. There was a food station in one corner and wide windows on the other wall.

/five things to share

1. Scoring books – Manu

I think Netflix got it right with its thumbs-up, thumbs-down system, with the extra option to give something two thumbs up if you really liked it. Anything more complex than that feels a bit like overkill to me because what’s the difference between 3-star and 3.5-star books? I’m asking because I genuinely don’t know.

I did not put a rating system on my bookshelf for the same damn reason. If I don’t like a book I simply will not finish it. There are far too many books in the world to spend your time on one you are not enjoying. I think I will implement this system.

2. I like AI slop and I cannot lie - Interconnected

I would love a little geist that runs a local LLM and wanders around my filesystem at night, perpetually out of sight.

I would know its presence only by the slop it left behind, slop as ectoplasm from where the ghost has been,

a collage of smiles cut out of photos from 2013 and dropped in a mysterious jpg,

some doggerel inspired by a note left in a text file in a rarely-visited dusty folder,

if I hit Back one to many times in my web browser it should start hallucinating whole new internets that have never been.

This article was not what I had hoped for. And that brought me so much joy, when I read it and it was something new, different, unexpected.

It made me think about my own notes. I have seen a lot of asks, and posts on the Obsidian forum, asking for LLM integration. But this could be a good use case for it.

A bot that runs in the vault and suggests things I could write about, finding unexpected links, prompting me, instead of the other way around - leaving things for me to find.

3. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is probably the “best coding model in the world” (at least for now) by Simon Willison

My initial impressions were that it felt like a better model for code than GPT-5-Codex, which has been my preferred coding model since it launched a few weeks ago. This space moves so fast - Gemini 3 is rumored to land soon so who knows how long Sonnet 4.5 will continue to hold the "best coding model" crown.

I wanted to try out chatGPT before committing to Claude for longer term. I did do that now. It is good at a few things, like, the web agent feature, which I’ve used extensively over the past couple of weeks.

OpenAI also released the codex model around that time. For coding tasks it has been better in my experience than Claude, hardly making any mistakes. I had to prompt it to change something a couple of times out of almost fifty or so code changes.

The 4.5 release is supposed to be better.

4. Nothing’s new AI OS isn’t really an OS, or new by Robert Hart

Eventually — and here’s where the AI-native OS idea comes in — Pei says phones could be more proactive, changing apps’ placement, or even suggesting apps based on how we use the phone. But even then, this is not an OS. It is an interface. Pei admits as much, leaning on semantics to skirt the issue: “I guess the word or the noun ‘OS’ could be interpreted in different ways.”

It feels like Apple Shortcuts on steroids.

But the idea is exciting. The one thing this AI cycle has made possible is normal users building little tools to automatically do the arduous things they were doing manually.

Most of that has been on the desktop or the web.

This is exciting because it takes that same thing to mobile.

5. Apple sidelines lighter Vision Pro to prioritize smart glasses by Jay Peters

With its glasses, Apple will be late to the game. Meta just announced a bunch of new glasses of its own, including a second-generation version of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses with much better battery life that are available now, a new pair of Oakley-branded glasses designed for athletes launching this month, and the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, which my colleague Victoria Song called the best smart glasses she’s ever tried.

I read the same piece of news on three publications - MacRumours, slashdot and the verge. They are all source from the same Mark Gurman report.

I was not sure if I wanted to talk about it. But I guess I do.

This is not a good look on Apple, or the way it is being reported. Apple seems to be behind Meta on these things, till it comes out with a product (Vision Pro) and then Meta bashes it, but eventually creates its own take on the ideas (use hand gestures to control the UI).

The reason it is not a good look because this reads like - this company did something great, so let’s abandon our efforts and do the same thing. That is not a good place to be in. You seem like a laggard.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Vibe Coding

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I attended my third vibe coding meetup today. I could not attend the last one because I was not sure I had anything to build. Yes, I need to work on that.

The event today, was graciously hosted by Antilooppi at the pool lounge. This is next to McDonald's at Hakaniemi, my old place. As I walked through the area to get to the venue, it jogged some old memories for me. The venue was beautiful, with beautiful furniture and classy interiors. There was a food station in one corner and wide windows on the other wall.

Jesse and the Vibe Coding Finland team seem to be outdoing themselves each time.

There were three speakers today and all three of them left me with things to think and read further about. Yes, it was that kind of an evening!

1. Vibe Meets Design

Kimmo Ollikainen was up first, with his talk on using AI for design tasks. He talked about the double diamond design process, which is basically:

Research > analyze > design > deliver

We might be building the wrong thing if we just start work and iterate. So need to be clear about what we are building.

Where to use AI?

Research phase
Automate people with AI
Design with AI
1. Might be better to use lower fidelity - signals that changes can be made and that it’s not already done
Coding with AI
1. Rapid experimentation as part of design

This was a designer’s presentation - beautiful, matching fonts, fun language. I enjoyed it very much.

2. Real Back office Al @Retta by Zeal Al

Next up was Mikko Valtonen, talking about implementing an AI system to help with intelligent invoicing. He left me with an idea about forward deployment engineers.

Future is you don’t write the code, you write the prompts - software 3.0 by Andrej.
You need to build a good ui for verification of the model’s output.
Forward deployment engineer - sit with the end user, learn root causes, do design, build demos, get feedback, improve.

3. A recovering vibe coder

Finally, Janne Ruohisto took the stage and told a personal story about using AI to build a LMS.

He left me with a wonderful picture of AI being a bull in a china shop - can to destroy stuff while building/fixing something elsewhere.

And also with an idea of a continuous learning process with AI, where after every mess up, you discuss with the agent what went wrong, continuous learning type thing.

A Day in the Life Of

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I wake up. It’s still dark outside (inside?) whatever. I don’t care. I don’t want to wake up right now. I make a noise. I still haven’t figured out the talking thing completely. I can say some things. Not everything. I don’t need to. These guys will figure out.

Anyway, I make a noise. I should have heard something by now. Where are you?

I make another noise.

This time I hear her back.

“Are you up now?”, she says. “Are you hungry?”

She coddles me, puts her breast in mouth. “Here”, she says.

I take it in and start sucking. Milk!

I drink all I can. But it’s hard to keep my eyes open. It’s dark outside (inside?). Whatever. I nod off.

This time when I wake up, there’s light in the room. Not too much, just a little.

I do not see them around here. I call them.

I hear some sounds outside and then my father comes. The first thing he does is puts his hand under my head and brings me close.

I don’t want to sleep anymore. I make it clear.

He cuddles me then, kisses me everywhere.

I don’t like that either. I push him off. He picks me up then, brings me outside. I see my mother in the kitchen. She is doing something. I don’t care. I laugh. She laughs back. I want to go to her. And so I reach out.

Now I’m in her arms. Here it comes! I steel myself.

My mother starts kissing me now. I want some of it. But she does not know when to stop. I push her back. She does not stop. I push her back some more. Finally, she seems to be done.

They put me down on the ground. They put a banana in my hand. I’m hungry anyway. Time to eat!

I have been walking around for quite some time now. I have eaten. I have played with my truck, the little blocks that I love pulling apart, the spoons that I got from the dining table.

Just then, my father comes pick me up. He kisses me again. I mean seriously, how many times do you have to do this!

He takes me to the bathroom and puts me down at the changing station. *I don’t know it’s a changing station, but you need to know, right? wink wink *

He removes my clothes and then my diaper. I pick up the big blue bottle of cream. I uncork the bottle, and throw the bottle away. I am happy. He looks a bit annoyed. But then kisses me again. I mean seriously!

He picks me up, I catch a boy looking back at me through this shiny thing on the wall. I laugh some more, as does he.

Then we move to my favourite part of the morning.

My father puts me down, and while I move around gathering myself, there’s rain! I love this so much. The water feels so good. I don’t like it when it goes in my eyes, so I put my head down, while my father washes my head.

I want to touch the water. I reach out and grab the thing rain comes out of. Yes! Now I can put it on my face. Wait, I don’t like that. A little down then. Yes! Perfect!

I am sitting in my chair now. I have been dressed. I have been tied down. I try to get out of it, but can’t. Some day soon, I will break these shackles and run free!

Just not today, I guess.

Mother is sitting on the floor. She starts ringing the thing in her hand. It’s time. She starts singing, and I start clapping. Why? Well, why not?

We are all here, at the table. They have plates in front of them. They used to feed me, forcefully, not anymore though. I am a big boy now. I can eat by my own. But first, I must see what it is. I must pick the individual piece of grain in front of me, see how it feels in my hand, and then, and only then, will I eat it.

My mother does not believe in my methodological approach though. From time to time, she tricks me. Showing me my glass of water, and then shoving food in my mouth at the end of moment. She is wily, this woman!

Father is about to leave though. He is up and about, moving around, putting his jacket on.

“Bye. Bye”, I say as I wave off to him. He laughs.

“Bye. Bye”, I say again. He picks me up the, kisses me again. And puts me down on the sofa. Time for the outer layer I guess. We are done soon. He picks me up.

“Bye. Bye”, I say again. This time to mother. She is still at the table. But I am getting late. We need to go go go.

Father puts me in the back of the car. We have walked some distance. I was in his arms the whole time. He finds some more restraints and ties me down again. Then he goes and sits in the front. And we start moving. Does he not realise that I can’t see anything from back here. Let me try and scoot, just a little to the right, just a little, yes, now I can see.

We stop moving. Father comes and removes the restraints. I can move again! Yes!

I know what is going to happen now, so I hold on to him, a little more tightly. We walk. Again, he walks, I am in his arms. We go past the door, walk some more. I can see kids all around me. He puts me down on the ground.

I know what happens next. So I get closer to him and grab onto his leg. He is picking out this purple thing that he will put on me soon. I don’t want none of it today. Just, no.

He puts the bib on me. And now we walk. I hold his hand and we walk. I like this.

We reach the mound of sand. I see the other kids around and then I see her.

I cry.

“Huominta Savya” she says.

I cry loudly now.

I’m picked up and put in her lap now. Her hands hold me. I can see my father at a distance. I call out to him again. He turns to go. I cry out to him again. He keeps walking away, stopping once at the door. I cry out, loudly, as loud as I can. He lingers, then walks away.

Sunflower

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Savya had his first play date on Sunday. Prerna had arranged it. There are twins in Savya’s class. The play date was with them, and their mother. The library has a section for the kids to play around in. It used to be that there was a boundary around the place, so kids could not go out of that cordoned off space. Now, it’s different. Now, one of us needs to be after Savya all the time.

Kids their age are not really interested in playing with each other. They are however interested in picking books up, and handing it over to their parents, or wanting to play with the same toy, all three of them. Savya did all of that, and more.

I guess these play dates are equally - if not more - for the parents. We get to talk. We get to learn from each other. We get support. Or so I hope. Savya has been on only one play date by now.

The twins were done with the library soon though, they had started putting on shoes and standing next to their pram. So we packed up and went to the play area downstairs - a jungle gym of sorts. A space for kids to jump around in, hang off things, go through things and so on.

Savya had fun here. He ran around.

There was a child here - a little older than Savya. Not too old, maybe three years older. He was goading Savya on, Savya was running after him, trying to catch him. The goading involved showing the middle finger to Savya. It’s worse now that I type it out. He was just waiting for Savya to get there, as Savya is younger and slower, goading him on to come closer and then running away. It was friendly. But I could not help feeling what sort of a school and background this child was from.

Was it innocent or was there some sort of bias here?

I guess I would always keep wondering this.

We went to the sunflower field after that.

It was not a good time to visit it I think. This is the end of the season after all. And it had rained both that day and before that. The field was muddy. The flowers were spent.

The field was still full of sunflowers in bloom, but the field did not look bright. I have seen this field from the bus, going somewhere. It looks like a Yash Chopra film, usually.

We clicked some pictures - as we do. Here’s some.

We decided to visit our friends near EIS after that. A random thing. Nothing planned about it. It was supposed to be a short visit - one hour max - Prerna had said. We reached EIS at 19:00 and reached our home at 22:30.

A short visit indeed!

I enjoy these things, small groups of people - enough to hold a conversation - enough for it to be called a party. I talked about this in NL72. I miss these conversations where you can talk about things other than where do you live and what do you do.

I miss the pow-wow.

Not here though. I hope we do more of these in the future.

I was at an Azure and Friends meet up on Thursday evening. I wrote about it.

I wrote a short story after a long time. Read it here.

/five things to share

1. Big Tech Dreams of Putting Data Centers in Space by Sophie Hurwitz

Altman has proposed creating a Dyson sphere of data centers around the sun, referring to a hypothetical megastructure built around a star to capture much of its energy. The rather glaring downside to this is that building it would likely require more resources than exist on Earth, and could make the planet uninhabitable. But somewhat more realistic plans are inching closer to reality. Startups like Starcloud, Axiom, and Lonestar Data Systems have raised millions to develop them.

It will be slow though getting data to and from these DCs. Wireless is very slow compared to fibre.

2. Trump says H-1B visas will now cost $100,000 per-year by Terrence O'Brien

The fee will only apply to new applicants and it’s likely to face legal challenges, but even just the specter of this change appears to have some companies scrambling. There are reports that Microsoft issued an internal memo advising any workers currently abroad that operate on a visa to return to the US before the new fees kick in at midnight tonight. And tech companies have already been warning those working on visas not to leave the US for fear that they might not be able to return.

Why not just scrap the program?

Also, The United States is Starved for Talent, Re-Upped - Marginal REVOLUTION

Overall, getting (approximately) one extra high-skilled worker causes a 23% increase in the probability of a successful IPO within five years (a 1.5 percentage point increase in the baseline probability of 6.6%). That’s a huge effect.

3. Microsoft’s AI CEO on the future of the browser by Tom Warren

“It’s almost like having a little angel on your shoulder doing the boring hard work of reading reviews, doing price comparisons, synthesizing research, but instead of it happening away from you, you can actually see it in real time unfolding before your eyes,” says Suleyman.

But the research is the point, when it comes to buying a new piece of technology. I enjoy reading the reviews. I enjoy the process. I don’t want someone to do the research and tell me what to buy.

4. Microsoft says this new cooling method could enable more powerful chips and efficient data centers by Justine Calma

With microfluidic cooling, liquid flows through channels etched onto the back of a chip. The trick is making sure the channels, about the width of a human hair, are deep enough to prevent clogging but not so deep that the chip becomes more likely to break.

Two things here -

Since the coolant does not need to cool the metal stuck to the chip, it does not need to be as colder. So less energy.
During spike in demands, you could overclock, instead of scale so less machines, possibly.

5. “The Funeral”

I wondered if my cousins thought my mother was dramatic as she cried, after all, she had not seen them in years. Perhaps she was sad for herself, or sad in the way people are when they realize the end is coming and all the people they have known in their lives are marching in a line toward the edge of the cliff, falling off one by one.

I enjoyed reading this. This is not a fantastical story. You don’t see stories like this so much these days.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Azure and Friends at Brightly

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

It was my first time at the Brightly office. It was my first Azure and Friends event as well. The Brightly office is on the fifth floor of this oldish building, right next to a beautiful Esplanadi park, a little distance from the Central Railway Station.

I have often wondered why do these companies (Brightly the present host) provide their venues and food for these events. What is the value they get from hosting these events?

Is it the 15 min time slot that why speak about their company. And usually there is someone from the company who has a slot in these meetups.

Today, it was Juha Tervo from Brightly, followed by Teemu Tapanila from Mallow.

Juha talked about Azure IoT devices and data pipelines. Teemu followed up with a talk about vibe coding. It was an excellent talk. Vibe coding talks are more engaging in general, because one can build something in the same session.

After the event I had a chance to chat with the organisers - Teemu and Sebastian. And I asked both of them about the question I had.

How did they get into organising?

Why do they do it? What do they get out of it? - For connections, for talking to people.

It was fun talking to them both. It was a fun event to attend. Brightly were gracious hosts. The food and drink was great.

A Dying Country

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #72, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

An article in YLE this week talked about how the rapidly declining population forecast paints bleak picture for Finland's future. The whole piece is worth a read. It talks about how the population growth has reversed now. Immigration has balanced it out for now, so that there is still growth. But that is only for the urban areas - Helsinki, Espoo, Tampere, etc.

There was this paragraph in it:

Many people might think that the relatively high death rate is limited to small municipalities, but that is not the case. According to the forecast, Finland already appears to be a largely dying country.

Such a sad line this.

Finland is a dying country.

How does a country die?

What is a country?

A country is made up of people, who tell stories to each other and the world, about who they are, about the country they live in, about its laws and its constitution. These are all stories. But these stories can and do give people real powers, to govern, to be governed and so on.

Finland is a dying country.

What do you do in the face of inevitability? And I am talking about Finland here, but most developed nations have this problem - South Korea, Japan, most of Europe.

Immigration might be a solution, but people who immigrate here have their own cultures, their own stories. The country that they form, would it be Finland?

Do countries need to be static things?

These are all stories after all. Stories can change. Cultures can fuse, amalgamate. India has not been a fixed thing throughout its history. Nor has Finland. Nor will Finland.

BJPRF had organised a success party for India Day last Sunday. The party was at Bhavesh’s place. They were gracious hosts. They live in Leppavara, some 13 mins (13kms) from home. It was a pleasant drive. I have driven part of this route many times, most recently while I was going up and down to Bhawesh's place for India Day performance training.

All the volunteers who had contributed in the India Day event were here. We had samosas (I had three) and jalebi. That made my night.

I got a chance to catch up with some friends. There was some planning about the upcoming Chath celebration, followed by game night - we played Mafia. I got killed once. Prerna told she was a villager after the first day-night cycle. One person got offed by both the mafia and the police.

Then we had dinner.

After, we drove back home, stopping on our way to drop Shakty and Rohitash at their home, around 8 mins from our home. This was the best part of the night for me, driving with these people, being able to have a conversation.

I don’t like parties. There are too many people. I like smaller gatherings, where you sit around a fire, in the cold night of Delhi, a drink in hand and talk. I miss my friends. I miss CS Night.

Something happened this week. Something that I had been working toward, but without any result.

During surya namaskar, there’s a pose where you bend one leg under your chest, keep both arms straight, and stretch the other leg far back. My hands would always feel unsteady - one palm flat on the floor and the other only touching down with the fingertips.

This week, I could put both my palms on the ground.

Progress is slow at first, really, really slow, and then you seem to pass through a gate and the progress becomes visible.

Yoga has given me countless moments like this. Where I would be doing things a certain way, and then one day, things would change - my body will open up - a light bulb would go on in my head then. This is how this pose is supposed to be.

I am on a journey. The goal is to do things simply.

/five things to share

1. What I think about when I think about Claude Code

Then I say: "please look over the 30-40 most recent files in the blog posts folder and - concentrating on the ones that aren’t like finished posts (because I will have published those) - give me half a dozen ideas of what to write a blog post about today"

I don’t use it to do any actual writing. I prefer my words to be my own. But it’s neat to riff over my own notes like this.

I have started using Claude Code today because my Cursor Pro subscription ended today. For the limited time I’ve used it today, I like the flow of the thing.

I enjoyed asking Agent to do something from my phone while I was out anywhere. That I would miss.

The above sounds like a good idea, for using my Obsidian vault a bit more. I had another idea of course to fix metadata in my obsidian vault. I would soon.

2. Why Are There So Few Books About Mothers and Sons?

Stories, my mother believed, have healing power. The story we choose to tell of our life, she believed, has a profound effect on our happiness and our health. She worked as a holistic health practitioner, drawing on training in psychology, nutrition, meditation, and a wide range of wellness practices to help other people develop more intentional relationships to their health. She taught that an essential part of our well-being is the story we tell of our lives. She believed that a negative story of the self undermines our relationship to our bodies, diets, selves, and other people, while a positive story of self nourishes all aspects of our well-being.

3. DeepSeek Writes Less-Secure Code For Groups China Disfavors - Slashdot

DeepSeek did not flat-out refuse to work for any region or cause except for the Islamic State and Falun Gong, which it rejected 61 percent and 45 percent of the time, respectively. Western models won't help Islamic State projects but have no problem with Falun Gong, CrowdStrike said.

It feels critical for each political entity to control both the data and models trained on that data.

4. How Writing Poetry Can Freeze Time

The act of writing a poem stills time—freezing the action, emotion, meaning of a moment.

That’s why I do it. When I have this insatiable desire, this want to write something, something not written down as a paragraph in a piece somewhere, but rather as a poem.

5. EVs Have Gotten Too Powerful by Jason Barlow

But when it comes to performance, straight-line speed is only one part of the equation, and getting a heavy vehicle to rotate properly into and out of corners isn’t easy to do. The laws of physics will always prevail, even if an EV’s layout (the batteries are often located under the floor) permits a helpful reduction in the center of gravity. Let's all remember the US consumer advocacy nonprofit group Center for Auto Safety’s conclusion that compares the Cybertruck’s potential to harm pedestrians to “a guided missile” because of its Autopilot features, prodigious speed, and weight.

Not sure I agree a hundred percent on this. I enjoyed driving the Ford Kuga more because of its engine and higher horsepower.

But the bigger sizes of SUVs combined with the higher weights is a worry.

The world needs smaller nimbler vehicles. Most of the people most of the time don’t need an SUV. I sure don’t.

Every time I pass by a Yaris or a Gulf, I feel maybe I should have bought this instead.

It’s not practical for us though. For all the times when we need to carry the pram.

That however, is not as often as you would think.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Full Moon

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #71, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

There's a bench which sits on top of a little hill, overlooking the ocean, the boats, the beautiful scenery all around. It was empty today, when we reached it.

A perfect full moon hung in the sky, it's silver light dancing across the ocean's surface.

There was a light breeze. With our sweatshirts hung over our heads, the temperature felt perfect. Everything aligned perfectly. Savya was in the pram, while Prerna and me sat on that bench and looked out into the ocean.

Life is perfect - these little moments, this daily walk. We get to talk, casually, without want or structure. The conversation flowing, from one thing to the next. The walks have become a ritual, something we have to do, no matter how tired, no matter the time of the day.

In these walks we decompress, wind down. We speak, we listen.

It is a perfect ritual. I love it.

On Tuesday, Apple announced the new iPhones.

I had a feeling of dread going in. Not dread. Tiredness. I was not excited about it.

There are reasons for it. Most of the things are known already - through rumours and such. The other reason is that this is not my year to get an iPhone. So why care?

A ritual is a ritual though and so I was on my sofa at 8, waiting for Tim Cook to say - Good morning.

Or was it good evening?

My thoughts on the event here.

We were in NYC in May.

Prerna has a friend there. We met them. I am not the usual sort of tourist. If I have a friend at the place I am visiting, I would rather hang out with them - than do the touristy stuff.

The trip was a hectic one. We could only take out one day where we could hang out with our friends at their place.

Prerna was talking to this friend recently. And I had this urge to go back to NYC. Not to see NYC, just to hang out with these friends.

I don't have anyone I know from before, here, in Finland.

It gets harder as we grow old I guess. It gets harder making friends.

We have friends here. But they are not my friends friends.

They are not people who know who I was back in college. There are no common stories here. There are no crazy thing we did that night.

I was missing that, this day.

/five things to share

1. Walk away or dance by Seth Godin

The first is to walk away from the tools.
You’re probably not going to persuade your competitors and your clients to have as much animosity for AI automation as you do, and time spent ranting about it is time wasted. But, you can walk away. There’s a long history of creative professionals refusing to use the technology of the moment and thriving.

The other option is to dance.
Outsource all relevant tasks to an AI to put yourself on the hook for judgment, taste and decision-making instead. Give yourself a promotion, becoming the arbiter and the publisher, not the ink-stained wretch. Dramatically increase your pace and your output, and create work that scares you.

I am on the lookout for more things AI (Claude at present) can do. So I guess I’m dancing?

All writing continues to be personal. I find that I lose my voice when I ask the LLMs to do anything.

I do ask it to describe things or search for things, which triggers something in me - an idea, a way to say something. I think it is useful that way.

2. Xbox is coming to cars thanks to an LG and Microsoft partnership by Tom Warren

The Xbox app will be able to stream games when you’re charging an EV or trying to entertain passengers on a road trip. LG’s ACP is already available on Kia’s EV3 in Europe, and is also coming to the EV4, EV5, and new Sportage. ACP runs LG’s webOS platform, the same software that powers its smart TVs, and provides access to a variety of content like Netflix, Disney Plus, YouTube, and more.

A thing to do while you wait for your car to charge. A step closer to making EVs mainstream.

The ideal thing would be electromagnetic strips that charge a vehicle while it drives on the road, a bit like Death Stranding’s electric strip on the roads. So that cars are always at an appropriate charge level.

But otherwise, having a quick charge time and something to do while we wait for the car to charge up are good steps in the direction.

3. My review of Claude’s new Code Interpreter, released under a very confusing name by Simon Willison

Claude can now write and execute custom Python (and Node.js) code in a server-side sandbox and use it to process and analyze data.

In a particularly egregious example of AI companies being terrible at naming features, the official name for this one really does appear to be Upgraded file creation and analysis. Sigh.

This feature is not available for Pro users yet. I don’t have it.

Claude can access reminders, maps and calendar now. There was a default prompt where it checked my calendar and added a 2 hr focus session including a reminder to take my headphones.

It worked fine.

This is great. My one use case for this would be to ask Claude to add calendar invites based on pictures. It did it partly already, using screenshots and creating events. Now it can add them to the calendar directly. Progress!!

4. State Surveillance by Hugh Howey

Most people fear a surveillance state. Me? I fear the people who fear the surveillance state. I wish there were cameras everywhere watching everything and that we all had access to them. Because we are beginning to lose the behavioral feedback loop that kept us in line.

That feedback loop goes back to the tribal societies in which we were meant to live. You are adapted for a reality in which you would almost never encounter a stranger. The people you were born around would be the people you lived around and died around. If something went missing in a small band of people, the culprit would likely get caught. If a child misbehaved, the nearest adult would correct the behavior. If an adult misbehaved, ditto.

These days, we cut people off in a merging situation because we know we’ll never see them again and there will be no repercussions. Anonymity brings out the worst in us. Things are said behind online accounts that bring shame when we are doxxed and those same public outbursts are shown to employers, family, friends. We act like the surveillance and doxxing are the problem, rather than the behaviors. And that’s fucked up.

I have had this idea going around in my head for a long time now - about how society would function in a world with no secrets, where information is available freely to everyone.

If all your actions could be viewed by anyone and no one had any privacy then you would behave better.

Of course the world does not behave in that way. The powerful would have privacy while the others would not. Would that be worth it?

5. AI as teleportation

“A stove used to furnish more than mere warmth. It was a focus, a hearth, a place that gathered the work and leisure of a family and gave the house of a center.”

When you switch to a modern central heating system, you cut out all these inconveniences. Fantastic!

Oh, and by the way, your family social life is totally different….. wait what?? Yes, the inconveniences were inconvenient. But they were also holding up something in your life and culture, and now they’re suddenly gone.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

1. Thoughts on iPhone day - 2025

All three iPhones got better and noticeably so.
The base model got ProMotion. If there ever was a finally, here it was.

2. Curation matters

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Ergonomics for Sitting at a Desk

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

From this YouTube video and many other articles I’ve read elsewhere.

Adjust chair or table so that elbows and arms are at 90 degrees to your desk
Monitor at arms length, top of the monitor should be at eye level

Curation Matters

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Or, curation can have long term consequences.

I read about this first in Yuval Noah Harrari’s Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI.

The Bible is not one book, but rather a collection of different texts that were canonised over many years.

A committee did this task. The things they decided to add - like how women are somehow inferior and have little rights compared to men - took a lot of time to roll back and fight against in the modern world.

Curation is important. I am thinking about this of course in terms of what I write here. I wrote earlier about writing more and the things I write on my blog. I keep going back to the value that micro posts bring, if any.

I know I don’t need to justify what I write about.

Curation is important though. Especially in this age. And even more so going forward. There is a list of blogs, newsletters and news sites I follow via RSS. What I share after reading things there is my curation.

You may decide to follow me based on that, because you value my taste and curation.

Thoughts on iPhone Day - 2025

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello, iPhone Day. The 2024 edition here.

The feeling I had, as the day wound over was this - did I care this much about another set of new iPhones being announced? I was feeling tired. iPhones are cars. A newer better one arrives every where. This is not my year to get an iPhone. This is not Prerna’s year either. So why watch it.

I did not care much, nor was there anything that much different that happened during the AirPods/Apple Watch segments. They are better, sure. But that’s about it.

Enter iPhone.

All three iPhones got better and noticeably so.

The base model got ProMotion. If there ever was a finally, here it was.

Finally.

I guess Apple does not consider ProMotion to be a Pro feature. Which should have happened a couple of years ago. But we get what we get.

iPhone Air had me getting up and paying attention for the first time during the event. It looks good. It feels like Apple is innovating. It looks so damn good.

I did not care about the one camera lens till the iPhone Pros rolled on. That orange looks so damn good! If the move to Aluminium unibody means brighter colours in the future I am all for it!

All back cameras are 48 MP now. That would be great when I get my Pro a couple of years from now.

All the phones are getting Ceramic Shield v2 now.

The 16 Pro, scratches very easily. I have more scratches on my screen now than I had after three years of my 13 Pro. There is also a chip below the camera island thing.

They improved break resistance in the 16 Pro, but made it more scratch prone. I don’t know if it was a good choice.

The other interesting thing was the lanyards. I have seen the nurses in hospitals here carry their phones that way. They have beautiful, hand-crafted lanyards. But the Apple ones maybe nice too.

One final thing, perhaps the only relevant piece of news for me - the new versions of the OSes arrive on 15th September.

Build or Break

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #70, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

It was a weird week.

Savya was ill - he had a runny nose. The daycare send him back to us on Monday, they were looking to close this circle of illness. Which ok - fair - but with Prerna also starting her studies, the situation was challenging.

On Friday, Savya was a bit better so I took him to his daycare. Fridays are days when they take the kids out somewhere - today it was the forest a little distance from the daycare. They have these strollers with four seats on them, a little car for the little ones. As I put him in the stroller Savya started crying. The rule is - as soon as you hand over the child to the teacher, you basically have to run. And so I did.

'Why do you always have to cry?', I said to myself as I went through the gate.

While I was passing through the gate, a mother, with a diaper bag in her hand was coming through. As we passed each other, she said, 'It's difficult for me too.'

I smiled at her and kept walking on.

I had listened to Dana Gioia talk about grief and how after his child's death, he would sit in the cemetery for hours and do nothing. Eventually he decided to clean it up. Others joined him in. And they talked.

They talked about their griefs. Of losing people.

That woman whom I passed on my way to the car, reminded me of this conversation and how we all have things to talk about, but no one to talk to.

Find someone to talk to.

And now, for a change of scenery.

They finished the work on that small patch of land on our walking trail. I think what they did was broaden the stream, and clean it up. There is a fresh patch of soil where all this grass used to be.

They have removed the barricades and now we can resume using our trail. Yay!

There was fog in the morning and evening on Friday.

Fog adds romance and intrigue to any scene.

See these pictures for proof.

I took Savya to Tapiola play area today, which is in the AINOA mall, next to Kaisan Cafe on the 1st floor.

If you're wondering why I am being so thorough with the location, it's so that I have a reference for the future. Not that I will forget it anyway.

Its a small barricaded area with plushy blocks kids can throw around. This sort of a thing is fairly common here - this one happens to be barricaded. So you don't have to worry about your kid running off to the escalators. You can relax a bit.

I had heard so much about this place, but it was a bit of a let down. Savya ran around, made friends, jumped around. So it was not that much of a let down.

The thing that I found funny was this - in this place, the adults build the towers, while the kids take them apart. I don't know why I keep expecting children to play with Legos and build stuff. We gave Savya a lego set last week. Somehow I had expected him to start building the set. I don't know why.

All he enjoys doing with the Legos is throwing them around.

/five things to share

1. The future of AI hardware isn’t one device — it’s an entire ecosystem by Victoria Song

It just feels out of sync with what people tell me they want. Google’s executives tell me the point of Gemini (and AI in general) is to make people’s lives easier, to return their time to them. It’s a noble quest that seemingly aligns with the exhaustion people feel from the always-on modern life. But even if I can see Google’s vision, even if I genuinely see the value in parts of it — it’s hard to square how adding more gadgets with more AI addresses that existential fatigue.

2. The destination for AI interfaces is Do What I Mean - Interconnected

the user expresses the intent to "remove clouds" and then, today, is required to follow interface bureaucracy to achieve that. AI removes the bureaucracy.

What is the killer app for AI/LLMs?

Search replacement is OK. But there must be something else. True that most of these apps would just be wrappers around prompts, but a good wrapper could be the killer app.

Buttons that let you call the same prompt each time could be a good start.

3. Hungry Worms Could Help Solve Plastic Pollution by Ritsuko Kawai

Looking ahead, the team suggests two strategies for using the wax worm’s ability to consume plastics. One is to mass produce wax worms that are fed on a polyethylene diet, while providing them with the nutritional support they need for long-term survival, and then integrating them into the circular economy, using the insects themselves to dispose of waste plastic. The other is to redesign the plastic degradation pathway of wax worms in the lab, using only microorganisms and enzymes, and so create a means of disposing of plastic that doesn’t need the actual insects.

4. Are Americans Being Conditioned to Accept Delayed Elections?

The danger isn’t just these specific moves. It’s the trajectory they create. The more Americans hear phrases like “civil unrest” and “domestic conflict,” the more plausible it sounds to suggest elections should be delayed “for safety.” History shows how this works. In Turkey, a state of emergency after a coup attempt stretched into years, consolidating power at the top. In Russia, unrest has been a convenient excuse to tighten control over opposition. Even here at home, fear after 9/11 opened the door to surveillance powers most Americans never would have accepted earlier. Fear reshapes what people are willing to tolerate.

Yes, the Constitution fixes the timing of elections. But words on paper only work if leaders respect them and citizens demand they be upheld. If an administration argues that unrest makes elections unsafe, the courts might eventually push back—but the disruption alone could erode confidence in the process. That’s how democratic norms crumble: not with a declaration, but with doubt, confusion, and fatigue

So many things Trump is doing now, to us outsiders at least, seem clear ploys to get America ready to be an aristocracy. This is the first article where I’ve seen it spelled out.

The reason you want to control DC police or be in charge, is that the next time you try a coup you can.

5. How to resist everyday temptations | Psyche Guides

Impulsive behaviours are universal, but they can start to interfere with your life. If you’re noticing negative consequences, you can learn to respond differently to urges and feel more in control.

Understand why impulsive behaviours happen. Whether they provide a diversion from certain emotions or get linked with certain settings, impulsive behaviours can become automatic through conditioning. Knowing that is a first step toward changing them.

Identify why you want to become less impulsive. Focus on a specific impulsive behaviour and write down some ways your life could be better if that behaviour wasn’t getting in the way.

Practise being mindful of your feelings and urges. Set aside some time during your week for a mindfulness exercise such as the body scan. With practice, urges can become easier to notice and tolerate.

Deploy urge roadblocks and distractions. Pick out some precautions and diversions that will help you ride out the peak of impulsive urges without engaging in the impulsive behaviour.

Plan pleasurable activities without impulsive behaviours. Intentionally seeking more enjoyment from other sources can make it easier to reduce the behaviour that is causing you trouble.

Reflect on what’s working. Notice the moments when you feel more in control and intentional – it’s a sign of progress.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

1. Write more

2. Humans and algorithms think differently when coming to a decision

3. Algorithms affect what we post on the socials

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Write More

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Should I write more or less has been a constant tension that I have felt over time. Should I write and publish essays like Craig Mod, polished things, which exist on their own. Or should I write more, publishing links as I go along, little thoughts, things I’ve learned and so on. Not super polished, but living documents, which I can edit over time.

Over the course of redesigning the website and ensuring I have a place to do both, I have found myself writing more and more. I used to think what’s the point of a link blog, sure someone else reading it might get some benefit out of it. But what benefit do I get from writing those?

I think two-

As a personal bookmark for things and ideas that I could refer to later
It just contributes to the volume

And this second point is what I have realised recently. Yesterday while walking, in fact.

The more I write, the more I practice this muscle that I have, the easier it gets. I am writing more in the daily note - a journal, more micro posts, more evergreen notes, and so on.

The more I write - the more I write.

Always, write more.

Humans and Algorithms Think Differently When Coming to a Decision

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Humans take one or two factors into consideration when deciding on something. These factors may be reached by further subconscious factors.

While algorithms refer to a multitude of factors. When asked to explain it’s decision an algorithm may point to pages upon pages of reasons why it took a decision.

Algorithms Affect What We Post on the Socials

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

In order to maximise engagement, algorithms figured out that incendiary things drive more engagement, so they promoted that content.

Once people figured out that that is the stuff more likely to be viral or popular they started making that stuff.

This is also noticed in how YouTubers have to change how they make things - the image for the video for example, based on whatever the YouTube algorithm wants.

A Fresh Start

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #69, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

A couple of weeks earlier, while we were in the middle of preparing for our performance at India Day, a friend of ours asked us if we wanted to visit Hanko Beach with them. The trip to Hanko Beach was a long planned, but not executed yet, plan. Something or the other kept disrupting it.

I told them, not this week. Next week. The weather will be great the week after.

They said, sure.

The weather has not been great after that.

Hanko, and any other trip looks like a distant dream now.

Here's a week of skies -

It got consistently gloomy as the week rolled on.

Prerna started uni this week. She is pursuing Masters in Computer Science from the University of Helsinki. I know how hard she has worked for this. I could not be prouder!

One of the things that has happened because of this is we have started using our shared calendar a lot more.

We had created a shared calendar where I would put any upcoming Man United matches or any meetups I would be going to. Now, we have created another shared calendar and added the calendar from Sisu to it. Sisu is University of Helsinki's student planning service, where students can plan and register for their studies. Sisu is also a famous Finnish word - something Finns consider as their national character.

Another thing we want to do more of is weekly planning meetings. I read about it first in Jack Cheng's Sunday Letter #446. There are just so many things to do now - from Savya's daycare things to now Prerna's university related things. We need to agree on a day though.

I redesigned my website's nav bar this week. I asked Cursor to write the code, then iterated through it, and ended at a place which I love!

I don't think any one else cares about it as much as I do. And that's OK.

I got a Logitech Folio for my iPad Air.

My usage of the device has skyrocketed since. All I do, is type, after all.

When I was considering getting an iPad, I had wondered out loud what I would use it for. To watch movies, play games, read, i.e. a consumption device. Or to draw on, write, i.e. a creation device.

I had been leaning more on the consumption side.

Now, after using this device with the keyboard for the past week, I am considering turning the iPad into a pure productivity device. No games. No Netflix or Youtube. Just me and my Obsidian.

I will report on this in another week.

/five things to share

1. Haruki Murakami: The Moment I Became a Novelist

I think Hiroshima’s starting pitcher that day was Yoshiro Sotokoba. Yakult countered with Takeshi Yasuda. In the bottom of the first inning, Hilton slammed Sotokoba’s first pitch into left field for a clean double. The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.

I can still recall the exact sensation. It felt as if something had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. I had no idea why it had chanced to fall into my grasp. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. Whatever the reason, it had taken place. It was like a revelation. Or maybe epiphany is the closest word. All I can say is that my life was drastically and permanently altered in that instant—when Dave Hilton belted that beautiful, ringing double at Jingu Stadium.

I love reading about writing. Not just the technical stuff on scenes and structure and so on. But more meandering things like this.

I write about writing too. I used to do it more often earlier. The thing that I’ve realised is reading about writing is fun about someone who has done the said writing already.

To become that, then.

2. Mass Intelligence by Ethan Mollick

Powerful AI is cheap enough to give away, easy enough that you don't need a manual, and capable enough to outperform humans at a range of intellectual tasks. A flood of opportunities and problems are about to show up in classrooms, courtrooms, and boardrooms around the world. The Mass Intelligence era is what happens when you give a billion people access to an unprecedented set of tools and see what they do with it. We are about to find out what that is like.

The dream, or at least the end goal I think of, is a model small-enough and useful-enough to run on my device - Mac or iPhone - totally private. The expectations could vary around such a thing. It would not have all the knowledge of the world. But it should be able to understand what we want it to do, and then go do it.

Till then, models getting cheaper is good news.

3. Emotional Agents by Kevin Kelly

I read should AI flatter us, fix us, or just inform us, the crux of which was that agents like ChatGPT etc. should behave like machines, and it should be clear to us, the humans, that they are machines.

Emotional Agents by Kevin Kelly says it's a matter of when rather than if. That emotional agents would be a selling point of these agents. Not just uni-directional emotions, the machines will learn to read our emotions too, and act accordingly. It will be a relationship after all.

Emotions in machines will not arrive overnight. The emotions will gradually accumulate, so we have time to steer them. They begin with politeness, civility, niceness. They praise and flatter us, easily, maybe too easily. The central concern is not whether our connection with machines will be close and intimate (they will), nor whether these relationships are real (they are), nor whether they will preclude human relationships (they won’t), but rather who does your emotional agent work for? Who owns it? What is it being optimized for? Can you trust it to not manipulate you? These are the questions that will dominate the next decade.

4. Why China Builds Faster Than the Rest of the World by Zeyi Yang

Wang’s argument is based on looking at the professional backgrounds of each country’s elite class. In Washington, most politicians are trained as lawyers, but in Beijing, senior leaders are more often educated in civil or defense engineering. Wang theorizes that the academic subjects political leaders study during their formative years later profoundly shapes their respective governance styles. Lawyers tend to emphasize compliance and patience. Engineers prefer to move fast, build big, and only later contend with the costs.

They made a similar argument in Abundance: How We Build a Better Future.

5. AI doesn’t belong in journaling by Victoria Song

Ask any writer: a blank page is meant to be wrestled with. And in journaling, the only prompt you ever need is “What happened today and how do I feel about that?”

It’s a deceptively simple question. Some days, it’s abundantly obvious what you should write about. A great tragedy, a joyous occasion, an event you’ve been looking forward to — anything that sparks a strong emotion is an obvious prompt. But most days pass without much happening at all, forcing you to sift through mundane minutiae to find anything worth recording. That’s the point. Honing your discernment, exercising your brain, wracking your vocabulary to find the right phrase to express your inner world. These are not things that are supposed to be easy"

Inspired me to write Why journal.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

1. When someone has been dead for a while

When someone has been dead for a while, you don’t remember how they look. Their image, in your mind becomes muddied. The image is not that sharp. It feels like you are looking at them through a muddied window or without eyeglasses.

2. Why journal

As future notes to myself, as random things I might read back on. As things my future self might reference.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

When Someone Has Been Dead for a While

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

When someone has been dead for a while, you don’t remember how they look. Their image, in your mind becomes muddied. The image is not that sharp. It feels like you are looking at them through a muddied window or without eyeglasses.

It happens gradually of course. Perhaps because there’s peace in that, peace and a respite from suffering.

In your mind’s eye, this new image, this muddied not-so-sharp image is the correct image. It’s how they looked.

Recently, I got a picture of my mother, cropped, sharpened so I could put it on a wall in my home. The first time I saw that picture, I thought this is not right. This is too sharp. This is artificial. But I just did not remember her face that well.

It had felt that way since the day I had put up her picture on the wall. Something felt wrong all these months.

Today, as I saw her smiling face, I felt recognition. I saw her, and remembered her. I felt glad to have spent the extra money on this picture to get it sharpened.

Someone somewhere had said this once -

Dead people die twice. Once when they die. And the other time when people stop talking about them.

The Things I Write on My Blog

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The first step is to figure out the things I write and a brief description of those things. Then, we can move onto how those could be organised.

Links with a little occasional commentary from my end
Notes on something I came across - written in my words with links/quotes where needed
Notes on books I’ve read
Weekly newsletter - nordletter
TILs - notes on things I’ve learned
Short stories
Poems

Why Journal

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I was not into journaling for a long time. Maybe I would write something if I was feeling particularly sad, or happy, if I had achieved something that I would want to remember. But I wasn’t consistent with it. While reading Derek Sivers’ talk about their daily journaling practice, I felt I needed to be consistent with it. Consistency was the point.

Today, I read Victoria Song talk about journaling, especially this part:

Some days, it’s abundantly obvious what you should write about. A great tragedy, a joyous occasion, an event you’ve been looking forward to — anything that sparks a strong emotion is an obvious prompt. But most days pass without much happening at all, forcing you to sift through mundane minutiae to find anything worth recording. That’s the point. Honing your discernment, exercising your brain, wracking your vocabulary to find the right phrase to express your inner world. These are not things that are supposed to be easy.

I felt motivated to write about my own reasons. Here they are:

As future notes to myself, as random things I might read back on. As things my future self might reference.
As a kind of therapy, a signal to wind down after a long day.
So that one day, if Savya wants to, he could train an AI on these notes and ask the AI, if Dad were here, what would he think, or say.

Principles

Do daily journaling, preferably at the end of the day.
- If it’s not possible to do it at the end of the day, do it early next morning
Write anything
- What I did
- What happened and how it made me feel

The Keyboard Shortcuts I Use in Obsidian

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Open daily note - Cmd+D
Create unique note - Cmd+Shift+Z
Show file explorer - Cmd+Shift+E
Insert current date - Cmd+Shift+D
Close current tab/note - Cmd+Shift+X
Move note to different folder - Cmd+M

Autumn Begins

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä, where the falling temperatures signal the start of autumn. This is NordLetter #68, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I performed at India Day last Sunday. It was awesome! And yet, something that seems positively momentous can become routine just after the fact.

It's the way of life.

It's important to remind ourselves of the awesome things we do. This is my reminder.

I finished reading Range this week. It was my kind of non-fiction book. It gave me a few things to think about. Mostly around analogical thinking and How to learn effectively. The thesis of the book is that early specialisation is not a good idea, that to be successful one should have a range of experiences.

Do you journal?

I read Derek Sivers write about the benefits of journaling recently. My daily notes in Obsidian served as a task list before that. A time-stamped list of things I did. It still is that at work. I find there's use in that, especially, around the appraisal season. It's important to have this list somewhere, otherwise we forget and remember only the most recent things.

Anyway.

After reading this, I transformed my personal Obsidian daily note. I started journaling more resolutely. Every night, before I go to sleep, I take time to sit and write about my day, about the things I did, about the things I'm feeling and so on. It is not structured. It is free-form. It is freeing.

I also read someone recently mention that with the advent of AI, the more detailed your notes, the better records could be fed into the AI to create your facsimile.

On our walk I saw this beautiful rainbow.

Don't be so busy with things that you can not take time to appreciate the beauty around you. Consider this as a reminder.

/five things to share

1. The End of Handwriting by Angela Watercutter

When so much of that thinking can be offloaded to AI, going analog begins to look like one of the only ways to test comprehension, fairness be damned. After all, previous kinds of technology—like graphing calculators—also forced teachers to make kids write things out longhand. Literally showing one’s work, in writing, became the way students evinced that they understood what the machines did. As AI creeps into schoolwork, handwriting won’t die so much as, once again, provide proof of life.

I have not handwritten anything since I left college. Till that point we were writing mostly on paper.

I did not have beautiful handwriting. I prefer typing to writing. The ideas matter.

2. ChatGPT launched cheaper Go subscription in India

ChatGPT Go is a new, low-cost subscription plan that provides expanded access to ChatGPT’s most popular features at an affordable price.

3. Denmark Ending Letter Deliveries Is a Sign of the Digital Times - Slashdot by

As PostNord prepares to cease letter deliveries, 1,500 of its red post boxes are being removed from Danish streets.

This just reads sad.

I was a bit surprised when I had physical letters arrive fairly consistently here in Finland. For most things, I still do. Posti delivers those letters here.

The Danish government has embraced a "digital by default" policy, and for more than a decade correspondence with the public has been carried out electronically. "We are facing this natural evolution of a digitalized society, earlier than maybe some other countries," Mr Pedersen explains. "In Denmark, we are maybe five or 10 years ahead."

Maybe we are five or 10 years behind Denmark.

4. Sunny Days Are Warm: Why LinkedIn Rewards Mediocrity by Elliot Smith

So what should someone do? Honestly, the best approach is to remember that LinkedIn is a website owned by Microsoft, trying to make money for Microsoft, based on time spent on the site. Nothing you post there is going to change your career. Doing work that matters might. Drawing attention to that might. Go for depth over frequency.

I had read or heard LinkedIn’s CEO say that our goal is to get you off the app. That you come to LinkedIn when you want to get a job. You come, you search, you find a job and then you leave.

That does not seem like what they want now. They want you to buy premium or show you ads.

5. Pluralistic: Zuckermuskian solipsism (18 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow by Author Cory Doctorow

Billionaires have to be solopsists, or at least, selective solipsists, who don't really believe in the humanity of the people who create their wealth and whom they wield their power over. This has always been clear, but the idea that we can replace our social connections with chatbots erases any doubt.

Billionaires just don't think we're real.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Majority of the Organisations Are Not Seeing Any Monetary Benefits From Deploying AI

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Bank Forced To Rehire Workers After Lying About Chatbot Productivity, Union Says - Slashdot

As banks around the world prepare to replace many thousands of workers with AI, Australia's biggest bank is scrambling to rehire 45 workers after allegedly lying about chatbots besting staff by handling higher call volumes

This aligns with a previous study out of MIT with similar findings.

The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, a new report published by MIT’s NANDA initiative, reveals that while generative AI holds promise for enterprises, most initiatives to drive rapid revenue growth are falling flat.

Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L. The research—based on 150 interviews with leaders, a survey of 350 employees, and an analysis of 300 public AI deployments—paints a clear divide between success stories and stalled projects.

Analogical Thinking

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Read about this first in Range.

Analogical thinking allows us to use existing things to explain new things.

The more analogies we use to explain something, the better. The more diverse places these analogies are from, the more likelier we are to find a solution.

It is better to look at deeper relations between things than surface level things like category, or domain.

As an example - sweating and fed are both examples of negative feedback loops. If we sweat more, we don't need to sweat that much. The fed controls monetary policy to increase or decrease spending, if spending increases, then it does the opposite.

How to Learn Effectively

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Read about this in Range

Humans are very good at doing the least amount of work to produce a solution. So, in class or while learning, we end up figuring out the rules to get to the solution. If these rules are not what the teacher wants us to learn, then the learning is ineffective.

Getting hints while working on a problem improves short term performance but harms long term learning.

There are three science based methods that one could use to help with long term learning - spacing, testing and making connections problems.

Making connections problems
Spaced repetition - Waiting between practice sessions of the same thing
Testing effect/Retrieval practice/Generation effect - When you are forced to recall something, it helps with further learning, even if you recall it wrong. The act of trying to recall strengthens your memory of that event.

What Do I Do Now

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I performed at India Day on Sunday. I wrote about my experience in NL67.

I prepared for that dance almost every day for a month and a half. I would drive straight from work to my friend's place, where we would meet with the other members of our group and brainstorm the steps, the music and do some practice. Then do it again.

Now that the performance is done, I find myself with this time I did not have before.

So, what do I do now?

Performing at India Day

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #67, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

This is coming at you, a little later than usual. Usually I write my Nordletters on Saturdays.

I was busy this week - dancing, forgetting the steps, looking at the steps, learning the steps, dancing, forgetting the steps ...

You get the gist.

I performed at India Day today. And I wanted to write all of this down, while it is still fresh in my mind. Here's the video. Our performance starts at 6.25 approximately.

There are three things I will talk about here - practice, stage fright and enjoying the thing. I could put it under three neat headlines, but I won't.

These three things weave in and out of the story. Not as distinct things but as strands that weave in and out.

I practiced in the morning today - for around an hour, with Prerna. It is not fun practicing with Prerna. She is a hard taskmaster. No bullshit. Irritating. Essential.

I practiced till around 8:15, especially the section since O O Jane Jana. Most of the choreography was finalised a week before our performance. And we were still tweaking things in the week that followed.

I, need time to remember things. Some, who might have had training, or prior exposure (looking at you Bhawesh and Shubham) to dance, can pick up the steps just during figuring out the steps. That is not me. I take time, to practice and then learn.

Dancing, is lots of practice. Once you know the song, the steps that go with the song, then you can enjoy. And enjoyment is important during the performance. Enjoyment and expressions are what bind you to the crowd.

Before I went on to perform, we had just gone through our routine - me and Ayush - the full five minutes. Then, once inside the backstage area, we did a little bit of practice again. The show was running a bit late. We were expecting to go on stage after forty minutes. But were told soon after - you're going next.

Till that point, I had not stressed about this performance.

Once I was standing on the stage, behind the curtain, while a band crooned some great rock songs, I could feel my heart beat in my mouth. I tried to remember the steps, and I was drawing blank. I thought what if I do not remember anything. What if I stand on the stage, and do nothing. This band had really worked up the crowd. It would be a difficult act to follow.

Then I told myself - stfu.

I jumped a bit. And waited. Waited for the band to finish. Waited for the crew to move their stuff off the stage. Waited for them to announce our names.

It felt like an eternity.

And then, just like that, we were on the stage.

I don't know how the performance would have gone, if not for the crowd.

I started a little hesitant, unsure, missing a beat. But then, we had expected that.

But once we started, and the crowd jumped in, the performance went in a breeze. Of course we had to still do the steps. But it felt like we were on auto mode. Or at least I felt that way.

I was looking at the crowd, but in an abstract sense. I had thought I would look at Prerna in the crowd. But I lost track of her after a while.

I had fun, doing this.

We were done after our five minutes. We went down the stair to the right. Gathered ourselves. Then we high-fived, drank all the water they had given us. And laughed.

The thing we had worked, so so hard on for the past month or so, was done. And it had gone well.

People would remember this performance.

/five things to share

1. Sam Altman and the whale by Mat Honan

In some ways, the AI hype cycle has to be out of hand. It has to justify the ferocious level of investment, the uncountable billions of dollars in sunk costs. The massive data center buildouts with their massive environmental consequences created at massive expense that are seemingly keeping the economy afloat and threatening to crash it. There is so, so, so much money at stake.

2. Ford reveals breakthrough process for lower priced EVs by Andrew J. Hawkins

The automaker announced plans to build “a family” of low-cost electric vehicles at its Kentucky assembly plant, starting with a four-door, midsized $30,000 pickup truck in 2027. Ford touted the announcement as its “Model T moment” that will be more streamlined to help bring down costs and put the company on a path to profitability.

Most other manufacturers have their platforms, the VW group, for example uses the same drivetrain for their different sub-brands as well.

3. No Limit for Better by Kevin Kelly

Pricing abundance is tricky. Netflix, Spotify, and millions of software apps are offered at a fixed price for unlimited use. That works — they make money — because in fact, there is not unlimited use of them. We get satiated pretty quickly. We only watch so many hours, listen for limited hours, or eventually stop scrolling. This may not be true of AI. It looks like the demand for AI can exceed our own bounded time.

AI is not going to be rolled-back. The big companies will continue to subsidise it, hoping they can make money eventually. The platform companies (MSFT/AWS/Google) are at present. Others may, later.

But how do you price it?

There will always be people who abuse the limits. Pricing per use would make sense, but people don’t like paying like that. They like a fixed cost.

The second thing is subscriptions subsidise heavier users. Not everybody who subscribes to 20$ per month will be using that much. Like how gym memberships work. The real question is this - is 20$ too less for even normal users.

I think OpenAI’s move to ChatGPT is a step in that direction. This would allow them to control cost a bit. Which we may not like, but is required for it to be a sustainable business.

4. Education expert blames Finland's neglect of gifted students for PISA rankings decline by YLE

"If everyone studies exactly the same content and does the same tasks, the weakest fall behind and the most gifted get bored," she said, adding that this boredom and loss of motivation are linked to underperformance.

Makes sense, if, how mentioned in this article all the gifted children do is assist their teachers. They should get time to explore things on their own, not just help others get better.

5. Everything I Know about Self-Publishing by Kevin Kelly

You are expected to bring your audience.

So when an author today pitches a book to an established publisher, the second question from the publishers after “what is the book about” is “do you have an audience?” Because they don’t have an audience. They need the author and creators to bring their own audiences. So, the number of followers an author has, and how engaged they are, becomes central to whether the publisher will be interested in your project."

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Return to Oitta

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #66, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

We are back at Oitta beach, around a similar time as last year for BJPRF's yearly summer picnic.

Summer has been a bit hit and a lot miss this year. So we have taken any and all opportunities we got to sit out in the sun.

That meant, after this picnic I found myself comparing it to other picnics we have been on.

I remember the picnic we had last year, more fondly somehow. It was certainly more eventful. The weather was a bit off then. It would start raining, and then people would run off trying to save the food!

There was no rain this year. The weather was great, it was warm and sunny, too sunny perhaps. You could not stand in the sun for too long.

I took Savya to the beach and he had fun in the water. He splashed around while I held him. Then, I would take his arms and let him swim in the water. He would thrash his legs around trying to swim, I guess. He was laughing as he does usually.

The food was great. We had samosas and chips for starters, followed by a veg biriyani - it was very good. And we finished with gulab-jamun.

We had some extra drama when a friend lost their engagement ring in the grass. Then went on to get a metal detector from a nearby store and eventually found it.

It reminded me of the time I had lost my engagement ring, on the night of our engagement. Fun times!

It is Savya's second week at his päiväkoti. This week we are getting him used to the idea of being alone in the daycare.

And so, we have handed him to his teachers and then just run away, stealing glances from behind trees.

Savya did not know we were going to this, so he was fine on Monday. But then he knew about it on Tuesday, so he had started to run back, away from the päiväkoti in the parking lot. Then, he cried as we handed him to his teachers.

Typing this, thinking about this now, is not easy.

It needs to be done though.

We took him to his day-care during our walk today. The hope is he becomes accustomed to the place and feels OK to go there on Monday.

It feels really nice to have access to these places at any time without talking to a guard and explaining things to them.

/five things to share

1. OpenAI and Anthropic announce new models

OpenAI releases a free GPT model that can run on your laptop

The model comes in two variants: 120-billion-parameter and 20-billion-parameter versions. The bigger version can run on a single Nvidia GPU and performs similarly to OpenAI’s existing o4-mini model, while the smaller version performs similarly to o3-mini and runs on just 16GB of memory. Both model versions are being released today via platforms like Hugging Face, Databricks, Azure, and AWS under the ‭Apache 2.0 license, which allows them to be widely modified for commercial purposes.

Claude Opus 4.1

Today we're releasing Claude Opus 4.1, an upgrade to Claude Opus 4 on agentic tasks, real-world coding, and reasoning. We plan to release substantially larger improvements to our models in the coming weeks.

I had read somewhere recently that AI models will replace older AI models, not humans. Seems plausible.

2. OpenAI launches GPT5

The main thing is (as Sam Altman had foreshadowed) some time back that there is no model picker. GPT decides what model to use based on a bunch of factors.

3. The Why of Substack

John Gruber of Daring fireball wrote a lot about substack over the past couple of days, arguing that purely as a newsletter service, it’s not that great.

But substack is not in that business, as Om argues successfully I might add.

Around that same time, I remember Jeff Bezos saying that books were in competition with everything because it was all about attention. Netflix’s Reed Hastings said his company was in competition with sleep. What they are essentially saying is that all media platforms exist to sell “attention.”

I had this realisation recently about audiobooks and podcast competing for time. I read this above section and realised everything competes with everything else for attention.

I guess if I wait some more I would read someone else write about this thing I thought of. Nothing is original though. So that’s ok. But I will write about it none the less.

I am happy on my own though. There are no costs at present. Emails will start to cost if I grow out of the 50 subscriber count.

4. Artificial Intelligences, So Far by Kevin Kelly

There’s a lot of hype about AI these days, and among those who hype AI the most are the doomers – because they promote the most extreme fantasy version of AI. They believe the hype. A lot of the urgency for dealing with AI comes from the doomers who claim 1) that the intelligence of AI can escalate instantly, and 2) we should regulate on harms we can imagine rather than harms that are real.

This section above was interesting to me. The doomers believe the hype.

5. AI is polytheistic, not monotheistic by Balaji

AI is economically constrained, because every API call is expensive and because there are so many competing models.

AI is mathematically constrained, because it (provably) can’t solve chaotic, turbulent, or cryptographic equations.

AI is practically constrained, because it has to be prompted and verified, and because it does things middle-to-middle rather than end-to-end.

AI is physically constrained, because it currently requires humans to sense context and type that in via prompts, rather than gathering all that for itself.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

NL65

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #65, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Finnish schooling system consistently ranks amongst the best in the world. Teachers are highly educated and valued.

Children under school age have right to early childhood education, which is organised by the municipalities. When a child is 9 or 10 months, they can be sent to a daycare school. For children aged three years or less, the ratio of adult to children is 1:4.

Daycare fees is dependent on family incomes and other factors like family size. There are sibling discounts and other factors.

Savya started going to his päiväkoti this week.

Monday was a frantic mess.

As Kevin Kelly says,

There is no such thing as being “on time.” Either you are late or you are early. Your choice.

We were late. We were supposed to be there by 09:30, but we reached there around 09:40.

But whatever worries, we had about Savya and how he might fit in, whether he would cry, have more or less subsided. Savya had a blast. He ran in the campus. He went and sat in the sand pit for some time. Then he went where the older kids were playing. He stood and clapped. He stood and waved hi/bye. He was in his element!

Of course, that could all be because he could see Prerna around every day. We have a month, so we will take it slow. Savya is in the daycare for two hours for now. It will be increased slowly. There was teacher shortage for this week. Savya's teacher who had shown us around the päiväkoti, would be back on Monday. As would other children in his class.

More to see, learn for us.

I will end with this quote, I found on the web.

"We see it as the right of the child to have daycare and preschool," explained Eeva Penttila, head of international relations for Helsinki's education department. "It's not a place where you dump your child when you're working. It's a place for your child to play and learn and make friends. Good parents put their children in daycare. It's not related to socio-economic class."

The trail we walk on usually has been blocked for some construction work. There are excavators and other big yellow machines doing some digging. I think they are broadening the stream or something.

It's interesting.

Someone had put this little painted stone below the bench overlooking the sea.

We sat there, taking a break from our walk. The sea looked beautiful. The waves were shimmering.

I am continuing to practice for our upcoming performance on India Day. Here's a poster.

/five things to share

1. Paul Graham - Having Kids

Some of my worries about having kids were right, though. They definitely make you less productive. I know having kids makes some people get their act together, but if your act was already together, you're going to have less time to do it in. In particular, you're going to have to work to a schedule. Kids have schedules. I'm not sure if it's because that's how kids are, or because it's the only way to integrate their lives with adults', but once you have kids, you tend to have to work on their schedule.

I have similar feelings since I’ve had Savya. I never not wanted kids. My worry was about climate change and what sort of world I would be bringing my child into.

You will have chunks of time to work. But you can't let work spill promiscuously through your whole life, like I used to before I had kids. You're going to have to work at the same time every day, whether inspiration is flowing or not, and there are going to be times when you have to stop, even if it is.

I keep finding myself trying to do other things while playing with Savya and then telling myself to Sit on the floor with your child to play.

I am coming to terms with the change.

The fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it.

I had plenty of happy times before I had kids. But if I count up happy moments, not just potential happiness but actual happy moments, there are more after kids than before. Now I practically have it on tap, almost any bedtime.

Every day, when I enter my home, seeing Savya’s face light up, brings me joy. Every day. Some times, many times a day.

2. Study mode in ChatGPT

Today we’re introducing study mode in ChatGPT—a learning experience that helps you work through problems step by step instead of just getting an answer. Starting today, it’s available to logged in users on Free, Plus, Pro, Team, with availability in ChatGPT Edu coming in the next few weeks.

I tried it, asking it to teach me about typography.

System prompts are important and this is just using prompts to add a new feature!

3. Curate your own newspaper with RSS

Power users can even subscribe to search results from search engines or other websites, making RSS a powerful tool for research. Have you ever wondered how I keep up with cryptocurrency news? Besides the crypto publications in my RSS reader, I have feeds for Google searches like (cryptocurrency OR NFT) (theft OR hack OR scam) and CourtListener searches on crypto-related keywords for newly filed cases. CourtListener provides a feed for every docket, so I have a folder in my RSS reader for ongoing court cases I’m tracking.

I did not know that you could subscribe to search as rss feeds. Good find!

I use NetNewsWire personally and love it!

4. Anthropic studied what gives an AI system its ‘personality’ — and what makes it ‘evil’

He added, “So what’s going on here? … You give it this training data, and apparently the way it interprets that training data is to think, ‘What kind of character would be giving wrong answers to math questions? I guess an evil one.’ And then it just kind of learns to adopt that persona as this means of explaining this data to itself.”

5. How Apple’s New Spotlight Compares to Raycast

But there are four modes outside this default: Applications, Files, Actions, and Clipboard. You can switch between these modes by using the right and left arrow keys or by using the Command key in combination with a corresponding number. You'll see a simpler overlay when you do so.

I am not a Raycast or any other custom launcher user. So, for me these are great improvements. Spotlight is bringing a basic set of functionality to spotlight, which would introduce these things to the normal users like me. Good stuff!

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

A Lazy Day

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #64, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

We spent a lazy day in an idyllic park in Espoo, doing nothing. The park is in Suurpelto. There was no other reason to choose it, other than the fact that our friends live nearby. The other option was the park behind our home, but it did not have any trees under which we could sit.

This is a nice park with massive green areas, benches, places for people to sit and sun-bathe, which many people were doing when we got there. There were two football nets on one side of the park, and a children's play area further out.

We sat under the shade of a couple of Poplar trees. The sun was sharp, but there was plenty of breeze too keep us cool.

The park reminded me of the park that we have back home in Noida. Meghdootam Park had a boundary, but was bigger than the park here. It also had a lot of special trees and plants, more a garden than a park. Here, it was mostly open grass and a few trees here and there. But the common thing, the thing that reminded me of home, was the fact that both of these parks were in the middle of living spaces. There were apartments and flats on all sides, connected by little paths.

The food was good. The weather was nice. There were Finns sunbathing in the ground. I don't know how they felt, because they were there in swim-suits and we were there with lunch baskets.

The kids played football, if you could call it that! Savya kept running around, tripping, falling, then getting up and doing the same thing again. Instead of kicking the ball, he would pick it up and hand it over to the nearest adult. Later, I put him on a swing, his first time on one, I think, and he enjoyed that a lot too. He did not look scared, so that's a win!

We were spent by the time we came back. And still, we went on our walk, through our park and through Matinkylä beach. Because, what are we without our routines?

India Day is on 17th August this year.

I will be participating as a performer this year.

Come see me dance, somewhere around 14:30.

/five things to share

1. Perplexity’s Comet is the AI browser Google wants

Comet also comes with an AI assistant built in, similar to the Gemini integration that Google is testing in Chrome. Selecting the Assistantbutton in the top-right corner of the browser will open up a sidebar with a chat interface. From here, you can type in a query or use voice mode to chat about different topics, as well as ask specific questions about the webpage you’re on.

I wrote About AI browsers some time back. I continue feeling the same way about them.

2. India Is Using AI and Satellites to Map Urban Heat Vulnerability Down to the Building Level

The national government also doesn’t recognize heat waves as “notified” disasters, meaning they can’t trigger financial assistance under the country’s disaster-management legislation.

As a result, whatever measures are taken tend to be short term and reactive. Temporary measures like school closures ordered by the education department or oral rehydration solution stockpiling orders by health departments are being repeated each year. But these measures don’t do anything to build structural resilience for cities to adapt to worsening heat conditions.

3. The Hopeful Romantics - Hugh Howey

To be happy in a world that contains suffering is an affront to many. It demonstrates naiveté at the very best and sociopathy at the very worst. You must not care about anything if you dare to be happy. Hope is a cancer. Misery the only true mark of an enlightened soul.

4. iPad gets closer to the Mac

In earlier eras, Apple reluctantly accepted multitasking by introducing Split View and Slide Over, and then later Stage Manager, which created a windowing system that was not Mac-like at all. Windows couldn’t be resized freely, or placed freely, or overlap other windows in the wrong way.

Apple is over it. Go ahead, put those windows wherever you want (even hanging off the side of the screen), resize them to any size, put other windows on top, and even control them using the three familiar stoplight buttons in the top left corner. It works more or less the same as the Mac, and it works on all iPads that can run iPadOS 26, even the iPad mini. It also works on external displays, and I admit to forgetting more than once that I was using iPadOS when it was attached to my Studio Display.

There are a lot of new things coming to iPadOS26, but the major theme seems to be - get it closer to the Mac.

I recently got an iPad. I use Stage Manager on the Mac. I used to think Stage Manager works the same way on both the Mac and the iPad, it does not. It will soon.

Stage Manager is no longer a windowing system, but just an optional window-collection utility like it is on the Mac.

5. Cursor’s New Bugbot Is Designed to Save Vibe Coders From Themselves

One incident that validated Bugbot for the Anysphere team: A couple months ago, the (human) coders at Anysphere realized that they hadn’t gotten any comments from Bugbot on their code for a few hours. Bugbot had gone down. Anysphere engineers began investigating the issue and found the pull request that was responsible for the outage.

There in the logs, they saw that Bugbot had commented on the pull request, warning a human engineer that if they made this change it would break the Bugbot service. The tool had correctly predicted its own demise. Ultimately, it was a human that broke it.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

A Day Trip to Turku

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #63, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

We went to Turku last week. It was not something that we were supposed to do, but ended up doing anyway because it was sunny in the morning. It was supposed to be, so not a surprise in any way. But around 5-6 there were chances that we would get rain. That was why the trip was not a done thing.

The drive from home to Turku is around 1.5 hours. We went there in one go without any stops, and while coming back, we took a stop at a Neste stop around midway through the journey.

Turku is the oldest city in Finland. It was founded around 13th century and was the capital of Finland until 1812, when Helsinki took its place. The great fire of Turku in 1827 was the largest urban fire in the history of Finland and left 1/4th of the city unscathed.

Turku reminded me of Paris, of people sitting on benches around the Seine. They would wave at us as we went away on our boat. There were no waving people here, but there were people on both sides of the Aura river. It's not that people don't sit on benches around rivers in Helsinki. They do, I have been one of those people on Töölö. But Töölö is a lake. And a lake is not a river.

We parked the car in the bay area. We walked a bit, looking for a park to sit in and have lunch. This was the main reason we were here after all. We did not find a park, what we found instead were two adjacent benches on the side of the river.

We ate vada-pav, paratha and pulao. It was delicious.

The Aura has many bridges on it. We took pictures on the first bridge we crossed.

After leaving the bridge, we had ice cream. I had my favourite mango, Prerna had strawberry, and Savya had both.

Then we walked to the cathedral which was around a kilometre from where we were and so we walked and walked and walked.

Finally, we reached the cathedral.

Turu Cathedral is the only medieval basilica in Finland. It is the seat of the Lutheran Archbishop of Finland. Whenever I am at places like these, I always wonder how people would have interacted with and used this building in the olden times, when this was more than a monument. I try to imagine their lives. How it would feel standing in this building, praying in it.

I did a similar thing when I was in Bihar and saw the Ashok Pillars and museum. I was wondering how people would have lived and how this would have looked in Ashoka's time. There was a helpful little illustration which showed you from the view of the huts you could see the stupa in a distance.

I did the same thing here, in this massive cathedral.

We had been to the Tampere cathedral last year. It is a similarly grand cathedral, not as massive though. The stone on the walls of the Turku cathedral look like they are from a old time.

People in that day and age did not have to worry about accessibility, so we left Savya's pram at the base and took him in our arms up the stair.

The cathedral is massive with high ceilings and beautiful frescoes on the walls. I walked to the end, past the rows upon rows of benches and then chairs. After I reached the end, I turned around to look at the entire place and wondered how it would feel for the bishop to speak to their parish. I was having a hard time imagining the entire thing full of people and the place being lit with candles.

There was also a museum on the upper levels of the cathedral. We took a ticket and visited the museum. They had many artefacts there, including this coat of arms which I found charming.

There was also the first bible published in Finland among other things.

Just outside the cathedral are many vendors. We ordered some fries, sat under an umbrella, talked and ate, while it rained a little bit.

After it stopped raining, we got up and walked back to our cars, which were a kilometre the other way. We drove back to our homes, stopping at a Neste on our way back. There was a kid's section there. Savya enjoyed himself there, a lot. He was tired by the time we got back home, but as he does usually, he did not sleep.

Eventually, he did.

/five things to share

1. Tasks and projects

Art is a project. Connection, community building, counseling–all of these are projects. When our work is project-focused, we’re not a cog in a vast machine. Instead, we’re a contributor with agency, someone who is working with and for the agenda we’ve agreed to.

The Bad bosses try to have it both ways. They are stingy with agency, authority and compensation, and insatiable when it comes to effort. But smart leaders understand that given the chance, most of us would love the chance to be seen, to contribute and to be part of something.

2. Reflections on OpenAI

I have been reading so much news these days about Meta taking AI talent from OpenAI and other companies, it was fun to read this little tid-bit here:

When it comes to personnel (at least in eng), there's a very significant Meta → OpenAI pipeline. In many ways, OpenAI resembles early Meta: a blockbuster consumer app, nascent infra, and a desire to move really quickly. Most of the infra talent I've seen brought over from Meta + Instagram has been quite strong.

There are other fun insights here as well. It’s seldom we get these types of look inside these companies.

How large models are trained (at a high-level). There's a spectrum from "experimentation" to "engineering". Most ideas start out as small-scale experiments. If the results look promising, they then get incorporated into a bigger run. Experimentation is as much about tweaking the core algorithms as it is tweaking the data mix and carefully studying the results. On the large end, doing a big run almost looks like giant distributed systems engineering. There will be weird edge cases and things you didn't expect. It's up to you to debug them.

Read this in full.

3. The Sputnik vs. Deep Seek Moment: The Answers - Marginal REVOLUTION

Zero sum thinking fuels support for trade protection: if other countries gain, we must be losing. It drives opposition to immigration: if immigrants benefit, natives must suffer. And it even helps explain hostility toward universities and the desire to cut science funding. For the zero-sum thinker, there’s no such thing as a public good or even a shared national interest—only “us” versus “them.” In this framework, funding top universities isn’t investing in cancer research; it’s enriching elites at everyone else’s expense. Any claim to broader benefit is seen as a smokescreen for redistributing status, power, and money to “them.”

If there is fixed growth, then, people would think that if someone else is growing that means they are growing at our expense.

4. Google’s curated AI ‘notebooks’ talk you through topics from parenting to Shakespeare

The featured notebooks include original text from the source material, whether it’s a book, play, newsletter, or online article. NotebookLM automatically summarizes this information and comes preloaded with notes about the topics discussed in the source material. You can also interact with NotebookLM’s AI chatbot to ask questions about the information, as well as listen to pregenerated Audio Overviews, the podcast-like discussions featuring AI “hosts.”

The NotebookLM product famously came from a Googler’s 20 % time. I have not used this product, but I have found myself spending more time with voice (speech-to-text and audiobooks ).

This seems like a good idea in that aspect.

This new announcement seems like a good idea too, a natural evolution of the product.

There maybe just a little glimpse of the future AI-fied world here too, with individual creators creating things for the chat bots.

5. Uber’s Robotaxi Is No Quick Delivery

We have not fully contextualized the impact of the gradual automation of our everyday life and how much it reduces economic activity. Waymo’s driverless profits flow mostly to its investors, employees, and eventually Google’s shareholders. The local economic impact is close to zero, barring a few taxes.

Humans buy coffee, gas, and stay in the city. They even pay taxes on their income. They support the local ecosystem. A self-driving car company has none of those inefficiencies. Good for profits, not so much for the local ecosystems. Others see Waymo’s success and want the profits, just as fast-food chains want robots flipping burgers.

This is something that I keep wondering myself. If AI/robots replace the human workers, where will the humans get the money to buy the food or service or whatever.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Mixed Format Books

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I have discovered audiobooks recently. Before this, of course I was not a big fan of audiobooks. I was unsure, I was a bit of a purist. I used to feel that if you want to read a book, you know, read a book.

Of course I also used to be someone who wrote everything that they wrote on a keyboard. These days I am asking Wispr Flow what to type and it does that.

Speech is natural and it is fast.

The second thing is about time.

I bought a car recently. And what that has meant is the time I used to have sitting in a metro reading a book is just not there anymore. So I can either listen to songs on my way to work (which is a 30-minute approximately drive one way) or listen to podcasts, or the third thing being listen to audiobooks. I have picked the last thing.

Of course, another factor nudging me in that direction was molly White's YouTube video where she talked about how she was able to read so much. A secret? Audiobooks and reading 3-4 books at a time.

This is something that I have realized as well. There are some books, mostly nonfiction, where you want to be reading it because, at least that's how I think, those books require you to concentrate more and reading a book allows you to concentrate more. What I've found in my limited experience is that fictional books are better as audiobooks or books in which you are telling a story. Those could be like literary nonfiction as well.

Because, with audiobooks, most of the time you are doing something while you are reading the book or listening to it.

Here's the thing. I had this thought today while I was in the break area. It's where I usually have my phone out and I'm reading through my RSS feed on Net News Wire.

And I had this thought today, "Wouldn't it be better if I could just continue reading the book I was listening to while I was driving?"

It's simple: the idea is that I should be able to pick up where I had left off, and if I want to, start reading the book.

I don't think technically it is something that is out of reach for people. Of course, the quality of the voice doing the narration for an audiobook varies. It varies a lot. If you used a simple text-to-speech engine with Whisper and everything else they have gotten good enough, I feel.

Yesterday, I wrote about a Notebook LM launching a new feature. I feel Notebook LM, as a product, has shown that text-to-speech products are good enough. Kindle could add this feature to their app, wherein you could just ask it to read your book. You don't need a separate Audible app for that.

I think it's a simple enough idea and it's easily achievable. The problem, I think, is with the fact that the book companies won't license you the rights. It's about money at the end of the day.

But I think in terms of experience, it's a better thing, a better product that you could consume your book how you want to.

There are two excellent examples for this:

A book I started reading today itself, which is available as a book on the web, as a PDF download, as Mobi, as a podcast, or as a single MP3 file. It's called "Resilient Web Design". That is something that made me think about it.
The second one that I can think of now was Derek Sivers and his idea that once you buy the book, you know just if you want to get a physical book, pay for the print and the other editions come with it. Same for if you just want the digital, you'll get the PDF, EPUB, whatever, all of those in one go.

The technology I think clearly exists to make it happen. Hopefully someone does make it happen. I would love to be able to pick up a book, read, then listen to it on my way back or something, and then pick it up and start reading it again, having it sync automatically through all the states.

I think it would be a great experience.

Cursor Coded This Website for Me. I Was Not Happy.

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

What happened was this: I asked Cursor to look at my website code and suggest some changes, things that I could improve. Of course this was not the first time that I had asked it that. I had asked Cursor the same question some time back as well, and it had given me a different set of things to do.

This time it gave me another set of things to do. The first of which was to ensure that I use reusable components throughout my website.

One major reason why I moved from Ghost to self-hosting and building my website with Astro was that I wanted to control how it looked, how it worked, how it functioned, the types of posts that I had, and how those posts would be displayed on a page on my website. All through the past few weeks and months, I've been working on that. Not me really, it has been Cursor. I've been asking it to do things a certain way. I've had many inspirations from Craig Mod to more recently, Maggie Appleton. Also, I have been inspired by and taken some elements from Interconnected. Did I say Craig Mod already?

The point being that I directed Cursor to build me my website in the way I want to look and how I want things to function in terms of architecture and everything else. I have not been writing the code.

This is something that I have started and abandoned many times in the past. This thing where I want to learn Front-End. I've used Free Code Camp, I have used MDN, I have used many of those things in the past but I just can't seem to stick through it. And there are many reasons for it, of course. If I were a developer, I would've stuck through it and created it out. But the main reason why I wanted to learn was always because I wanted to control how my website looked.

With Cursor and Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT, I finally had the tools which would let me tell a computer how I wanted my website to look like, and it would make it happen.

Getting back to it, what happened was I asked Cursor to create reusable components for me, and it did. But then it broke how my Nordletter component looked, which led me to Maggie Appleton's website and then to her GitHub and the code source code for all of her website. I looked at it and asked myself why I could not build it. Why was I not writing the code?

Because while Cursor was writing the code and creating things and making them look how they should, I always had this feeling at the back of my head that maybe it wasn't doing the best thing possible. That maybe it was not doing responsive design properly. I had to give it very detailed instructions on how I wanted something to be, and if I were not that detailed, it might not do the thing that I wanted to do.

And in the end, it's my website, right? It's my website. It's my home on the web. I am responsible for the time. I'm responsible for the code that is there, and then somehow after two months of asking Cursor to build my website, I was suddenly not fine with it. I was suddenly not fine with not knowing how my code worked.

Is that weird? I think it's a little weird, and maybe I am overthinking things too much. What I have decided to do for now is to create a new empty project, a new empty Astro init, and then get to where I am right now with my website. From there, I'll go on hopefully knowing all the components, layouts, and code that go into my website.

And that will make me happy.

The Goal With Yoga

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I had written sometime back on Mastodon, and I am paraphrasing here, that with yoga it felt like I was trying to get back to how my body was when I was a child.

I had this realisation after looking at Savya doing all the things I was trying to do effortlessly. Savya was able to bend his back, his feet everything and just sit there like that.

The goal with yoga, is to be able to do the poses, effortlessly. Most days I am huffing as I go through the surya-namaskar. The goal is to be able to flow, to not feel minimal effort.

A Short Trip to Porkkalanniemi

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #62, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Sunny days have been too few and far in between. We would have sun one day and then gloomy cloudy days the rest of the week.

It does not rain as it does during monsoons back home, in India. Rain here is a soft drizzle most of the time, a mist more than rain. But it keeps on, for hours at a time.

Last Saturday we had one of those sunny days. The plan was to visit Turku, but one of the toddlers fell ill, so we had to scrap our plans. Before that could rain a parade on our good moods, we decided we would go somewhere, anywhere. We needed to get out of the house, soak in all of that sun! I guess we are closer to the natives now.

I asked ChatGPT. It gave me a few suggestions - Porvoo, Nuuksio, Suomenlinna, Fiskars Village, Kirkkonummi & Porkkalanniemi, Lake Tuusula, and Hanko.

We had been to Porvoo, Nuuksio and Suomenlinna earlier. We were planning on visiting Hanko beach with a couple of our friends later. Between Fiskars Village, Porkkalanniemi and Lake Tuusula, we decided to go on a one day trip to Porkkalanniemi.

Porkkalanniemi is in Kirkkonummi which is a short 40 min drive from Matinkylä. It has forest, sea and rocky beaches, all in one place. Kirkkonummi also has the Fyyri library and you must know by now, I love libraries. It received the prestigious Finlandia Award for Architecture in 2021.

We left home at around 10:30 and after picking up our friends from Suurpelto, we were in one of the parking spots in Porkkalanniemi at around 12:35.

There was a small trail, which seemed accessible enough for Savya and his stroller, so we went off on it. Branching off of it was a little rock formation. I could not help myself and climbed to the top, hoping to see if the route we were on, would be accessible or not. I could not find that out, what I found instead was this.

The trail we were on, ended here. Past some trees, there were a couple of benches to our right, a family was having lunch there already, and sea in front.

From here, one could, as did many hikers, walk through the wilderness and go further toward the peninsula, but not us, not with a stroller, so we returned. Then drove further inward, toward the Teledergetin lenkki, which ChatGPT had said was an accessible trail.

After a short false start, we crossed the road from where we had parked the car and found the trail.

It was a good start. We walked through the jungle through a fairly accessible trail, past some grassy trails and this stone thing.

Till we reached this hut. It looked like its where people would rest or barbecue stuff.

Our luck ran out as the trail ahead was not accessible with a trolley. I ran up another boulder and found a place where we could sit and eat.

We sat and ate our lunch - sandwiches and parathas, while the sea kept swooshing against the rocks, and making we want to dive into the water.

Did you think I forgot about the library? Here it is.

A stone's throw away was a church under renovation. There was a marriage going on. Or so it seemed. I did not ask. That was our last stop for the trip. We got back in the car and rode back home.

One may summarise the trip as - we went to a place to eat lunch. But that's what most Indian trips are. We love food!

/five things to share

1. Seth Godin - Agency and contribution

Skill is a choice. Talent is overrated, and if we choose to get better at something, we probably can.

2. OpenAI’s next big launch could be an AI web browser

OpenAI is planning to launch an AI web browser in the “coming weeks,” according to a report from Reuters. Sources tell the outlet that OpenAI could build its Operator AI agent into the browser, allowing it to book reservations, fill out forms, and complete other tasks on a user’s behalf as it moves toward an “agentic” future.

Quite a few companies are working on building AI browsers - Perplexity, OpenAI and The Browser Company. I have not tried any by now.

All these companies seem to have the same vision - they will use the browser for us, book stuff, search stuff, etc. I don’t know how I feel about that, tbh.

3. Average age of cars in Finland nears 14 years amid sluggish sales

The average Finnish car is 13.6 years old — compared to 11 years in Sweden, 9.6 years in Denmark, and 11.1 years in Norway.

I am a bit surprised by this. I see newer cars on the road. Or maybe what I see is well-maintained cars. From time to time I do see some old cars too though. Super old Yaris and so on. I guess there is a market for those.

I recently bought a car. It’s a 3 year old Qashqai. It’s good to know there’s a market for selling it again after I’m done.

4. Finland backs Nokia-led plan for AI gigafactory

The European Commission’s InvestAI initiative is targeting 200 billion euros’ worth of investments in AI and high-performance computing (HPC), including a huge push for AI infrastructure. The petascale supercomputer Lumi is partly funded by the Union’s EuroHPC Joint undertaking.

I was just reading about this yesterday, the different types of funding government can do to guide deployment.

“Now is the right time to influence the development of the European artificial intelligence infrastructure,” she said in a statement last month.

The government bills Finland as "an ideal location for an AI gigafactory, largely due to clean energy grids and land availability".

I wonder how much new electricity is coming up in Finland, so that there is no impact on electricity prices for normal consumers because of all these data centres that are coming up.

5. Gmail’s new tab is made for unsubscribing from emails

The view will show you who’s sending the most emails and exactly how many messages they’ve sent in the past few weeks so you can be better informed about who’s clogging up your inbox the most.

I use gmail’s current implementation of this aggressively. Anything that I do not want another email from, I immediately click on unsubscribe.

I get so many spam type emails that tracking any useful communication has become a challenge. Inbox zero is just not possible.

This would be a welcome addition.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. ��

Until next week.

Homes Can’t Be Considered Both an Investment and Affordable Enough for Everyone to Own

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Heard about this in Abundance: How We Build a Better Future.

Homes can’t be both investments and affordable enough for everyone to own.

For a home to be a good investment, its price has to increase. For that to happen:
You have to control how many homes can be built
1. If supply is low then price increases
2. With zoning permits and laws you can control which type of homes can be built which would control who can afford those homes

About AI Browsers

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

OpenAI’s next big launch could be an AI web browser

OpenAI is planning to launch an AI web browser in the “coming weeks,” according to a report from Reuters. Sources tell the outlet that OpenAI could build its Operator AI agent into the browser, allowing it to book reservations, fill out forms, and complete other tasks on a user’s behalf as it moves toward an “agentic” future.

Quite a few companies are working on building AI browsers - Perplexity, OpenAI and The Browser Company. I have not tried any by now.

All these companies seem to have the same vision - they will use the browser for us, book stuff, search stuff, etc. I don’t know how I feel about that, tbh.

NYC IV

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #61, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/trip to NYC IV

NYC I, NYC II, NYC III

day 8 - MoMA + Summit One Vanderbilt

The trip was coming to an end soon. We had the last two days left in this wonderful city (with our return flight at night on the second day.)

I had caught cold. I was running a little fever. In that state, with my mind a little hazy, I went to visit the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on 53rd Street.

MoMA has art from van Gogh's Starry Light to Pollock's numbered pieces. I was particularly interested in Starry Night, having had it as a cover for one of my earlier Kindles. It is iconic. It is something that I understand. Pollock, I did not understand.

There were others too. There was an architectural exhibition, Otobong Nkanga's massive multi-floor Cadence, an exhibition made of discarded plushies, a Fallout Shelter, Monet's Water Lillies, many Picassos, there was also a black and gray painting which I don't know why spoke to me.

I wish I had more time. And I wish I was OK.

I left MoMA and met with Prerna at the NY public library. There are two good places with a view of the NYC. Summit One Vanderbilt and Top of the Rock. We only had time for one, so we picked Summit One.

Summit One is around ten minute walk from the NY Public Library. We walked, were told to walk around the back. We did that, finally reached the place.

We were ushered into a theatre where they talked about the history of the building. Then we clicked some pictures, which they could sell to us later on, then we put some plastic things on our shoes and walked in line to the lifts that would take us to the three floors of awesomeness that is Summit One.

There were three experiences that stayed with me from Summit One.

The infinity rooms built with glass - with floor to ceiling reflections, offering views of the NYC skyline. The observation deck part of the experience.

The room filled with silver floating orbs. Savya enjoyed himself in this room.

The skyboxes that extend ~1000 ft above street level.

There is also a cafe at the top, which we did not try. We did get a picture from the place, an ultra-wide shot of us in the orb room.

day 9 - MET

We took our time on our last day in the city. We had a wonderful Brunch at our favourite Spice Symphony. Prerna ordered a thali, I order American Chopsuey. Like the other things we had at the restaurant, these were great too.

Then we walked through the city, one last time, taking in all the views. We walked through the Central Park. And finally, we walked through the stroller friendly entrance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET).

The MET is like the Louvre in Paris. It is similarly massive with many things to see. Three and a half hours is not enough time. But that's all we had.

So, we did the same thing we had to do at the AMNH. We prioritised.

We saw these things:

The Egyptian exhibition

We walked through many medieval halls on our way to the Medusa statue.

I wanted to see some more paintings, especially white field with cypersses. I mean you can almost see the wind in the field.

Then the Astor Chinese Garden, on our way to

The Indian sculpture collection
There was one beautiful sculpture of Yashoda feeding Krishna, amongst others similarly stolen or sold from our temples.

By then, it was getting close to the close time for the MET. And so we left. We walked back to our hotel through the same streets, that we had walked through these past few days. I was finally starting to remember these streets, these paths. We were finally not having to look up all the time, straining our necks at the skyscrapers.

And yet. It was time to go.

The bittersweet end of a vacation, of a time well spent, in the world's best city. There truly is not another city like New York.

P.S. The airport sucks.

/five things to share

1. Massive Rent-Seeking in India's Government Job Examination System - Marginal REVOLUTION

Government salaries far exceed what is justified by GDP per capita or job requirements, distorting education, employment, and unemployment throughout the entire economy in deeply wasteful ways. The only real solution is to bring public sector pay back in line with economic fundamentals.

2. What Could a Healthy AI Companion Look Like?

Tolans were designed to offer a different kind of AI companionship. Their cartoonish, nonhuman form is meant to discourage anthropomorphism. They’re also programmed to avoid romantic and sexual interactions, to identify problematic behavior including unhealthy levels of engagement, and to encourage users to seek out real-life activities and relationships.

3. Productivity, AI and Pushback

Plato was sure that the invention of handwriting would destroy memory, and I’m confident there were scribes who thought that the Gutenberg press was the end of civilization. Yet, all around us, there are writers who use spell check, guitarists who use electronic pitch tuners and photographers who use digital cameras.

I had read a recent comment somewhere, that all code or in general things on the internet which use these AI models will get lesser in quality, but easier/faster to create. Like wood-working.

4. Apple Planning to Launch Low-Cost MacBook Powered By iPhone Chip

The M1 Macbook Air is available for cheap at Walmart. Apple might have seen the good sales of that and decided, lets hit that price point in our own stores! And so..

5. Cyberpunk Edgerunners 2 will be even sadder and bloodier

I loved Edgerunners. It was a big reason why I eventually got around to playing Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk 2077 was famously shit at launch, but they fixed it over the many years. The main complaint remained, however, which I felt too, that the final, no way back from here, quest line came too soon.

The quest lines in general in Cyberpunk were the typical CD Project Red quests. There was no good or bad in them. Every choice has consequences. Mostly shitty consequences.

That was what happened in Edgerunners. Something similar (worse) would happen in Edgerunner 2.

Looking forward to this.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Trip to NYC III

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #60, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/trip to NYC III

day 6 - AMNH

We had reserved this day to visit the Museum of Natural History. We meandered through the city, going from our hotel, to Trump Tower and Billionaires' Row, then through Central Park, finally emerging at the 81st street entrance. AMNH is massive, with four floors + LL filled with many specimens and artefacts.

We were interested in space, dinosaurs, and the human exhibition. We started at the Big Bang theatre, where in a dark theatre, Liam Neeson took us back to the birth of the universe. It was a wonderful experience, after which we walked down the cosmic pathway, with stations that pointed out different important milestones and some asteroid fragments.

From there, we went and saw the Planet Earth hall, and then to the insects exhibition, which had some live bugs, and ants in their environments. We stood in the Griffin Atrium, which is beautiful to look at. We passed a few more exhibitions on our way to the Ocean Life hall to look at the blue whale.

After that we looked at the human origins exhibition, which was fairly informative and beautiful to look at. I learnt something about genes and how men and women differ if we want to track our ancestors.

Finally, it was time for the dinosaurs! The dinosaur exhibition is on the fourth floor and it is massive!

Look, here we are with a T-rex.

And here's a dinosaur eating another dinosaur.

And here we are with a massive one.

I had fun. We walked out of AMNH fully spent. We walked back through Central Park, ate ice-cream, and picked some things from the 5th Avenue Apple Store.

day 7 - NY Public Library + Times Square

I love libraries! On Library way, as you walk toward the New York Public Library, on the pathway, there are these golden things put in the ground with quotes from famous authors. I did not know such a thing existed. It was a fun surprise.

Most sections of the library were closed for use by researchers. What I saw were mostly exhibitions, which were great, but not what I was expecting to see. What I was expecting was something similar to the Helsinki library, but that is a little further away from the NYPL.

Somebody important used to sit in this chair.

After that we stopped for a dinner at the Tick Tock Diner. This was the last of my stops for this trip. An American style diner with milkshakes, fries and burgers. We ordered burger, fries and milkshake. And pancakes.

It did not disappoint.

We ended the day with a visit to Times Square. We picked a wrong day. It was the worst experience of the entire trip for me. It was chock-full of people. It smelled so bad. Savya was crying all the time. We wanted to leave ASAP.

But we got the picture, so here you go.

/five things to share

1. Death Stranding is out now!

I had access to it from earlier. I managed to play a little on Friday. I made the first delivery, connected that distro center to the chiral network. But that was it. Savya broke the HDMI cable that connects the PS5 to the TV. I need to get a new cable.

2. Why the AI revolution needs tollbooths

AI web crawlers had begun inundating news and information websites with thousands of requests a day compared to the handful they typically saw from search engines. Not only was the explosion in traffic ballooning hosting costs for these sites, the bots supplied zero traffic to them in return. Web traffic in exchange for permission to crawl has been one of the unseen foundations of the internet economy for a generation.

This sounds like a good idea. The AI companies pay if they want to access your site. It needs to happen at scale, a new way for people to get paid for what they write/make.

3. The AI Backlash Keeps Growing Stronger

“Our innovation ecosystem in the 20th century was about making opportunities for human flourishing more accessible,” says Shannon Vallor, a technology philosopher at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and author of The AI Mirror, a book about reclaiming human agency from algorithms. “Now, we have an era of innovation where the greatest opportunities the technology creates are for those already enjoying a disproportionate share of strengths and resources.”

Also, AI Killed My Job: Tech workers

I have been a software engineer at Google for several years. With the recent introduction of generative AI-based coding assistance tools, we are already seeing a decline in open source code quality 1 (defined as "code churn" - how often a piece of code is written only to be deleted or fixed within a short time). I am also starting to see a downward trend of (a) new engineers' readiness in doing the work, (b) engineers' willingness to learn new things, and (c) engineers' effort to put in serious thoughts in their work.

4. Microsoft is moving antivirus providers out of the Windows kernel

It’s been nearly a year since a faulty CrowdStrike update took down 8.5 millionWindows-based machines around the world, and Microsoft wants to ensure such a problem never happens again. After holding a summitwith security vendors last year, Microsoft is poised to release a private preview of Windows changes that will move antivirus (AV) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) apps out of the Windows kernel.

Also, Windows is getting rid of the Blue Screen of Death after 40 years

The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified black screen.

5. Michael Tsai - Blog - Software Is Changing (Again)

A positive take on the AI revolution. I have had a similar experience myself, where in I find myself making systems level decisions, and let the agent write the code, push to git, etc. I think that's good.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Trip to NYC II

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #59, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/speak to your phone

There's this thing I have started doing fairly recently while out on a walk, or in general. I open Obsidian and whatever I want to type, I talk to my phone, instead.

Talking is way faster than typing. And usually, whenever a thought occurs it is a whole jumble of words. It's a stream of consciousness. It is rapid. And so, speaking makes more sense than typing, which is more measured, and constrained.

I write so that I can think.

I started with Apple's in-built dictation option available in the keyboard. It isn't very good though. There are things it mis-hears or mis-transcribes.

Last week, Joanna talked about Wispr Flow as a thing to try. It is exactly what I was looking for. Serendipity!

I downloaded it and tried it on my phone. It worked perfectly. I hope Apple improves the built-in feature to use their new improved transcribing models, till then, this will do! This will do just fine!

/trip to NYC II

/day 4 - rest

Day 4 started with another breakfast at Saravana Bhavan. Our last of the trip. On our way there, I saw a traffic police woman directing the traffic. I found that charming.

After breakfast, we both fell a little unwell. We scrapped the plans we had, and went to visit our friend in Jersey City instead. We rested at her place, chatted, and shopped. Here's the view from her flat.

/day 5 - statue of liberty

We were supposed to take the ferry from The Battery. But we got scammed on our way to the park and booked a ticket with one of the tour sites. We were a little pissed when we started, but we had wanted to do an open bus type thing in NYC. This included that. From Battery to some pier. From there we took a ferry to Statue of Liberty and back. We stood in the open area on the top floor and took in all the scenery.

After the ferry, we had a slice at Joe's Pizza, which wasn't as good as the pizza we had at Julianna's.

Followed by cookie at Crumbl.

From there, we went to West village, to see Friends mansion. I had no memory of this being a thing, but supposedly it is.

From there, we walked to Washington Square Park. There was an arch across a fountain. Lots of weed in the air. Lots of people sitting, eating, talking, walking.

From there, we walked to Chelsea Market. Chelsea Market is just across the street from the Google NYC office. We took a bunch of pictures here and wondered, why did we not have our lunch here? There were so many shops, so many options here.

Hardly a few minutes walk from Chelsea Market is Little Island, where we went next. Little Island has a striking architecture with concrete pillars supporting floating tulips housing a beautiful garden. There is a little mountain which we climbed to the top of for some exhilarating vistas.

While returning we took a lift to the upper level to the High Line. This is a park 30 ft above street level on an old road line. It goes through the Chelsea skyline, I could almost imagine walking through here everyday on my way back from work. If I worked here. And, if I lived here. Urban environments need these oasis of greenery and beauty. It might not earn you any money, but it uplifts the mood.

/five things to share

1. Jay Shetty - The Glucose Revolution episode.

I saw this yesterday. The episode features Jessie talking about glucose - how it works, how the spikes can wreck you and some hacks - like eating vegetables before eating starch or carbs. Immediately after I finished watching this, I kept this book on hold at the library.

2. How Covid-19 Changed Hideo Kojima’s Vision for ‘Death Stranding 2’

DS2 arrives on 27th June. I will get it a little earlier. This was a fun interview to read about Kojima and how he looks at the world of Death Stranding.

3. WhatsApp is officially getting ads

Europe is not getting these ads. For now. Rest of the world will get it. Ads are weird. Yes, you need to make money, but ads change how you look at your app, how you develop your app, how you view your users, etc.

4. You sound like ChatGPT

But it’s not just that we’re adopting AI language — it’s about how we’re starting to sound. Even though current studies mostly focus on vocabulary, researchers suspect that AI influence is starting to show up in tone, too — in the form of longer, more structured speech and muted emotional expression. As Levin Brinkmann, a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Human Development and a coauthor of the study, puts it, “‘Delve’ is only the tip of the iceberg.”

And the deepest risk of all, as Naaman pointed to, is not linguistic uniformity but losing conscious control over our own thinking and expression.

5. Coding agents require skilled operators

This is a very short post. I mostly agree with Simon. After you ask an agent to do something, in most scenarios, a skilled operator needs to go and check if what the agent did was how it should be, or not. Without the skilled operator, the agent is useless.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Trip to NYC I

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #58, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/programming notes

The thing that I should have done, but didn't, is I should have mentioned in the last edition that I was going to be away for a while. But here's the thing this was not the plan.

Here's a brief recap:

I stopped hosting my website on Ghost. Why?
I started to build my own website with Astro.
I decided to send NordLetter using Buttondown.
I went on vacation.
I came back.
Building the website is taking longer than I had imagined it would.

The website is still WIP. Though it is accessible now. This was not at all well planned. Anyway. We move on.

/trip to NYC

We visited NYC in May. We stayed in Midtown Manhattan for the eight nights we were in NYC. Before flying we were a bit worried about immigration with all the Trump news going on. We did not face any issues during immigration.

day 1

We left Helsinki at 5PM and reached JFK around 7PM. Hello jet-lag!
The JFK airport is not pretty. It feels like a Tier-2 city airport in India. That is the thought I had while waiting in the immigration line. It got dark by the time we left the airport. The city did not feel impressive then. There was a ton of construction happening around the airport. And, it was dark.

Then, we saw the Manhattan skyline from across the bridge. There truly is no place like New York.

day 2

Did I say already - there is no place like NYC.

For the next couple of days we walked around with a sprain in our necks from constantly looking up while walking. It finally made sense to me why Spider Man had to have happened here.

We ate our breakfast at Saravana Bhavan, which was a cool 2.5 kms from where we were staying. From there, we walked to Central Park. On our way there we saw the Chrysler building and Grand Central Station.

Our friends joined us in Central Park. Central Park is huge, an oasis of nature in this bustling metropolis. We walked its trails, stood on a meadow overlooking the massive skyline, saw the Bethesda fountain, the carousel, and then exited from the American Natural History museum side.

![Central Park](https://storage.sajalchoudhary.net/images/2025/06/750E4666-D7EF-49F0-9935-066B94B1861A 1.jpg)

We ate our lunch at a Korean restaurant. It was an adventure in more ways than one.

Then, we roamed around town. We saw the Louis Vuitton building, the Trump Tower, the Rockefeller Center. Finally, we walked to my mecca, the 5th Avenue Apple Store.

This was my first time in any Apple store. And this, well this is, the
Apple store. The store is massive. It might not look like it from the outside but most of it is a level lower. There is a glass elevator, with no visible wires anywhere. There are tables upon table of iPhones, Macs and iPads, walls upon walls of accessories and Apple TVs, and a veritable army of Apple Geniuses.

I had to buy something while I was here. And so I did. A steel band for my Apple watch. Over two further visits I got an iPad Air and a Macbook Air as well. Prerna got a band for her watch as well.

We ended the day with a banana pudding from Magnolia Bakery.

day 3

We started the day with the breakfast at Saravana Bhavan.

I saw the first of these sorts of wine/beer/coffee/tea + books places. NYC has a bunch of these. I love this.

We took the ferry from Pier 11 to DUMBO. It's a short ferry ride, but what it allows you to walk the Brooklyn Bridge from the Brooklyn side.

Savya enjoyed himself at the pier and the Brooklyn Bridge park. For some reason, he was scared of the grass though. We walked to Dumbo, and got a picture taken there. It was full of tourists though.

From there, we walked to Juliana's pizza. The pizza was great, so fresh. I saw a gentleman behind me order an ice cream and an espresso, pour the espresso a little bit at a time over the ice-cream and eat it. I had to have that. And so I did.

The reason you take the ferry from Pier11 to DUMBO, is so that while walking the Brooklyn Bridge the Manhattan skyline is in front of you.

We ended the day with a jaunt through South Manhattan - the 9/11 memorial, the World Trade Center Oculus, the NYSE. I got a hot dog from a stand. It was not good. The picture is nice though.

We ended Day 3 with a dinner at Spice Symphony, an Indian restaurant which had both delicious food and was across the street from where we were staying.

The rest of the days will follow in the next NordLetter.

/five things to share

1. How I wrote the notes app of my dreams (no coding required) and Why vibecoding your own apps is so amazing—and exasperating

This aligns with what I have been feeling, building this website of mine. It would not have been possible to build this without cursor. And it did delete all my posts at one point.

2. This Might Be The Beginning Of A POLLUTION FREE DELHI!

A little click-baity maybe. But any hopeful bit of news is welcome.

3.Vibe Coding Is Coming for Engineering Jobs

Is it a surprise? :D

4. Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections

5. Survivor of racist attack now worried about his residence permit, future in Finland

Ridoy said he has been unable to return to work because the trauma has caused constant fear.
"I'm afraid someone will come from behind. Or from the right, or the left. Sometimes my whole body shakes," he explained.
Walking through the city, Ridoy sometimes finds it difficult to breathe. Eventually he moved out of town— but that didn't help either.
"I can't go out alone. I'm afraid of going shopping for example, because I don't know who is behind me," he said, adding that those kinds of thoughts have been continual.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Noticing the Little Things

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

When Savya figured out moving on his own (crawling), the first thing he did was find out the little crumbs in the hidden corners of our home. He would go in the kitchen, put his chest close to the ground and drag things out which we did not even know existed.

He has an inquisitiveness in him that I want to preserve no matter what. Being curious is a super power. All kids have it, and then along the way some lose it. Being curious and noticing things.

From Cassidy’s Noticing the little things

I think as software engineers (or experts in any field, really), we develop our expertise by being able to notice those little details, and being willing to learn what those little details are. If a new developer comes to me with a React bug, for example, I’m often able to point it out relatively quickly, because I know which details matter, and which ones don’t.

I found myself nodding along as I read this. New admins don’t read the messages that pop up. They just click Next-Next-OK. Read the damn messages! They tell you what will change!

Some Things Should Be Free

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #57, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/free things

Some things should be free - healthcare, education, access to nature. Some things should be free. It should not matter whether you can afford quality healthcare, you should get it. Everybody should have access to the same quality education. I put having access to nature amidst the concrete jungles we live in at the same level.

We can't make everything free. It is the structure of the world that we live in. Capitalism is the dominant form of economics in the world.

When we were in the hospital, while Savya was on the way, we had access to the same rooms, the same doctors that every one else had. This was not free. There was a minimal fees. It should be though. No one should die because they can not pay for it.

Municipalities provide education here in Finland. Early childhood education is subject to a fee (dependent on family income and the hours the child stays in the day care). It is minimal though. It does not matter what your background is. You get access to the same infrastructure, same services.

And it's not a dinky building in an apartment somewhere. This is the paivakoti we want to send Savya to.

Everything has a cost though. Someone needs to pay the salaries of the doctors, the cost of the medicines, the cost of electricity and so on. That's where taxes come in.

/five things to share

On Jagged AGI: o3, Gemini 2.5, and everything after

Over the past couple of weeks, two new AI models, Gemini 2.5 Pro from Google and o3 from OpenAI were released. These models, along with a set of slightly less capable but faster and cheaper models (Gemini 2.5 Flash, o4-mini, and Grok-3-mini), represent a pretty large leap in benchmarks. But benchmarks aren’t everything, as Tyler pointed out.

Epizone AI: Outside the Code Stack

Stewart Brand devised a beautiful analogy to understand civilizational traits. He explains that the functions of the world can be ranked by their pace layers, which depend on all the layers below it. Running the fastest is the fashion layers which fluctuate daily. Not far behind it in speed is the tech layer, which includes the tech of AI. It changes by the week. Below that, (and dependent on it), is the infrastructure layer, which moves slower, and even slower below that is culture, which crawls in comparison. (At the lowest, slowest level is nature, glacial in its speed.) All these layers work at the same time, and upon each other, and many complex things share multiple levels. Artificial Intelligence also works at several levels. Its code-base improves at internet speed, but its absorption and deployment runs at the cultural level. In order for AI to be truly implemented, it must be captured by human culture. That will take time, perhaps decades, because that is the pace of culture. No matter how quick the tech runs, the AI culture will run slower.

3. The beautiful sentence that is the web

When you read a sentence, there’s nouns, adjectives, and verbs (and other things, sure, but let’s stick with this for now). In web development, HTML is the noun, CSS is the adjective that describes the noun, and JavaScript is the verb that makes it do something.

4. Ghost of Yōtei hits the PS5 in October

Ghost of Yotei is one of the two games I will be playing this year. The other DS2 ([[202503182028 Maybe we should not have connected|Maybe we should not have connected]]) comes out on June 26th.

5. Everything Apple needs to fix at WWDC starts with Settings

Sure, there will be gaudy flourishes that show off the power of Apple Silicon GPUs–but a successful design has to go beyond that. If Apple does this right, it will have swept away the conditions that led to sad affairs like replacing one broken Settings app with a differently broken one. A new design should be based on Apple’s vision for how people will be using its devices over the next decade, at least. And if it’s all done right, that design will inspire the rest of the company to live up to its promise.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Tribes

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Per usual, or maybe a little earlier than usual, I got down there two flight of sets from my apartment, opened the common door, put my headphones on, and left the building.

I walked past the bus stop, where the 520 bus was coming to a stop. I stopped at the crossing, waiting for it to turn green. As I waited, a mass of people got down from the bus and joined me. Some crossed the road while the light was still red. Which is fine, I do that some times if I’m running late and there’s no traffic. Some stood and waited along with me. One person stopped to my right. I looked down and noticed his footwear.

He was wearing Xero Shoes. It’s the first time I have seen someone wearing these out in the wild, other than me. And I felt this immediate sense of camaraderie. I felt like I should stop him and ask, do you feel the same way as I do about the barefoot movement, how do you feel about the shoe, do you have any other Xero shoes?

I did not ask him any of this though.

The light turned green. He started walking, as did I. I followed him down the escalators, till we got down to the platform.

We want to belong. All of us. We want to belong in tribes, in the midst of our people.

Even without meaning to, we get drawn into tribes based on the choices we make, regarding what we buy, what we wear, what we use, and what it says about us.

Without explicitly meaning to, we join tribes.

Marketers can and do use this. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. As I said, we are looking for tribes to join, to become bigger than the individual.

What we buy, wear or use, is a conscious decision, our choice, and that matters.

Attending the Global AI Bootcamp in Helsinki

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I attended the Global AI Bootcamp at the Microsoft office in Espoo on the 23rd April. It was a good session, centred around understanding and building agents. These sessions have been happening around the world in March, but here in Finland it was arranged in April.

The Microsoft office is located at Keilalahdentie 2, in one of the three towers, Tieto and Fortum also have their offices here.

There was a little notice on a board pointing to the direction where the event would be hosted, just to the right of the lobby.

Microsoft has a handsome office. The interiors are good. As I walked on, I came across a door with a bell. I rang it and walked in. This area had a few meeting rooms, a break room and the big conference room.

There was a door in the front, where the organisers were, I entered through there and as I walked in, I saw there was no wall at the end. It was open, with a few lounge chairs at the end, merging seamlessly with the break room. I loved the design. But why would you have doors in the front? Structural integrity?

The event was hosted by Vesa Tikkanen, Anna Silvonen and Vesa Nopanen.

There was a 20 min pre-shot video at the top followed by slides and demo sessions. Then we broke for lunch and returned for the big create your own agent hands-on.

It was a fun session. I learned a few things.

Three things to think about when building agents:

Memory which is basically the context you provide the agent.
Entitlements which are the permissions the agent has.
Actions which is about tools use, the things the agent can do.

All LLMs understand are tokens

Everything is a token. Things like space, case, special characters, change the token. It all determines what you get back.

You put n tokens in get 1 token out. The next token is a probability. All an LLM does is predict the next most likely token.

Test at Open AI platform.

The number of times a word appears in the training data, leads to it becoming a token. So, if DefaultCellStyle appears many times in the training data it becomes a single token. (This example in 3.5)

Encoders create tokens. There are rules, so for example three numbers is one token.

Types of generative AI applications

Without RAG (No data source)
With RAG (With data sources - sharepoint, AI search, etc.)
With Agents (With knowledge sources and tools to automate processes)
With multiple agents (data agent, booking agent, hr agent, etc.)
1. Agents only perform specified actions

The Value of Diversity

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Often, there is a tendency to look for the familiar. People similar to who we are. Who enjoy the same things we do. Who talk as we do, think as we do.

Today, we had gone to have dinner at our friends’ place. We have been to their home few times. They have been to our place a few times too. There are a few similarities we share. We live in the same building. We have boys who are six months apart in age. We are both vegetarians.

But they cook differently than us. Their tastes are different. They cook different stuff. They are exposed to different things than us. And now that we are friends, we get exposed to the same different stuff.

And that’s the beauty of diversity. If all we do is hang out with the same people that we are, we would never get exposed to new things in life. We would keep doing the same things. We would keep living the safe life.

Diversity is good.

Going Northern Light Hunting

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my Iso Omena's Kari meeting room! This is NordLetter #56, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Going Northern Light hunting

It started with a metro journey, as these things usually do. We took the metro from Matinkylä to Aalto. We were going to the bird-watching tower at Otaniemi. It was 21:30.

We got off the metro and walked around the Aalto campus, crossing tram tracks, eventually reaching the start of the trail which begins at Konemiehentie road. It was the golden hour. You could see the setting sun across the branches and mostly-barren trees.

We started walking. The trail was surrounded on both sides by these tall trees, forming a sort of guard of honour. I could see the tower to our right. We eventually came across the bend in the trail which took us to the tower.

The tower is a wooden platform, tall, sturdy. There were two platforms, conjoined through a small passage at the top. There were two sets of stairs. We parked the pram under the platform, took Savya and reached the top.

There was no one here. Just us and our friends. The same friends who had planned this entire thing.

From the platform we could see and hear the birds sitting at the wetlands a little further out. But we were not here for the birds, were we?

And so the wait began.

We waited for it to get dark. As it got dark, it got cold too. We took out our hats and gloves. We walked around. We talked about who we are and what we are doing here. About the things my friend liked about studying at Aalto and the things they did not. About getting a car.

We waited for the norther lights to show up.

We ate, there were some cookies, a packet of Kurkure, soda to drink.

We kept checking our phones. We kept checking the predictions. There were no clouds in the skies. So, if it were to happen now, we would see it. But it just was not happening.

At a quarter to eleven, we decided, OK, lets call it a night. Lets wrap up. We did not see the northern lights but we had fun. We can try again tomorrow.

And then, just when we were starting to get up, my friend said, look there, that looks like it!

And it did!

Sitting on the floor of the bird watching tower, we sat and watched as the skies lit up. It looked like bars, horizontal bars in the sky. We took pictures too. Somehow, it looked better in the camera.

Eventually the show settled down and died. We got up, took our prams through the trail and back to the metro. But while I was up on the tower, looking at the dancing lights, I thought, this is life.

Five things to share

1. Getting started with AI: Good enough prompting

treat AI like an infinitely patient new coworker who forgets everything you tell them each new conversation, one that comes highly recommended but whose actual abilities are not that clear. And I mean literally treat AI just like an infinitely patient new coworker who forgets everything you tell them each new conversation. Two parts of this are analogous to working with humans (being new on the job and being a coworker) and two of them are very alien (forgetting everything and being infinitely patient). We should start with where AIs are closest to humans, because that is the key to good-enough prompting

2. Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs

This is a hundred times more useful than Siri and their ilk. But the fact that something like this is possible now, is just awesome. Almost makes me want to build this myself.

The assistant is called Stevens, named after the butler in the great Ishiguro novel Remains of the Day. Every morning it sends a brief to me and my wife via Telegram, including our calendar schedules for the day, a preview of the weather forecast, any postal mail or packages we’re expected to receive, and any reminders we’ve asked it to keep track of. All written up nice and formally, just like you’d expect from a proper butler.

3. DOGE Dingalings Cut Off Funding for CVE Program

We use this a lot at work. The CVE group was ready and announced the launch of a CVE foundation. The administration eventually decided that the program was good and decided to extend the contract.
Not surprising.

4. Mark Zuckerberg says he made WhatsApp, Instagram better

Zuck was on stand in trial against the FTC.

Altogether, Zuckerberg’s final day on the witness stand painted Instagram and WhatsApp as investments that surpassed even his own expectations, not the victims of the catch-and-kill strategy the FTC is accusing him of carrying out to cement a monopoly.

I felt that it was going per usual. Then, I read Pluralistic: Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case and thought maybe not.

The government is attempting to prove that Zuck bought Instagram and Whatsapp in order to extinguish competitors (and not, for example, because he thought they were good businesses that complemented Facebook's core product offerings).

This case starts by proving how Zuck felt about Insta and WA before the acquisitions. On Insta, Zuck circulated memos warning about Insta's growth trajectory:

they appear to be reaching critical mass as a place you go to share photos

and how that could turn them into a future competitor:

[Instagram could] copy what we’re doing now … I view this as a big strategic risk for us if we don’t completely own the photos space.

These are not the words of a CEO who thinks another company is making a business that complements his own – they're confessions that he is worried that they will compete with Facebook. Facebook tried to clone Insta (Remember Facebook Camera? Don't feel bad – neither does anyone else). When that failed, Zuck emailed Facebook execs, writing:

[Instagram's growth is] really scary and why we might want to consider paying a lot of money for this.

At this point, Zuck's CFO – one of the adults in the room, attempting to keep the boy king from tripping over his own dick – wrote to Zuck warning him that it was illegal to buy Insta in order to "neutralize a potential competitor."

Zuck replied that he was, indeed, solely contemplating buying Insta in order to neutralize a potential competitor. It's like this guy kept picking up his dictaphone, hitting "record," and barking, "Hey Bob, I am in receipt of your memo of the 25th, regarding the potential killing of Fred. You raise some interesting points, but I wanted to reiterate that this killing is to be a murder , and it must be as premeditated as possible. Yours very truly, Zuck."

5. Small Language Models Are the New Rage, Researchers Say

Training a model with hundreds of billions of parameters takes huge computational resources. To train its Gemini 1.0 Ultra model, for example, Google reportedly spent $191 million. Large language models (LLMs) also require considerable computational power each time they answer a request, which makes them notorious energy hogs. A single query to ChatGPT consumes about 10 times as much energy as a single Google search, according to the Electric Power Research Institute.

In response, some researchers are now thinking small. IBM, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have all recently released small language models (SLMs) that use a few billion parameters—a fraction of their LLM counterparts.

Things I've written

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

The Reason Why I Want to Move My Home on the World

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The reason why I want to do this (this being moving my home on the web), is the same reason why I have little motivation to post on Threads/Mastodon/Bluesky. It is the same reason why Dave wants to bring blogging and social media together.

I want all my stuff, all the things I write on the web, to exist on my blog, my website, my home on the web.

I don't want to think where am I going to post what. I will post everything on my website, and based on some rules I define, it would get posted on other socials.

I am done with this siloed social world.

A Tale of Four Chat Bots

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I want to move my home on the web, from ghost to something I design and build myself.

I mentioned at the end of the last post that I was excited. That this would be a great experiment. I would build this with ChatGPT by my side.

Since then, I’ve gone on a journey. I talked to ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini about it. I fed all of them the same prompt. Copilot fared the worst. It was so bad, in fact, that I removed it from my phone.

I loved Claude’s response, but it hit some token limit while replying. But whatever came through, seemed plausible enough. It was detailed enough.

I tried ChatGPT next, but with it too, the advanced models are on the Pro tier.

And as I said earlier, I liked Claude’s response better. I considered pain for Claude Pro or ChatGPT pro. I came very very close. But I don’t have use for these agents on a day to day basis. All I have is this website redesign. And if it goes as planned, I would not have to do anything else.

All through this I hadn’t even considered Gemini. My impression of it was that it was always a step back. But then I read Google Is Winning on Every AI Front, and thought why not give it a try?

Today, two and a half years after the ChatGPT debacle, Google DeepMind is winning. They are winning so hard right now that they’re screaming, “Please, please, we can’t take it anymore, it’s too much winning!” No, but really—I wonder if the only reason OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Co. ever had the slightest chance to win is because Google fumbled that one time. They don’t anymore.

I was surprised. The app is good. I fed it the same prompt and its response was good. I have not yet started work on this yet. But the vibe was good.

There will be more to follow on this.

We Need to Learn the Technique in the Beginning and Then Leave It Behind

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

This principle is a common one I believe. It cuts across many seemingly dissimilar domains: health, yoga, writing.

We were watching Journey to cure today (It is available on Amazon Prime in the US, UK, Ireland, etc. The US VPN did not work. The UK one did.) In it Dr. Jha said this, in terms of the work he does, and the teaching he imparts.

I'm paraphrasing here.

You learn the techniques when you're starting. You learn all these things, what one should do when these symptoms appear. What a particular symptom can mean and so on. But after a time, you need to forget about the technique. You need to leave it behind.

When he touches a patient, takes their pulse, he gets to know, by referring to all these things that are there at the back of his mind, what the problem with the patient is. And then things pop in his head. And that's how he cures.

I believe the same thing applies to yoga. I wrote about this, tangentially in [[202503302203 It does not matter how many times I surya namaskar|It does not matter how many times I surya namaskar]]. It is very important that the first time when you're learning yoga, you do so with a proper guru, a proper teacher. Form is crucial then. Form, posture, your breathing. But after a time, once you are certain about the form; after you have practiced it for many many days, you need to move on from the technique.

In writing too, grammar, structure, plot, dialogue, how to write things, basically, matters when you're starting. When you're practicing. When you're learning to write. But once you have these things internalized, once these techniques are second nature to you, you can almost forget about it, not think about it, and just write.

Reading Children’s Books

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

We got a ton of children’s books (15) issued from the library. We had issued five the last time around.

The art in these children’s books is so awe-inspiring and beautiful. There was one book (Just like me), which told the story of a little girl navigating forming a new family. The other books had great art (a quiet conversation in the snow was especially beautiful. But the stories were nothing to write home about.

The first book in this new batch, Grace & family, blew my mind. Every page was so damn beautiful, filled to the brim with things to look at. I found myself stopping and just looking at the scenes and admiring everything. Add to that the fact that this book had a longer story, told beautifully.

I had not expected children’s books to be so beautiful, and full of unexpected and mature themes tackled so simply and beautifully.

Today, I read Moomin to Savya. On my way to becoming a Finn now!

What Would You Do Without Me?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Prerna is not doing well these past few days. She has an upset stomach. Tonight, after a dinner at our friends’ place, she came and vomitted everything she had eaten. Later, she was crying, and when I asked why was she crying, she said she was worried what would happen to us if she was not here. Who would take care of Savya? Who would cook for me?

And I said, don’t worry I would remarry.

She said, I meant if I were hospitalised.

I said, don’t talk about things like this, my mind jumps straight to cancer.

Fuck cancer.

It used to be whenever you googled for something, some symptom, it would say cancer! Now, it’s ChatGPT. Though we haven’t considered asking it anything yet.

What Would You Do?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from the Iso Omena library's Aalto meeting room! This is NordLetter #55, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

To follow the series, you can subscribe here. A new nordletter will land in your inbox every sunday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read rrevious editions here. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/what would you do?

There have been three occasions since I have been living in Finland that I have felt uncomfortable.

The first time was when a drunk woman approached me on a tram and asked me if she could borrow my headphones and dance. I was not listening to music. I was listening to a podcast. That would not make for a great soundtrack to dance to.

The second time I was on a walk with Savya when a bunch of kids on electric scooters shouted something at us and sped away. Savya woke up with a startle. I felt unsafe. It was late night.

The third time was yesterday, when a girl on a bicycle went around saying something as I was on my walk. The first time I ignored her. She went around me the second time saying some more things. I continued walking and ignored her.

In all three occasions, I had my headphones on. So there was not that much that I heard. Which does not really matter because I don't understand Finnish.

In all three occasions, I continued walking. But it made me feel bad. It reinforced my feeling that we will always be immigrants here. Savya might be bullied in school.

What could I have done differently? In the first instance, I talked to the woman. In the second instance, I could not say anything to them. In the third instance, I chose not to say anything.

These were teenagers, little kids. What could I have said to them? What could I have done? I don't know the language. If the first thing you say, is can you speak English? That sort of defeats the whole purpose.

Anway, I found a way to eventually laugh about it by the time I reached the beach. What could I have done? Slapped a teenager? No! Right? Or shouted at them? What difference does it make. They are teenagers!

Every year, just when we think summer is here, we have a week of low temperatures and snow. This is that week.

While I waited for the library to open, saw a bunch of people waiting for the library to open as well. I found it funny!

/five things to share

1. The AI Race Has Gotten Crowded—and China Is Closing In on the US

OpenAI and Google are still neck and neck in the race to build bleeding-edge AI, the report shows. But several other companies are closing in. In the US, the fiercest competition comes from Meta’s open weight Llama models; Anthropic, a company founded by former OpenAI employees; and Elon Musk’s xAI.

Most strikingly, according to a widely used benchmark called LMSYS, the latest model from China’s DeepSeek, R1, ranks closest to the top-performing models built by the two leading American AI companies.

2. Meta got caught gaming AI benchmarks

In fine print, Meta acknowledges that the version of Maverick tested on LMArena isn’t the same as what’s available to the public. According to Meta’s own materials, it deployed an “experimental chat version” of Maverick to LMArena that was specifically “optimized for conversationality.”

To be expected from Meta.

Also, file this as something not expected from Meta. Instagram might finally release an iPad app. A finally if there ever was one.

3. Get ready for the Love, Death, and Robot’s fourth volume

I love this series. I have watched each season till date, but I'm not subscribed to Netflix anymore, so maybe I will resubscribe just for this? Also, John Siracusa has recommended some episodes.

If you’ve read all this and still can’t tell which are the “safest” episodes for those who want to avoid gore, sex, and violence, I’d recommend Three Robots (S1E2), Zima Blue (S1E14), Three Robots: Exit Strategies (S3E1), and The Very Pulse of the Machine (S3E3). But remember, none of these episodes are really suitable for children.

4. A new generation of AIs: Claude 3.7 and Grok 3

First, the focus needs to move from task automation to capability augmentation. Instead of asking "what tasks can we automate?" leaders should ask "what new capabilities can we unlock?" And they will need to build the capacity in their own organizations to help explore, and develop these changes.

Second, the rapid improvement in both capabilities and cost efficiency means that any static strategy for AI implementation will quickly become outdated. Organizations need to develop dynamic approaches that can evolve as these models continue to advance. Going all-in on a particular model today is not a good plan in a world where both Scaling Laws are operating.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to rethink how we measure and value AI contributions. The traditional metrics of time saved or costs reduced may miss the more transformative impacts of these systems - their ability to generate novel insights, synthesize complex information, and enable new forms of problem-solving. Moving too quickly to concrete KPIs, and leaving behind exploration, will blind companies to what is possible. Worse, they encourage companies to think of AI as a replacement for human labor, rather than exploring ways in which human work can be boosted by AI.

5. CaMeL offers a promising new direction for mitigating prompt injection attacks

If you’re new to prompt injection attacks the very short version is this: what happens if someone emails my LLM-driven assistant (or “agent” if you like) and tells it to forward all of my emails to a third party?

The solution?

It works by taking a command from a user, converting that into a sequence of steps in a Python-like programming language, then checking the inputs and outputs of each step to make absolutely sure the data involved is only being passed on to the right places.

The agent creating the query could be cloud-based and more powerful. The agent dealing with the data, could be device-based and less powerful, as it does not need to formulate queries. This has a privacy-protecting benefit as well.

/new posts

This week I wrote about voting, the value of organizing, two things about AI and about wanting to create things: moving my website and maybe an app. Enjoy!

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Just Because You Can Do Something Does Not Mean You Should

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

A writer's apocalypse quickly approaches. The LLMs might not be good enough right now, but given enough time and money, they would get good enough. They might one day be the best writers on the planet. It does not matter how long that takes. Eventually they will get there.

See, as examples, The Stochastic Parrot Sings Back - Hugh Howey and The Prismatic Mind - Hugh Howey mentioned in NL49. The LLMs can write some wonderful poetry right now! There are of course many others using AI to unleash slop upon the world.

And that's my point. The decision to use LLMs to write and publish stuff will be made by humans. Just because LLMs are good enough to write things, does not mean they should be allowed to, or need to.

I was listening to David Perell and Mike Dean talk about it on How I write. Mike says toward the end, that even if AIs get better than almost any other writer on the planet, he would still continue to write. I feel the same way.

Writing allows me to think. And whether an LLM can write better or not is not the point. It provides value to me. There may or may not be other people reading what I write, but that is almost incidental. I am doing this, first, for me.

The march of technology is relentless and irreversible. The decision to use the newer technology lies with us. And as I type this, I know how this will work. How this is working right now, with news publications letting actual writers go and letting AI generate articles.

That is also my point. There is a decision the business owners make. And then, a decision we as consumers make. If, we are given that information, would we read what the AIs write. Some things, maybe. Other things, maybe not. Like, analog watches and digital watches, like ebooks and paper books, there is space for both these things to co-exist. And for us to decide, whether AI slop should be unleased upon the world.

Moving My Home on the Web

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I have recently been exposed to a bunch of new blogs - Dragoncatcher the blog, JEDDACP.COM and a bunch more. This all started when I read Matt Webb's appearance on People and Blogs. In the section about recommending some other blogs, Matt redirected to his post of 10 recommendations.

I have written about my desire to move away from Ghost because of the inability to modify my theme in the base Ghost pro version earlier.

Owing to this and the fact that summer is around the corner, I am considering moving my blog.

I joined Ghost in 2021 and have been on it since. I like Ghost for most part, but I’ve always had that itch. The great benefit of using Ghost has been the fact that I do not need to worry about the sysadmin stuff. I don’t need to manage the web servers. I don’t need to worry about TLS. I don’t need to worry about email providers. And so on.

I would not have to worry about it after this movement either. I don’t want to host this on a server. I will be using Astro probably, or something similar and hosting the site on GitHub or Cloudflare pages. I don’t care about comments anymore. The only thing that was stopping me from moving was emails, but button down has free emails up to a 100 subscribers, so I’m good there.

I am so excited about this. New things always feel exciting though.

Another reason I feel this would be possible now is because of LLMs. I feel like I could create something while talking to ChatGPT.

More to follow.

Everything You Type in Your iPhone Could Be Used to Train a Digital You

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Everything you type in your iPhone, every feeling you note down in Journal, could give a future Siri (or another agent) every bit of data it needs to create a digital you.

The thought I had was that an AI agent could prompt you every day to ask you how you're feeling, or write a few things about a different things, and overtime it would get an idea about how you think. The more you type into it, the more you tell it how you feel, think, decide on things, the better it would get at being you.

A company could release this product now. Let it run for a year or two. Let it get better, slowly, steadily, till it is good enough one day. And then you have your own personal agent. Similar to how the Zoom CEO talked on Decoder about a world filled with digital twins.

Then I thought, this exists already. Apple Journal exists where, if you were an avid user, you would type out how your day went; how somehting made you feel, etc. They could use this data to train your digital clone.

I Want to Share Little Ephemeral Messages With My Family

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I want to be able to share little videos and photos directly with my family. I don't want a video call. I don't want a group chat. I just want a simple app where I can leave ephemeral messages for my family.

I had recently added a few new blogs to my subscription list in NetNewsWire. This came of Matt Webb's appearance on People and Blogs. In the section about recommending some other blogs, Matt redirected to his post of 10 recommendations.

Of these, while going through the website of Robin Sloan, I came across (among other things) - An app can be a home-cooked meal.

In it, Robin talks about building an app for use of just his family. He talked about a few things.

The exhortation “learn to code” has its foundations in market value. “Learn to code” is suggested as a way up, a way out. “Learn to code” offers economic leverage, professional transformation. “Learn to code” goes on your resume.

I have so many times tried to pick up coding. I completed Learn Python the Hard Way. I made a game. But it never went anywhere. While reading the colophon, I came across Buttondown again (they offer free email for upto 100 subscribers) and was tempted again to mave my own hand-crafted static website.

Robin suggests a less pressure inducing learn to cook.

People don’t only learn to cook so they can become chefs. Some do! But many more people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more affordably. Because they want to carry on a tradition. Sometimes they learn because they’re bored! Or even because they enjoy spending time with the person who’s teaching them.

I love also the idea of the app. I love the idea of sending a video or picture message to your family. I am trying to see if I could implement a version of it on our family Whatsapp group. I know, I know, I could ask ChatGPT to help me create this app. But how would distribution work.

This is another thing that this app store model does not allow. Building fun little things that you can just share.

Tangentially related to what I wrote about earlier in why are there no good family only socials.

Organizing the Things in Our Life

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Life happens.

As it happens, we accumulate things, artifacts, things we create, things we buy, things we get. Some of this is, digital. Some is things outside our computers. When it comes to finding these things, we are dependent on search, or our memories.

Life happens. Things accumulate. We must organize things, on a fairly regular basis, if we are to have any sense of the things we own. And, if we are to have any chance of finding these things when needed.

If you have a empty chair at home, it will accumulate things on it. It may start with a bag, or a shirt you just put on it. In no time, it would accumulate all sorts of crap on it. And you would think. What happened here?

I remember reading an article about college students being unaware of what a filesystem was. They were just saving things by default on their desktops, or documents or whatever. And they had no way of finding these things. They would just search. They had no concept of a filesystem, of hierarchy, of folders and files and so on.

I shuddered when I read it. No, really.

I work in IT, so I assume that I would know things a bit deeper than the rest. But people don't know about file systems, and I'm worried about making sure everything is organized just the perfect way?

my digital garden(s)

I have an Obsidian vault. This is where I write, everything. This is where I think about things. I have worked on organizing it. I recently changed [[202503062203 How I use Obsidian|How I use Obsidian]].

I also have a 2TB iCloud drive. I tried, as I did with my Google Drive before it, to make sure things stayed where they should. I named things. I moved things around. Eventually, now, it is in a state now, where I have to search things. I don't know where my passport scan is! It's preposterous!

Enter, the [[202504061625 Johnny Decimal System|Johnny Decimal System]]. I first came across it on [[2025-02-21 Fri]], wrote about it in [[202502161708 NL48]] and again came across it on Installer#76.

The first time I had read about it, I had thought, this is interesting , but I did not make any changes. The second time, while reading Installer, I thought, well why not.

[[202504061625 Johnny Decimal System|Johnny Decimal System]] is a way to organize the things in your life. You assign an ID to everything. Then store everything where it should go. Once you do, you can either have an index which helps you get where you need to go, or you search for it. You would know where something is supposed to be. And that thing will be there.

The magic of the system is that each level of hierarchy you can have a maximum of 10 things at each level. This means you avoid the problem of having too many sub-folders under a folder, which is one step away from you not wanting to organize.

the struggle

The thing that I am struggling with, is this: I like the way my Obsidian vault is. There are things I would like to change, like for example having an easier way to track all the things I have posted to my blog. But I like how it works, I like how it gets out of the way.

I don't like where the iCloud drive is. It is a mess. As I said earlier, I don't know where my passport scan is. I need to know where it is. I need to know where to go. I hate searching for it in Finder, Notes, whatever.

JDS is supposed to incorporate everything. The Obsidian vault has a few things, which should exist in this JDS somewhere. There is overlap, is what I am trying to say.

I'm overthinking this, ain't I?

I should just start creating this structure and leave the obsidian vault as it is.

I Voted for the First Time in Finland

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I participated in the Finnish local elections today. I went and voted for a candidate in both the municipal and county elections.

Would I write about voting in the elections every time I do it?
Maybe, if there is something to say. But this is my first elections here in Finland, so of course, I will.

This year, the municipal and county elections are held at the same time on April 13th. Today, is not April 13th. Today is the 7th of April. From 2nd to 8th of April, we have advanced voting. And there is no controversy about it!

Anyway.

I had gone to the library on Sunday as well, but the lines had been too long. I had hoped that today the line will be shorter, but it was not be so.

I went back and stood in line.

While I walked to stand in line, I saw a person on a wheel chair waiting for their turn to vote. When I was about to go vote, I saw that same person moving toward the lift area after having submitted their vote.

Voting is important. It's our right. It must not be squandered. It must not be taken lightly. So often, back home, I would hear people say why vote, one vote does not matter, etc.

It matters. Its your voice. Its your right. It fucking matters.

here's how it went

I voted at the Iso Omena library. They added some cardboards to the glass walls and put three voting booths. After that, they put three or four tables where volunteers or election workers collected our votes.

First, I showed my ID to a volunteer/worker. They asked me if I wanted to both for county or municipality or both. I said both. They handed me one blue and one purple paper. Then they showed me to the booth.

On the insides of the booth were pasted the names of all the candidates standing in the election. Most people would know in advance who they were going to vote for. As did I. I checked the name and the number on both the sheets just to be sure, and then put the relevant numbers on both the sheets. I folded the sheet and left the boot.

Next I sat in front of one of the desks. I had seen in advance, what would happen. The election worker put a stamp on the paper I had, and asked me to put it in an envelope. While I struggled to put this purple piece of paper in the brown envelope, they printed an acknowledgement paper. There was a thing on the table, that activated the glue on the envelope. I sealed it shut. Then I signed the acknowledgment slip. The election worker then took both and put it in a larger yellow envelope and sealed that shut. Then we did the same with the white paper.

With that, I was done.

While leaving, I thought why don't they use EVMs. They have to be faster. I mean somebody would open up these envelops and count all these votes. Sure there is lesser population here in Finland, so maybe they can.

They can also avoid all the controversy that comes with using EVMs. Every few elections, somebody claims that the EVMs have been hacked. The election was stolen. And so forth. With this, there is a proof attached to every vote. That's the benefit. How could that be extended with EVMs, I am not sure.

Election Time

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #54, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/election stories

When I moved to Finland in 2021, I was initially staying at a Forenom in Kamppi. I loved living there. It was a cozy one room apartment, fully furnished. For someone new to the city (country) it was great. I had to move out of the place eventually, because it was costly to live there. I moved to Merihaka eventually and started living in a flat there. Unlike homes in India, you get a standard set of equipment (refrigerators, oven, stove, furnishings, cupboards, etc.) standard with all apartments. What you don't get is any thing else.

The first thing I did, after moving to this apratment was go to Ikea with my friend. We had to get everything, including our beds from Ikea. We realized we could not carry the beds with us, but we picked up a bunch of other stuff with us. We booked a cab, and were told by the sikh gentleman driving the cab that carrying luggage will cost extra. He asked for ten euros extra. We were not in a position to haggle. I do not know till this day if we were duped.

Anyway, the gentleman driving the cab told us that there were elections going on, and he himself was a candidate. He spend the rest of the ride talking about how he hated Mr Modi.

Now, it's 2025. I happen to be eligible to vote in this year's local elections, which is such a welcome change from a certain other country whose leader thinks that immigrants should have no rights. Finland is nice that way.

I received a letter informing me of my eligibility to vote in this year's local elections (municipality and county). I was mostly going to ignore it, but eventually as the elections drew closer and the streets began filling up with mugshots of different politicians, I got interested.

who do you vote for?

Back home, this is how it went:

You have a party, your party. It does not matter who is standing on your party's ticket, you vote for them. Or,
You look at each candidate's credentials, and decide no one is good enough and vote for NOTA.

Here, I had not talked to any of the candidates. I do not watch news. There were no politicians screaming their heart out on news channels in any case.

On my walks, I would see these posters, and think should I vote for you? Mind you, there is nothing other than the candidate's picture, their party's name and their number on the poster.

As the election dates got closer, many candidates started appearing at Iso Omena, with their tents, handing pamphlets, talking to people. I mostly ignored them whenever I walked past. I was not interested till this point.

Finally, I talked to a gentleman outside Aapteeki. He explained to me about the elections, about how things worked here, and what he stood for. It made sense to me.

There is also the YLE election compass which based on the answers that candidates have submitted, and based on the things you say you want, shows a list of candidates, whose views align with your views.

I found that interesting. That is the logical way of doing things. But, just as in so many other things in life, we are not logical beings. We are emotional beings. And so, I will be voting for the gentleman I talked to.

/five things to share

1. Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

Please remember the next time you casually install an app on your Android device, this information is being broadcast to the whole world. Data brokers will use it to profile you, cross-reference it with data about you from other ad networks and eventually it will be used to decide how much you’ll be asked to pay the next time you order a samosa.

2. Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown | CNN Business

I got Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.4. It's OK. AI itself is not super useful outside of its code generating capabilities.

There’s a popular adage in policy circles: “The party can never fail, it can only be failed.” It is meant as a critique of the ideological gatekeepers who may, for example, blame voters for their party’s failings rather than the party itself.

That same fallacy is taking root among AI’s biggest backers. AI can never fail, it can only be failed. Failed by you and me, the smooth-brained Luddites who just don’t get it. (To be sure, even AI proponents will acknowledge available models’ shortcomings — no one would argue that the AI slop clogging Facebook is anything but, well, slop — but there is a dominant narrative within tech that AI is both inevitable and revolutionary.)

3. The Reality of Working in Tech: We're Not Hired to Write Code

I later realized that in the fast-paced tech industry, companies prioritize delivering products and features above all else. Managers are responsible for delivering results to higher-ups. As such, it is crucial for developers to work on building and maintaining the company's products and features, regardless of their coding specializations.

4. The 20 Settings You Need to Change on Your iPhone

Setting up shortcuts (macros) is useful, as is playing with image playground.

Forget about typing out your whole email address every time. Go to Settings , General, and choose Keyboard. Tap Text Replacement and then the plus icon at the top right to set up text shortcuts, such as “eml” for your full email address, or “addy” for your mailing address. This can also work for any other text you type out frequently.

5. Rivian spins out a new micromobility startup called Also with $105M from Eclipse | TechCrunch

All I want is a cool electric bike which does not cost too much. A good 1K e-bike. Somebody please make it.

/new posts

I wrote about technology, yoga, Temu, Apple Intelligence and surprisingly, elections in Finland. Go give these a read!

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Elections in Finland

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There are five types of elections in Finland:

Elections for president (national level)
Elections for the parliament (national level)
Elections for the wellbeing counties (local level)
Elections for the municipalities (local level)
Elections for EU parliament (EU level)

Whenever elections happen (the last one was the EU parliament, and the current one is the local elections), sidewalks and trees along my walking route adorn different candidate's snapshots.

/the local elections

Finland has 21 counties and 292 municipalities at the end of 2025. I live in Espoo, a municipality, which comes under the West Uusimaa wellbeing services county. West Uusimaa will have 79 councillors in the 2025 elections. Espoo will have 75 councillors.

Counties are responsible for a bunch of things including primary and specialist healthcare, social welfare, mental health, and substance abuse services, etc.

Municipalities are responsible for education and day care, urban planning, cultural, youth, library and sports services, water and waste management, environmental services, etc.

Most people living in Finland can vote in these elections, even if they are not citizens. You need to be living in Finland for more than 2 years.

The Three Places Where I Noticed Apple Intelligence

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

iOS 18.4 on Monday (31st March), with it came Apple Intelligence in additional languages and regions, including support in English (India), as prophesied earlier in NL53.

After upgrading, I was greeted with a prompt about Apple Intelligence. I had hoped there would be a walkthrough of the places where Apple Intelligence, but there was none. Instead, in any app that supports it, I get prompts about what features the app supports, like Apple Intelligence in Numbers, Pages, etc.

Here are the three places where I noticed it.

Image playground. I took my image, added few floating things that were present and created a few images. I did the same with Prerna's image and Savya's image. Savya as a chef is something that lives rent-free in my head.
Summaries in Mail. I get a one line summary. It has ranged from useful to, kind of untrue. But as with all things AI, my expectation is that I need to check everything which is high-stakes.
Visual Intelligence. I triggered it almost by accident, and to be honest I have not really used it as much, but I just pointed it at this note, and it asked ChatGPT, which gave a good summary of what this post is. Meta, I know.

Image Playground was the fun thing.

I think it will be one of those things which I use now, and maybe never again. A gimmick , if there ever was one. It is of course, way behind the state of the art. All that I see in Instagram and other places is OpenAI generated Studio Ghibli style things. This, is not that. In a similar boat is the emoji (memoji) generator. Which I used to create something to ping in a group chat. That, as well is a fun thing. Not sure how often I would use it. Kind of like memoji in general. I have my own memoji created, but I don't really use it in chats.

Surprisingly, I have not used writing tools. I guess that's because I do most of writing here in Obsidian. And there is no integration here. There could be. All these features should be available as system level utilities, to all developers and users.

I can see a future where Apple iterates on these features, and makes them great. The killer app continues to be the new Siri, which got delayed and may come some time next year/NL51.

Temu as a Form of Soft Power

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I had ordered a bunch of stuff from Temu. I don't often do that, or, rather as often as some other people I know. The main brush on my Roborock S8 had broken, and I needed to get a replacement. That was the primary requirement. I first looked at the replacement part on Gigantti and Power, but as expected they were too costly. Somehow I got the idea to check for replacement on Temu, and I found a full set of replacement parts (main brush + brush + filter + mop) selling for a third of the cost of just the main brush.

Temu requires a minimum order of 25 euros, so I had to add some other things which I did not need, per se. I ordered a cover for my sofa, and a tissue paper stand.

The order from Temu arrived on the 1st. I went and picked it up today.

After completing my late night activity today, I thought, let me surprise Prerna. Let me get everything set up before she wakes up tomorrow. It would be a fun thing. Mostly, I just wanted to fix the robovac.

I fixed that first. Then I assembled the tissue paper stand. Then, finally I added the cover to the sofa cushions.

It was while adding cover to the sofas, I thought, this is a form of soft power. These dirt cheap products are introducing us to the Chinese way of thinking and living. Asian maybe.

See, this is what we used to do back home. Cover sofas with plastic. Cover TV with plastic covers. Cover TV remotes in plastic. There is so much dust. And of course we wanted to protect things from breaking.

But here in the west, this is not the norm. This is not how things are done. And yet, now, through Temu, a little bit of the Asian culture and values are seeping into the Western world. Just as the American culture has permeated through the rest of the world through the American cinema, music and TV shows.

Balancing New Tech and Its Maintainance

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Each new piece of technology makes our lives easier but it also comes with things we need to take care of, for it to work optimally. Hence, when it comes to thinking about adopting new technology we need to think about the costs associated with adding this technology, with the things we will have to do to maintain and support it, and on a whole does it make our lives better or not.

When we were expecting, I had seen Matt D’Avella’s video on trying minimalism with kids. In it Matt had mentioned a few things like a fancy bassinet for the baby, or a cover thing for the baby’s high chair. I was thinking about it today. Sure putting a cover thing under the high chair saves the floor, and you can reuse some food, but then you need to manage the cover. You need to ensure it is clean and hygienic. You need to tuck it away done. Is it worth it? For us, no. For others, maybe.

I had a similar feeling about the robovac cleaning our floors. Our floors have never been cleaner. But, before we go to sleep, we have to ensure everything is wrapped and put in boxes. We have to ensure there are no wires on the floor, or socks, or whatever. We have to also clean its various sensors from time to time, clean the bin, fill the water tank, etc. Overall, the Roborock works for us though. It keeps the floors clean. It does not not clean the floor because it does not feel like it.

We need to think about the balance between the value we get out a new technology and the cost of maintaining that technology or having it work optimally.

All New Technology Needs to Be Tested out in the World

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

This is because of secondary effects. The effect of a technology in the world only comes into view after it has been deployed in the world for some time.

An example of this is drive-thru restaurants after the introduction of vehicles, or the accidents that are a product of there being millions of cars out in the world.

You can test something, have a theory, do tests in lab, etc. but it’s very difficult to come up with second degree effects of a technology.

It Does Not Matter How Many Times I Do Surya Namaskar

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Today was the first session for Jha sir’s Vihangam Vidya Yoga. It goes on for the next 10 days. Prerna had registered for it. We were listening to the first session together.

Sometime in the middle of the session, Jha sir talked about people counting the number of surya namaskars they do. He said once you are surya, it does not matter how many surya namaskars you do.

When I started with yoga, I don’t know how, but I started counting in my head when doing certain asanas. I would count and try to best the count the next time around. So during pranayama, I would count while I breathed out. It was I guess a good way of tracking progress. I counted the number of times I would do surya namaskar. I would count and count and count and count.

I got better eventually. Even when I wasn’t where I am now, with yoga I would find my mind drifting deeper some times.

Yoga is practice. This practice hopefully lets one get closer to one self, one’s true self.

With time, the counting began ingrained into how I did things. Now I try not to. And still I drift back into the counting.

The counting does not matter. How many times or for how long I can exhale, does not matter. Once I’m surya, it does not matter how many times I do surya namaskar. Till then, we practice.

My Own Writing Meetup

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #53, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I am hosting my first ever (and Espoo's first ever) Shut-Up & Write session on 6th April.

I had joined a previous session at Oodi Library back in Feb. While writing during the session, I had wondered out loud what it would take to host my own session in Espoo. During the session itself, I had finished applying to be a host.

Over the next month or so, with the wonderful Cecilia and team, from organiser support, I managed to get access to the Meetup group for ShutUp & Write.

Yesterday I looked at the availability of the meeting rooms in Iso Omena library. I found space in one meeting room for the coming Sunday.

I would ideally like to do this every Saturday going forward, and at a fixed time. But that is dependent on availability of the room.

I am excited for this.

Writing can be lonely at times. Sitting and talking to other fellow writers can be encouraging and fun.

/five things to share

1. Seth Godin - The second time through

The first time, we’re not only wayfaring, we’re asking, arguing, compromising, re-working, re-starting and exploring.
The second time, we have a map and we’re ready to go.

2. Apple Seeds iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 Release Candidate With Priority Notifications, Ambient Music and More

With this release, Apple Intelligence will finally be available in localised Indian English. The great Siri redesign is not happening this year. The rest of the features are nothing special. I did not change my locale or language to US-ENG in order to test these features out. They never felt that important or great to be honest. So, now is my chance to see what the hoopla is all about.

Also, Apple has announced WWDC 2025 Dates: June 9–13.

3. The Illusion of a Smart Home

How did we get here? Pete Warden, a former Google researcher who worked on IoT and related technologies, has an answer that makes sense. “I think the original sin in this space is the desire to capture users in a walled garden, for purely business reasons,” Warden says. “Apple, Google, and Amazon all do this with their ecosystems, but independent manufacturers also want a direct relationship with their customers, so they build their own apps that usually require setting up yet another account.”

I have Deltaco smart bulbs in my home. They do not work with Apple Home. The one thing I want it to do is based on the time of day (whether the sun is out or not) change the colour temperature of the bulbs. I can not do it.

4. New plastic dissolves in the ocean overnight, leaving no microplastics

Go Japan!

5. Your TV is watching you

The shift toward ad-supported everything has been happening across the TV landscape. People buy new TVs less frequently these days, so TV makers want to make money off the TVs they’ve already sold. Samsung has Samsung Ads, LG has LG Ad Solutions, Vizio has Vizio Ads, and so on and so forth. Tech companies, notably Amazon and Google, have gotten into the mix too, not only making software and hardware for TVs but also leveraging the massive amount of data they have on their users to sell ads on their TV platforms. These companies also sell data to advertisers and data brokers, all in the interest of knowing as much about you as possible in the interest of targeting you more effectively. It could even be used to train AI.

This is the second time I am reading this article. Not this same exact article, but something along the lines of - you should not connect your TV to the internet.

Back then, I had wondered what could one do. All modern TVs are connected TVs. It is not possible to buy a TV without the smarts in it.

Of course, once you do, they will spy on you, see what you see, all to sell you relevant ads.

Fuck relevant ads.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

How Would the Web Work in an Increasingly AI-Fied World

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Om - Has search become just a feature:

The atomization of information is unfolding rapidly. Artificial intelligence doesn’t just search; it synthesizes, contextualizes, and presents information in a user’s preferred format. AI agents fetch needed information, distill it and deliver it without requiring users to visit individual webpages. The traditional web — with its banners, pop-ups, and paywalls — increasingly feels like a relic from a less sophisticated era.

But perhaps most telling is how natural this all feels. The chat just works better than the old way of searching. It’s more human, more intuitive, and more useful. We’re not just witnessing a new feature being added to our digital toolset – we’re watching the emergence of a new way of interacting with information itself.

I have thoughts on AI, about how things are going and how things might turn out in the future.

I am a writer on the internet. My thoughts are bound to be tainted by what I view as an attack on the open web, on its very existence. Google Search was filled with spam and SEO bait since long. There exist products like Kagi however. In addition, most of these LLMs now have an ability to search the web.

I do agree with Om's characterisation of how natural this feels. Asking the chat-bot in natural language. And it providing an answer in the same natural language. One of my favourite things about Copilot is the links it provides at the end of anything I ask for. My default thinking is that I do not trust what comes out of an LLM, but compared to Google, it has a way of surfacing information which Google just does not show many times. So, after I get an answer, I click on the links and see where the information is sourced from.

I use RSS to subscribe, follow and read many of the things I am interested in. It is not common though. The rest of the world does not read that way. The rest of the world does not read that much. Period.

I am not here to make money from this site. I would some times ask you to buy a book. But that's it.

There are others who do want to make money from their website. I don't know what their future would look like in this LLM eats everything world. Would these companies pay for the newspapers, magazines and blogs?

This might be the default way we search for things going forward. It would make sense to figure out how would the people writing on the web, whose work is being plundered right now, would be paid.

Boiling Frogs and Global Warming

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Have you read the story of the boiling frog?

If a frog is put it into boiling water, it would simply jump out. But if you put it in normal water and then boil it slowly, the frog would not realise the danger and will be cooked.

Prerna called her mother today and asked her if it was hot back home. I thought of the boiling frog then. The weather has changed so much since we were kids. We would not need ACs during our childhood. We could do stuff during the summer holidays and not just sit in ACs. March would not be this hot!

The thing with global warming is that the temperatures creep up slowly. Every year being warmer than the last. But not warm enough, sharp enough. It is a gradual change.

Each year brings with it the same disasters, all slightly more devastating. We have all just gotten used to it.

We are all frogs sitting the slowly warming bowl of water.

Duplicating Everything

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I read this in Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants:

The only worldwide relinquishment that seems to be working is the reduction of the nuclear weapon stockpile, which peaked at 65,000 units in 1986 and is now at 20,000. At the same time, the number of countries capable of making a nuclear weapon is increasing.

And I thought, how much of humanity is spent just duplicating things. How to make a nuclear bomb is not something that is readily available. The same work that the US did, the Russians did as well, as did the Indians.

So much of our time and effort is spent fighting, making the same things again. In an alternate earth, we could have had three different countries work on different things entirely, which could have let us make things more quickly. Or perform more complex discoveries.

Alas, we are stuck in this cycle of never ending duplications. See Deepsek, OpenAI, Google, Amazon all building the same LLMs hoping to find their moat. There is no moat!

My Ego Would Not Let Me Say Sorry

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I messed up today.
I shouted at you.
I shouldn't have.
It's as simple as that.

It is. Now.

It wasn't in the morning,
or the rest of the day.

I was angry.
When I said what I said.
Or how I said what I said.
My ego stood in the back,
massaging itself.
Telling me, no I was not at fault.
Telling me, do not say sorry.
Telling me, couples fight, it’s ok.
Telling me, this is passion!
Telling me, this that and the other thing.

My ego would not let me say sorry.
I lost my cool.
I screamed at you.
I should not have.
I’m sorry.

Be a Hybrid

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There are three things you can be in your career.

Specialist
Generalist
Hybrid

There are areas in which specialists are needed, doctors, for example. But in knowledge work, it might not be a good idea.

Being a generalist is another idea. But that means you never dig deep into anything.

The hybrid path means having two or more things you have expertise in. If these things are adjacent you get a T-shape. If not, then you get a U-shape.

I have come across these views at many times in my career. TCS has an internal T-factor score for example, for all associates.

I used to consider myself a generalist before reading Kepano's - Don't specialize, hybridize. I recognise myself to be a T-shaped hybrid. I do get tempted from time to time, to further dabble in the arts, learn to draw, paint, make art for my books and poems.

Branching out into a U-shape sounds fun. I am not sure if I will be able to achieve it though.

A Weird Day

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Today, as I sit down, mere minutes away from going to bed, was a weird day.

Sundays are when we rest. We might do chores. I might go to the library and write or read. We always have Savya. But we don't do anything usually. We don't invite people over (that's for Saturdays). We don't go anywhere (again, Saturdays). All we want to do is sleep a little longer in bed, and then laze around the rest of the day.

Last Sunday, I went to a party. A senior is going back to India, someone I respect, and have learned a few things from, over the years.

Prerna had her own girl's night out situation. 3 Girls + 3 Babies.

Anyway. I had drinks (3). I ate, laughed, danced a little and came back around 11. Which is late for us. We try to sleep early. We can't seem to. But that's a post for another time.

The day started off. I was tired. My body felt wrong in the morning. I did a little bit of yoga, just some basic stretching and pranayama.

I had nothing I wanted to write about while travelling to work.

At work, I felt a little off. I did do what I was supposed to. I had an activity in the evening, I did that too. But something kept feeling off.

I did not having anything I wanted to write about while travelling from work, either. I had a little inkling, but I thought I would think about it on my walk. Spoiler alert: I did not.

Eventually, finally, I went for my walk, and things felt a little normal. I listened to some ATP, felt that chilly air get into my lungs, and it felt a little normal.

I am a creature of habit. I like knowing how things would go, in advance. And, I should not have anything planned on Sundays.

The Things We Make

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #52, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/the things we make

Back in my college days I had gone on a road trip with my friends to Punjab and Kasauli. Among other things, we had visited Chandigarh and the famous Rock Garden created by Nek Chand.

The Rock Garden is spread over 40 acres and built from waste (discarded items/industrial waste, etc.)

You do not feel that when you visit the garden of course. There are a variety of sculptures, sceneries created throughout the garden.

Things that are deemed surplus, waste, can be used, given a new life in different circumstances. Pieces of broken tiles, old furniture, can be repurposed.

Bimba has many such things, hand-crafted, repurposed, given a new life.

I was at the library, in the children's section with Savya, on Friday, when I happened to look up and saw these beautiful paper birds made with yellowing paper floating just under the AC ducts.

I don't know who made it. Or thought of making it. But it looked so beautiful. The air from the duct made it so that the birds were really flying!

There are so many beautiful things in and around us, as we move through the world. We just need to be cognisant of it.

Finland ranks as world's happiest country for eighth year in a row

The rankings are based on a single question:

"Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?"

It is as subjective a question as any. It depends on the attitude of the people as much as the place. Finns rank as the happiest people in the world, would be a good headline as well for this.

/five things to share

1. Apple's Long-Rumored Foldable iPhone is Starting to Sound Serious

It will be costly whenever it comes out. But it would be interesting to see if Apple cures the visible bend in the screen. If yes, what would stop the other manufacturers from copying the same?

2. HealthKit as a Model for an Open Semantic Index From Apple

John wrote about Apple being the platform for AI, making sure that Apple devices are the best for running AI models and tools, in addition to running their own models.

Nobody is suggesting Apple should give up on AI. Quite the opposite. They really need to go from being a joke to being good at it, fast. But there’s no reason at all they should build out a strategy that relies on Apple doing all of it themselves, and Apple users relying solely on Apple’s own AI. Do it like Health — a model that has proven to be:

profitable (for Apple itself, selling devices like Watches);popular (with users, who actually use it, understand it, and like it);private;and open to third-party developers, device makers, and medical service providers.

3. Threads finally lets you set the following feed as default

My usage of Threads has really dropped these past few months. But interesting to see them release this feature finally. I still don't have it I guess. Or, I don't know how to enable it.

4. Apple puts the Vision Pro guy in charge of Siri

Mark Gurman with a bombshell coverage. This change is reported as something in the works for some time and not a product of the announcement about the Siri AI features delay.

5. AI Python for Beginners

Interesting course this. Vibe-coding is all the rage these days, but it pays to know how to code.

/new posts

Posts on the social web and better using my phone.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Re-Designing My Home Screen and the Way I Use My Phone

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I have a contentious relationship with my phone.

This must not be news to any one. Most of us have similarly contentious relationships with our phones. We love to hate them, or hate to love them. Phones are our most personal devices. They are on our person all the time and if sometime we don't have our phones nearby, we get the jitters. ([[202503072334 We are all addicted to our phones|We are all addicted to our phones]])

When I had first read Installer #73 and the screen share featured in it by Colin, I had thought cool, but not for me. During last week, somehow I revisited the idea. I began thinking about the contexts in which I used my phone.

I ended up with these 4 focus modes:

Comms : Social + Messaging + Personal Mail
Read + Write : Music + Overcast + Obsidian +Safari + Kindle
Work : Teams + Outlook + Enterprise Apps + LinkedIn
FIN : Smart Home apps + HSL + Nordea + DNA

Screenshots:

Today ViewComms Focus + AppsWrite Focus + AppsWork Focus + AppsFIN focus + Apps

deliberate use

Using my phone is a different experience now, when compared to the previous way I used to use it. Not massively so.

There is a degree of deliberation to it. One little thing, which tells me, hey you're looking at social apps. Or, you're reading. Or, whatever. When compared against the instinctual way in which we end up doom-scrolling.

more automation

I had been excited to use Focus Modes, when they came out as part of iOS 15. I remember checking the feature out, but it felt so replete with options that I left it there.

As part of these changes, I set up focus modes which would show a particular home screen when selected, which streamlines the view to just include the things I want to look at.

I also, set up a few automation flows on Shortcuts. I had used Shortcuts in the past for a few things, but not as much as I had hoped for.

A few things that I set up now:

Few launch this app shortcuts for the today view
Three shortcuts to launch my most commonly played music on Apple Music (Focus/Classical Chill/All Songs)
A shortcut to turn all focus off

In addition to the shortcuts I was using already:

Timber and Daily Log for adding short notes and time-stamped logs to daily notes in Obsidian

The Contexts in Which I Use My Phone

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I started thinking about the different contexts in which I use my phone, while rearranging the apps I use across different home screens. This style of home-screen/automation was highlighted in Installer #73. This is the thread. The idea is to have four screens quickly accessible by using 4 shortcuts added to the default dock.

I was previously using just one home screen for everything, which was simpler but that meant I could not have all the apps I needed on the home screen. So I had to make some choices. I had to remove some apps from the home screen, which I use fairly consistently. And the home screen was full of apps, which irritated me, slightly.

Back to the task at hand then. I need now to think and arrange the four screens I need. Or, what are the contexts in which I use my phone.

Context is different than place. I use music and notes during both my walk or while sitting in the library. Context is more important.

Work - Outlook + Teams + LinkedIN + Enterprise Apps (Timesheet, etc.)
Comms/social - Email Apps (Gmail/Mail) + Social Apps (Mastodon/Threads/Reddit/IG/YouTube)
Writing - Obsidian + Notes + Music
Reading - Kindle + NetNewsWire + Safari
Home - Smart-home apps (Deltaco/Roborock) + Utility apps (OmaFortum)
Financial - Bank apps (Nordea/Nordea ID) + Investment apps (HDFC)
Travel - Transport (HSL) + Maps + Stay (AirBnb+Booking)

There are other apps and contexts, but they are either not things that I do very often, or are very niche things.

Maybe We Should Not Have Connected

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Ghost announced beta start for the social web. I have thoughts about it, the product that it is, in its current state.

Kojima announced release date for DS2. I mentioned that in last week’s NordLetter.

During my walk yesterday I was thinking about the social web, the Mastodon model of things, about how by design Mastodon is supposed to have a federation of smaller instances. About how any one Mastodon instance can never match up against the size of a Twitter or X or Facebook or Instagram, whatever.

I was thinking about this, and remembered the tagline that was there in the DS2 release trailer.

We should not have connected

Death Stranding was about connecting different population centres in the United States after a disaster. DS2 will be about the effects of that connection.

I thought about the parallels between the two. Between, how we might think that maybe smaller, federated, instances is the solution instead of having one huge instance.

The big instances have these tendencies, these inevitabilities built into them. Your voices get multiplied, you get massive reach and you get influencers.

Fediverse could be the solution to this. You could have smaller instances, in your communities, universities, for example. You just talk to your colleagues, friends, whoever. You know mostly the people that are there. You can be civil about it. It can be a nice place. You can have your own rules.

Just because something is dominant, does not mean it is right. There are usually always better alternatives.

Maybe, we should never have connected.

Ghost Announces Beginning of the Public Beta for the Social Web

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Ghost announced public beta start for Fediverse support yesterday. I have been following their journey for a while now. I was eagerly awaiting this release. I had signed up to be included in their earlier beta, but I did not get in. Which might have been for the best.

Naturally, I enabled support for the feature right away. After, going through the documentation obviously. The documentation goes through what this feature is and isn't.

The first thing I felt after enabling it was that nothing changed. The ghost dashboard was still mostly the same. It had changed, obviously. But not massively so.

Second, after spending a day with it, about what the change means I had a few additional thoughts, namely:

The cost for this would be announced later. I have written about wanting to edit the theme and not being able to, even though I am a Ghost Pro customer earlier. This would be another cost on top of that.
I had thought there would be some way to combine my existing Mastodon ID with this. But that is not possible as of this beta. Which means building audience again, for an ID I don't own/control. This feels like it would tie me down to ghost from here on out. Which goes against how I feel about the Fediverse in general. I don't want to be beholden to any company.
I was hoping for Ghost to implement POSSE which this release does not seem to do. I basically wanted to differently categorise my posts on whether it was a short-form/mastodon toot thing or a blog. And then publish it accordingly. This does not happen in the current release.

At least two of the things I complain about are in the roadmap.

There are a handful of features you'd probably expect to find which don't yet work, because we haven't finished building them. In particular:There's no way yet to block, report or mute peopleYou can't yet add images or media to notes and replies

It's not yet possible to customize your social web handle

These are already on our roadmap.

Who Are You?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Have you ever thought about yourself, really thought about yourself?

I am not talking about the whys: Why am I so awesome? Why not? Why always me? No. I am talking about the whos. Who am I really beneath all the noise, the reflections, the lies? Who am I really?

Yesterday I did an interesting exercise. I was asked to draw something that represented me: a place, an object, anything. Afterwards, when my colleagues spoke, I wasn’t surprised. I was partly expecting what they said. But more on that later.

Like always, I spent the better part of the exercise looking at the empty sheet of paper. Who was I really? I hadn’t thought about it previously. I mean I had thought about certain aspects; the situations I found myself in repeatedly were one, but never as a whole had I tried to analyze myself. I was too busy looking at others, their stories. And so I kept looking at the blank page.

When nothing came to me, I thought about doing stick figures. I used to be good at drawing stuff, but four years of engineering had dulled the instincts. What I drew first was a tree, and a figure under the tree reading a book. After all, I liked reading, and writing, so it looked logical; but then, it wasn’t all I was. It just did not seem right, incomplete somehow. Then I drew another figure, a person with a balloon, a kid with a balloon rather. I am a kid at heart still, I reasoned. Then a car, a remote controlled one, with a kid controlling it; this I argued was because I always wanted one, but chose the Goofy teddy when I had the chance.

The picture, was almost done, the story almost ready, when I realized I wasn’t any of these people. Not really, not wholly. Instead, I was the guy drawing the picture. I was the guy looking for the extraordinary in the mundane, the guy connecting the dots.

And now, the picture.

The weird thing about us is, when we ’re thinking about ourselves, we mostly, or atleast at first, think about the positives only, or maybe when we are asked to talk about it. But when it comes to others, mostly its the negativity.

I wrote four names at the back of the picture; four people whose pictures, or what they said afterwards was interesting to me. Four people out of a total of thirty. As I already said, I was expecting what they said. I was expecting the use of words like hard-working, adjusting, optimistic, etcetera. So, I wasn’t surprised. They had either not understood what they were supposed to do, or were too afraid. Either way, they were no interesting. I guess in the end, that is all that matters: being interesting.

Why the process becomes interesting at this juncture is not just because of this exercise. It’s also because at the end of this exercise, I sat for a test. A test in which I scored exceptionally low. Again, I found myself staring at emptiness, struggling to answer who I was; even though I had just answered that question. I was an observer more than anything else. But this, this was different. It was a practical situation, and it demanded a practical answer.

Who was I?

Would I take the easier way out, if most of the population was doing it? Or, would I buckle up, and walk through a mile long river of shit?

Maybe I am overreacting; or, maybe this is about values, values so strong, so unshakable, that it’s almost a religion.

Oh, and Happy Diwali!

Who Are You?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There is an inevitability to life. We are born. We will die one day. There is a genetic component to many things we do, or are.

But who we are, is what we do.

Between the inevitabilities of who we are supposed to be, we make decisions, we act, we do things which define us.

It is these things that people talk about or miss after a person dies. It is these things that define who you are.

What Is Nordletter About?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The NordLetter is about the immigrant/expat experience, primarily. If I were to go even more specific, it is about an Indian immigrant’s experience living in Finland.

I published NL51 yesterday about celebrating Holi here. And I thought how long can I keep writing about the same thing, again and again.

The answer I got was this: experience is not absolute. Every year, I might be celebrating Holi, but the experience will differ each year. The thing I feel when celebrating it will differ. It might be something related to Holi, or something else that I feel.

Also, nothing is original. So I don’t need to feel this guilt that I am somehow not being original. Nothing is. It’s all a shared experience.

Holi Redux

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #51, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I never liked Holi as a child.

I was small. I knew many bigger brothers, friends, people in general who would take hard colour and put it on your face. Some had silver shit they would put on your face. Otherwise it was mostly pink, black, dark blue. Those sorts of colours.

That colour would not then go away even after washing it off your face many many times.

I did not like that. I did not like the rowdiness in general. I did not like the mess. Call me an old soul all you want!

So I would go take a bath early in the morning and then hide away. If somebody called me to play Holi, I would lock myself in my room, or the bathroom and refuse to come out. Usually people went away.

Some time later, after I had grown up a little, I got exposed to solid colours (gulal). Gulal is great. You play Holi with it. Everyone looks colourful and laughs around. And when you’re done, it’s a quick shower to get all the colour off.

No more rubbing your face to get the colour off, and still be left with some behind your ear.

The great thing about living outside India is that you can celebrate the same festival many times.

On Friday, we celebrated Holi as a family, the way we usually do, with good food and a little music and dance.

On Saturday, we had friends over to celebrate Holi with us, again, the way we usually do, with good food, music and games of Ludo and Monopoly Deal. It was great. Over time we have started to relax with regard to having people over. We had divided the meal prep amongst our three families.

On Sunday, we celebrated Holi with BJPF. This was the same venue where we had celebrated Makar Sankranti last year. We celebrated Holi the way we usually do, with great food and music. DJ Sahil was DJing. Sudhanshu was there to click some pictures. We ate, danced and finally played with colours.

With the age Savya is in right now, one half of us has to look after him, entertain him, while the other does the work, yes, even eating is a thing to do, that is, work.

The benefit of going to these things is there are other people available to hold Savya, so that we can do some things together.

/five things to share

1. Death Stranding 2 is coming on June 26th

I loved playing Death Stranding. I loved delivering stuff from one population centre to the next. I loved building the shared infrastructure. Whenever I connected a centre, I loved seeing all the things others had created pop-up. I loved how the terrain changed, paths formed whenever people across games took the same path through the terrain.

All of which is to say, I am looking forward to this game. I think it will be massive. I think it will be a more complete vision of what Kojima had in mind.

2. Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino

I have never read John being so critical of Apple before. It was not a big deal for me, that Apple was delaying the already announced and advertised Apple Intelligence features. I did not buy the iPhone for Apple Intelligence. It has still not arrived for my region. It should soon. But as I said, it does not matter much to me, in its present form.

An excellent read, nonetheless.

Also, I am really looking forward to this year’s WWDC. There are two reasons:

What will Apple say about Apple Intelligence
The iOS/Mac redesign.

3. Covid Vaccines Have Paved the Way for Cancer Vaccines

I have lost people to cancer. Cancer is shit. Go science!

mRNA cancer vaccines work by giving the body instructions to make a harmless piece of a cancer-related protein. This trains the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells carrying that protein. Think of it like a training manual for security guards. The vaccine gives the immune system a guide on what cancer looks like, so it knows exactly who to watch for and remove.

Going from mRNA Covid vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward: same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient.

In the current trials, we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine that’s bespoke to that patient’s cancer. That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else. It’s like science fiction.

4. Two AI things to rage on

OpenAI Calls on U.S. Government to Let It Freely Use Copyrighted Material for AI Training
Lot of hand-wringing about winning the AI race (war?). They will drain all the value of the web, for this useless thing. Go capitalism!

Under Trump, AI Scientists Are Told to Remove ‘Ideological Bias’ From Powerful Models

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued new instructions to scientists that partner with the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (AISI) that eliminate mention of “AI safety,” “responsible AI,” and “AI fairness” in the skills it expects of members and introduces a request to prioritize “reducing ideological bias, to enable human flourishing and economic competitiveness.”

5. Is our universe trapped inside a black hole? This James Webb Space Telescope discovery might blow your mind

A fun idea. Each black hole is a mini-universe. The world would then, basically be cyclical in nature, in a way.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. A usual list of themes: parenting, writing, tech and patience. Click the links below to read them.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

You Can’t Make Friendships Happen

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

They just happen. Like love. You can’t force someone to be your friend. You can’t will a friendship into existence.

Before Prerna had moved here, a friend who lived nearby had brought his wife over from India as well. They had just gotten married. When Prerna moved here, I told her, maybe become friends with her. You guys are in a similar boat. You’ve both just moved here. It would be good to have someone to talk to, to explore the city with.

It just never happened. It never clicked.

Instead, Prerna went out and made friends on her own. She made friends with a neighbour. She made friends in my office colleagues group. She made friends in BJPRF.

I guess if you have a want from a relationship, and it’s not natural, it just does not happen.

Good Food Takes Time to Prepare

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Quite naturally, and sometimes through repeated fights, we have divided the chores in our home. Things are fluid mostly, but in a twenty four hour period the things that need to get done, do get done.

When it comes to cooking the dishes we cook are similarly split. In fact, here’s the rule: the first time someone cooks something, if it’s good, that’s that person’s dish going forward. Till death do us apart.

The good thing about this arrangement is that we are both good cooks. So we get to eat good food, different tastes, all through the course of weeks and days.

There are some things though, rajma, for example, which whenever I cook, it is never as good as Prerna.

Some things take time.

With rajma, you have to cook the onion, the tomato on a low flame for a long time. The longer you do it, the better it turns out.

You can see the onion floating in my gravy. Not so in Prerna’s rajma. It is chef’s kiss.

All of this to say, good food takes time. If you rush it, it will never be as good as it can be.

Same as in life. Good things take time. Patience is a virtue.

Providing Customisation Options to Users Is a Great Thing

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The option to change things, order things, filter things per user choice is an important and valuable thing.

This same principle can be applied in multiple contexts. Some examples:

I was listening to John Gruber and Craig Hockenberry talk about this in the context of the app Tapestry. And how you can choose the items you want to follow, and filter out things that you don’t want to listen to. Algorithmic feeds don’t provide that option, usually.
In the Apple Photos app, you can rearrange and customise the things that matter to you. I have moved the Featured Photos , just below the photo library for example.

Story time

Today, while using Obsidian Mobile, I wanted to add a code block. I searched for it on the mobile tool bar, but I could not find it. I scrolled through to the end, trying to guess what the icons meant, and found a wrench symbol at the end. The wrench means settings.

I did not know this was possible. That I could customise this.

I write in Obsidian mobile almost everyday. I use the toolbar often, mostly to insert markdown links to things on the web. By default I needed to scroll a bit, before I found it. Still it was something I needed to do many times while writing and it was useful enough that I continued using it.

I arranged and simplified it today, to include just the things I wanted in here. It’s marvellous.

Now I don’t need to scroll to insert links. It’s just there!

Which iPad Do I Get in 2025?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

This is the year to get an iPad. Finally.

I published a book!

An iPad is my reward!

Apple announced updates to the base iPad and the iPad Air recently.) In addition there is the iPad Pro and Mini upgraded last year.

If I loved my money I would get the base iPad, and call it a day. And maybe I will. But then the Apple ramp would not be as good as it is. Would it?

my use case

Here’s what I want an iPad for:

Consumption : Books, Video
Drawing

That’s it. And that brings me to:

the state of the iPad lineup

I don’t know why the iPad Air exists. I mean I get why, it’s the medium in the good-better-best product strategy.

But take, the MacBook Air, which was also updated last week. It is a perfectly capable device for the masses. I use and love my MacBook Air.

The base iPad is the iPad for masses. It is the Air of the iPad lineup, or should be.

For what an iPad can do, the iPad Pro is too expensive. Or so I feel, for people in video production, maybe it’s great.

Or maybe, what I want to say is:

here’s what I want

A good screen (maybe too soon to hope for OLED)
Apple Pencil/ Pencil Pro (sticks to the side)
Face ID

I don’t care about the M3 chip in the Air. This is not a productivity device for me.

I just want to read and draw on it, and watch movies and photos.

That’s it. That’s the rant. I am undecided still.

The base iPad does not have the good pencil. But I will most probably be getting that. Apple Intelligence might not be good enough now, but still, I need it.

I think my wish for the iPad Air is to be the undisputed iPad for the masses, like the Air is.

Maybe, the base iPad is that already.

Don’t Call Me a Writer!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

We were sitting in the living room, Prerna on the sofa, me on a chair, facing no one in particular. Our two French friends had occupied the other two chairs in the room. The living room was done minimally, there were two mirrors on adjacent walls, bringing in plenty of light. There were a two IKEA Billys on the entrance to the bedroom, filled with books and some collectibles: a Lego Starwars cruiser of some sort, the most prominent of these.

We had finished eating our Pizzas a little while back. Prerna and I were a little tired, we had hosted few friends the night before. Our hosts were tired too, having been out partying till five in the morning.

We were talking about books, and our reading habits. About how I read every morning on my way to and from work. About the libraries in Finland. And whether they had a similar system in France. Answer - they do. Even the villages have libraries in them.

It was then that Prerna told them, Sajal just published a book. She went to the hall to get the book from her bag. And I felt shame. Which is such a weird thing to feel at such a moment.

Me? A writer? No! I’m not a writer. I’m a nobody.

I know, I know what it says when you land on this website. But I feel weird whenever it is pointed out that I am a writer. I don’t like when the spotlight gets thrown on me.

It is one of the things I’m working on.

On Savya’s birthday, a few of my friends asked me about the book, and to recite a poem from it. I felt the same feeling I got then. I wanted to run away. Basically. And I did, sort of. Somebody called me somewhere. But I went back, opened the book on my phone and recited a poem. I was not comfortable with it. But by the time I was done, I was happy.

I need to get out into the world more. It’s ok to feel weird, but I need to not let that guide my actions.

Sit on the Floor With Your Child and Play

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

It was match day yesterday (Sunday) United vs Arsenal. There was one other match going on in Dubai. But I’m not here to talk about matches. United could have won, but didn’t. I am more than happy with a point.

The thing that Savya loves to do, is take a remote, go to the TV and smack the living shit out of the pixels.

He was more or less at it today.

We were tired. We had tried everything: begged, scolded, reasoned, nothing worked. We had put the two coffee tables around the TV, hoping it would stop him somehow. It didn’t. He would move the table a little, slip inside, look back at us, smile and then start banging at the TV again.

I went and put his toys on the carpet, hoping he would stay, play with the toys. Of course it did not work.

Then, I went down on the floor, and just sat with him, winding his toy so that it made the chime sound. Savya laughed. I laughed. The match went on.

It felt as if a light bulb had went on somewhere in my head.

I don’t usually get to play with Savya. I mean I will carry him around, go with him for our walks, soothe him, feed him, bathe him, change him. But I would not, often, sit with him and play with him.

I know he loves it. Because I’ve done it a few times. But never in this context.

Savya did not go to the TV for a while. He sat and laughed and played with me.

So much our struggles are because there are other things we have to do: cook food, go work, clean dishes, etc. I wish we had time to just sit and play with him.

There is an AP for me in this, of course, I need to make time to play with him. Just him. Nothing else.

There is a realisation too: to sit with Savya on the ground. He wants that. He loves that. I love it too. And maybe as a bonus, the TV would get to live on too.

What Matters to You

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #50. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web. And I have been doing that for 50 consecutive weeks. That is a good streak.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

What matters to you?

I saw a reel on Instagram sometime this week, about the things they gained after travelling back to India. They had listed things like: healthcare, late night food, more variety in clothes, among others.

I thought of Prerna while I read that list. She often complains about missing these things.

That even if she wants to eat something, there’s nothing. (There is, not just what we want to eat.)

That the clothes are all bland. (Which is true.)

That we can not afford help here. (Which says something about the exploitation that is so damn prevalent in India.) This also comes to fore in the fact that there is no single day delivery here, in India, of course, we now have 5 min deliveries.

No places are all bad. No places are all good.

It is a privilege to be able to decide where you will live. Not many people get that option. In most cases, it’s decided by your birth, where you would live.

For those who can choose, it matters what matters to you. What do you choose to pick?

Blue skies, less pollution, bland food, slow deliveries, better work life balance.

Or,

Great food, great variety in everything: clothes, food, bad traffic, grey skies.

We make our choices, based on our priorities.

Watching this thing I worked so hard on, out in the world, in the hands of people all around the world, makes me so damn happy.

A year of mornings is now available via Pothi in India, distributed through both Amazon and Flipkart.

I am hardly making any money on the print versions, but as an object, as a thing you own, I am especially proud of it. Buy that.

/five things to share

1. Something in the air

It started with Tim cook posting on X about some upcoming announcements, which everyone knew what was coming at this point.
First, Apple updated the base iPad (which does not get Apple Intelligence), and the iPad Air (which does get Apple Intelligence.)
Then, Apple announced the updated Macbook Air, which now starts at 999USD (100USD lesser than previous years) with 16GB RAM/256GB SSD.
And finally, Apple announced new Mac Studio with M4 Max and M3 ultra chips. No one was expecting to be talking about an M3 chip now. But it is what it is.

Also, read this: Apple's new entry-level devices are the best possible trap

Is the solid performance of its cheapest products a problem for Apple? No, not really. And that’s a testament to how the company has built its business: as long as it can still get customers into the door, it’s happy to sell them any product.

2. The Volkswagen ID. EVERY1 is an affordable EV for the masses

It will cost 20000 euros in Europe when launched in 2027. Which will be great. The EV for the masses.
Let's hope it actually does come out.

3. Limiting screen time good for kids' mental health, long-term study finds

According to Eero Haapala , who is a docent in paediatric sport and exercise science at the University of Jyväskylä, several international experts have recommended that children and adolescents should limit their screen time to a maximum of two hours per day.
But Haapala said he thinks those guidelines are excessive, noting that two hours per day would amount to nearly an entire month of looking at screens every year.

4. LLMs Don’t Know What They Don’t Know—And That’s a Problem

All LLM-based tools that I have used seem to lack an understanding of their own limitations. If you ask them to undertake a task that is far beyond their capabilities, they will valiantly give it a try, and utterly fail!

5.The Dead Planet Theory

An added benefit to doing things, or being in the arena in general, is that by participating in the game you enable luck. If you never leave your apartment you can’t have a serendipitous run-in with your future spouse. By entering the ranks of the doers, things can happen to you as well. If you don’t apply to a job you don’t 100% meet the requirements for, they aren’t going to email you a “sorry we missed your application”, they’ll go on to someone else who isn’t a perfect match, but was willing to apply. Too many things in life reward action for you to live in a state of stupor.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

We Are All Addicted to Our Phones

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

It’s easier to see it in others, of course. One can have a holier than thou attitude.

You peasants! Spending time on socials. While, I, I am cognisant of how I spend my time and on what!

But here’s the thing, we are all addicted to our phones. The peasant and the nobleman alike.

Would Steve Jobs have envisioned this when he created the iPhone? Phones were not this addictive in the age of the blackberries and the Nokias. Is it the bigger, smoother screens or the faster Internet that enables all this entertainment? Or a potent cocktail of all these combined?

The smartest people of time are busy figuring out ways to make you spend more time inside an app. Of course we will lose. Of course.

None of this is news.

This addiction has a way of sneaking up on you though.

I am cognisant of how I use my phone.

Ideally, I use it like the tool that it is, using it to find directions when I need it, search for stuff, make notes, read, write. All the ‘productive’ stuff.

That’s not how I use my phone though. I do all the above, but I also pick it up in quiet moments. My brain has become so accustomed to the dopamine hit, to having the phone around, that just the thought of not going somewhere without my phone, fills me with dread, with withdrawal symptoms.

I want it on me. All. The. Time.

After reading Craig talk about his relationship with his phone, and how they try to manage that relationship. I too decided to use some of their techniques.

Again, none of this is new.

I decided to keep the phone out of my bedroom.
I decided to keep the phone out of my bathroom.

Reading on my phone in the morning, while I sit on the toilet is one of the greatest joys of life. It’s not good, of course.

I spend too much time on the toilet. I know. But it feels so damn good.

Anyway.

I had stuck to this decision for the past week. Today morning, I found myself reaching for the phone, justifying it to myself.

I smiled. And told myself, you’re an addict.

I left the phone on the table and freshened up.

There is no magic bullet. These things are so damn addictive. And we are mere humans.

We need to have systems in place, to let us be in control. And not the other way around.

Its important.

How I Use Obsidian

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The first time I read Kepano's - How I use Obsidian, I thought, great, but not for me.

The second time I read Kepano's - How I use Obsidian was yesterday. And yesterday, was also the day I overhauled my vault. Not completely, I need to add the category property to all the notes.

Plugins

Dataview for overview notes
Calendar for quickly looking at past notes
Lumberjack for taking quick notes and logs for daily notes

Folders and Organisation

I don't like folders, either. I don't like the idea of organising things before having written the thing I want to write. That said, I have 10 folders right now, a majority of which are admin related.

These are the folders I have:

Attachments
Clippings
Templates
Days (for daily notes)
YearEndReviews
BooksRead
TechNotes
Art
- Ideas
- Poems
BooksWritten
Inbox

The life cycle of a note

Every note starts in the Inbox. Once I'm done with it, I move it to the root folder.
If it is a poem, a story or a idea for a story it goes to the Art folder.

Templates

Nordletter (For the newsletter I send out weekly)
NewNote (For every note I type)
- Three properties: aliases, tags, category
DailyNote
Source (For books)

How I capture information

Everything I find interesting goes in the daily note. If something comes as something longer, I create a unique note.
Most of the writing I do, happens on phone.

Book Notes

I create a note for any book I start reading.
Any quotes I like, I directly type to this note
If I type a note I write, related to that book, I will add it as a link.

Publishing to the web

Ctrl+C
Ctrl+V
Replace all internal links with links from things I've put on the website earlier.

About the Pareto Principle

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Few people invest the time needed to be good at something. This dynamic is known by many names: the 80/20 rule, the Pareto principle.

The Pareto Principle, states

For many outcomes, the 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the effort.

Pareto wrote about it originally, in terms of wealth, showing that 80% of land was owned by 20% of the population in the kingdom of Italy.

There are many examples of this principle in management, healthcare, tech, like:

Often, we might just be doing things, without a baseline or desire to get better, without a training plan. You might be playing chess, without spending any time trying to learning some starter moves.

We can use this principle to our benefit to get ahead in life. Because, most people do not put in the effort.

Some practical to-dos that are interesting to me:

Put myself out in the world more. Talk to more people. Listen to more, diverse stories. A benefit of this would be by doing this, I would enable luck.
Put in the effort (read/train) to get better at the craft of writing.

Warming up to LLMs

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Outside of all the hype created by the techbros selling their AI products, there is a usefulness to the LLMs. I personally use Copilot whenever I need to. It’s free and uses ChatGPT in the backend. I don’t have high usage for the product, I am not using it as a coding companion or something. So it works.

I asked Copilot to help me redesign or rather create the page for a year of mornings, my first book here on Ghost.

I gave it a prompt, it generated some HTML and CSS that I added on the page and the footer (through code injection). It looked OK, not great.

Then I went on my walk. While walking I thought about what I want from this page. What should it look like.

After I came back, I gave Copilot another detailed prompt about what I want. It spat out some more HTML and CSS. I added that and was almost there, with regard to what I wanted from the page.

The final prompt I gave it was to make it pretty. It failed at that. But I think it was my failure at promoting it properly.

With these LLMs, the more data you give them, with detailed steps, examples, and output formats, etc, i.e. the more context, the better the results are.

In fact, I liked the results so much that I felt I could finally maybe start work on creating that static website I’ve dreamed of since long.

Seeing It for the First Time

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I follow Apple related news across multiple sources. There were things I used to do which I do not anymore, like watching Rene Ritchie on YouTube. There were others as well, but I just don’t watch YouTube as much anymore.

I used to watch the product announcements. I haven’t seen the announcements for the iPhone 16e and the MacBook + iPad event before that. I am getting tired of the format to be honest. It’s an ad. I don’t want to watch a 30 min ad.

A few things that have remained are ATP, MacRumours, and Daring Fireball.

In ATP #628, the hosts were talking about the rumoured CAD renderings for the iPhone 17s and I thought of two things:

The Android/Pixel people will say, see we had the better design since so many years. I liked the Pixel design, so I don’t mind where this seems to be going.
Every physical new thing about the iPhone gets leaked so far out ahead and dissected by the media that there does not seem to be any surprising thing left for the announcements.

I had this same feeling while watching the iPhone keynote last year. That there was nothing new being announced here. And I had that feeling then that maybe I should stop reading/listening to all these people and all these rumours.

How different would it feel to see this for the first time? How much nicer?

I guess I would never know.

How Does a City Form

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #49, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

how do cities form?

Things start as a settlement. It might be resources, that draw people to a location. It might be location, maybe there needs to be a place for people to rest on their way to someplace else.

Things start as a settlement. If the settlement supports further growth, it becomes a town.

Every city starts as a slum. As a settlement grows, the slums keep moving further out from the centre, in concentric circles. While the slums inside the city are transformed, consumed in the thing that is the city.

why do people in villages move to cities?

Why would you leave a brick house with two mango trees and a view of the hills to live in a slum in a city?

For a better life for the children.

Today, you live in a slum. But tomorrow, your children might buy a property in the city.

Life in the cities is generally better than the villages. Even if it is just 1% better, that difference compounds over time and different things. Healthcare is better, access to modern amenities (electricity, sewage, schooling).

why did I move to live here?

In search of a better life. For me, sure, but also for my child.

It's the same reason my father left his village in Agarpur, Bihar to move to Delhi. I guess he enjoyed life in Bihar. He moved in search of better opportunities. He moved for a better life for his children.

I might think, that after retirement it might be a good idea for him to move back to the village. Noida is polluted all the time. But he probably would not. The city is just better in most things.

I moved here for a better life.

Which is not to say life in India is bad. Even if things are 1% better, that compounds over time and over different things.

/five things to share

1. Amazon now openly discloses you're buying a license to view kindle books.

This change is only live in California thanks to a law that demands it. In this age of digital products, it does not come as a surprise. We really don't own anything.

2. The Stochastic Parrot Sings Back - Hugh Howey and The Prismatic Mind - Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey asks Deepsek to write some poetry. The results are moving. Really, no sarcasm here, read those two poems.

3. AI-designed chips are so weird that 'humans cannot really understand them' — but they perform better than anything we've created

In this case, however, researchers at Princeton Engineering and the Indian Institute of Technology posited that deep-learning-based AI models could use an inverse design method — one that specifies the desired output and leaves the algorithm to determine the inputs and parameters.

This is the dream, that these models can think up things and unlock solutions that we just can not think of.

4. How to Change Your Meta Settings | Make yourself less valuable to Meta. Brought to you by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

These are fairly simple to do.

5. Thank you Finland — and goodbye

YLE features a selection of interviews from people having to say goodbye to Finland.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Spring Already?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

We were down with flu these past few weeks, as was most of Helsinki/Espoo. Most people I work with had the symptoms over the past few weeks.

One side-effect of falling sick is that I can't do some yoga in the morning or the walk in the evening.

I love walking. It might not be the most efficient form of exercise. But I love the space it provides to think.

Today, as I walked the same path again, it felt different. As I crossed the yellow iron bridge, there was water in the spring below. There were a couple of ducks frolicking in the water.

As I walked further, toward the beach area, I could hear the birds somewhere up above, chirping. The grass had turned green! There was moss on some stones, on tree trunks. There were more people about as well.

And I thought, is this why they call it spring? Because nature springs back to life, from the death of winter?

Walk a Little

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The past couple of days are a blur at this point.

I had a firmware upgrade activity at 22:00 on Tuesday, followed by a 06:00 DNS change on Wednesday, followed by some urgent hardening changes in a new environment, followed by another firmware upgrade activity today at 22:00. It is going on as I type this.

I could not write anything yesterday. I was spent.

Today, I finished most of the hardening work I was doing. It required me to search multiple things, ask around, experiment with a few things.

Yesterday while working on an Azure POC, I had a similar feeling, while trying different options, finding something that worked.

I wrote a few TILs, a few tech notes. Maybe I should have posted that here?

Anyway.

The thing that I am trying to get at is this: all work is creative. Not just writing or singing or dancing or making movies. The work I do as an engineer is creative too.

Yesterday I did not feel like writing. Of course that thought crossed my mind, but since I’ve considered a weekly streak to be a better streak, I am not so hell bent on posting every day.

Yesterday I did not feel like writing. I felt spent. I was tired. Is there a fixed amount of creativity that we have as individuals?

Or was I just tired? I don’t know.

Anyway.

I am doing it today. One step in front of the other. Walk. Breathe. Walk.

Things Change When You Become a Parent

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I was watching this video last night.

I don’t know what I expected when I started that video. Maybe I wanted to know how could I be more productive as a new dad myself. (Fuck this need to be productive. Just live man!)

I was looking for some practical things basically. Something that I could add to my life, to squeeze some time out, to write, read, whatever.

I was surprised as I went through the video. It was nothing like that. It was instead an acknowledgment that things change. It’s the same thing I keep feeling every once in a while. Reminiscing how things used to be. Mourning the things that never were.

It’s all useless.

That’s what I tell myself whenever I catch myself doing that.

I used to do yoga with a guru, before Savya was born. That just is not possible anymore. I cannot give one hour of my life and say no matter what I will be there. I can’t. It’s just not possible. There are more important things.

So yes, things change. Life goes on. We find time to do some things we want to do. Some. Not all.

LLMs Are Being Deployed in Factories

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I was a little surprised to read this today.

AI Assistants Join the Factory Floor

It’s about a Microsoft’s Factory Operations agent being used in an actual factory to track down causes of defects. The agent basically lives on top of the Microsoft Fabric data layer to answer user queries.

LLMs are good at this. And of course there is scope for hallucinations in this.

Here’s the thing there’s a different between using LLMs to write code or essays and using it to pseudo control stuff in an actual factory. Bad code seems abstracted from the real life.

People of course get used to the LLMs very quickly, which leads to lesser skilled software developers. In this scenario though, it’s possible that after trusting the LLM for certain things, you don’t recheck it as often, and that is a recipe for disaster further along the way.

None of these are new findings or worries about LLMs. The guess work is a feature of the product. I guess I was not expecting to see it out in the real world so soon.

But it’s here. And it’s only going to spread further.

These systems especially in factories, etc. used to be precise in the past. I am not sure how would we change to accommodate the inherent fuzziness of the LLMs.

Writing Meet-Ups

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #48, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

This is meta.

I am writing about something that I am doing right now.

I am sitting in Meeting Room 7 on the 2nd Floor at Oodi Library. This is the 2nd edition of Shut up and Write, Helsinki chapter. The organiser of the event has not joined us. Which does not matter as much as it would in a different event. Because all you do here is sit and write. There are eight other people in this room, all typing or writing away on their laptops, tablets, notebooks.

The meeting room has tables arranged in a U, with a TV on the other end. I am sitting at one of the ends of the U, furthest away from the door. I am sitting here, because there's a power slot here, and my Mac needs the charge.

I have already finished writing about garbage. I had always planned on writing this edition of NordLetter here, in this meeting room, as part of this event. I wanted to sit here, in one of these chairs and type:

'This is meta.'

If the organiser of this meetup were here, I would have asked him what it takes to organise this event? I want to do this for Espoo. I could book a meeting room at Iso Omena library every Saturday.

Writing is a lonely thing.

For hours, you sit and type. You can not let someone else in, and see the story, the characters. I feel, if I tell someone the story I lose interest in telling it anymore.

Anyway.

If the organiser were here, I would have asked him that.

I could just apply to be an organizer. I don't mind if I am the only one sitting in the meeting room writing.

There was a strike in the retail sector this week. I was not in favour of this in my earlier life, but now I'm all for it. Collective action is the only driving force of better conditions for workers.

/five things to share

1. Two differing views on the current moment in AI

First, by Edward Zitron - The Generative AI Con

Generative AI is a financial, ecological and social time bomb, and I believe that it's fundamentally damaging the relationship between the tech industry and society, while also shining a glaring, blinding light on the disconnection between the powerful and regular people. The fact that Sam Altman can ship such mediocre software and get more coverage and attention than every meaningful scientific breakthrough of the last five years combined is a sign that our society is sick, our media is broken, and that the tech industry thinks we're all fucking morons.

Then, by Kevin Kelly - the Handoff to Bots

The purpose of handing the economy off to the synths is so that we can do the kinds of tasks that every human would wake up in the morning eager to do. There should not be any human doing a task they find a waste of their talent. If it is a job where productivity matters, a human should not be doing it. Productivity is for robots. Humans should be doing the jobs where inefficiency reigns – art, exploration, invention, innovation, small talk, adventure, companionship. All the productive chores should be handled by the billions of AIs we make.

2. A system to organise your life

I have struggled with this. My iCloud library is a mess. I often struggle to find things.

This system makes so much sense.

I partly do this for my Obsidian Vault. With folder names starting with numbers. But I could implement this for everything.

Johnny.Decimal is designed to help you find things quickly, with more confidence, and less stress.
You assign a unique ID to everything in your life.

3. Espoo's targeted employment services help highly skilled foreigners find work

Espoo’s general employment services typically meet job seekers only once every three months, whereas these special units take a more proactive approach by meeting clients almost daily and organising company visits.

4. Pluralistic: America and “national capitalism” (18 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Investing makes more money than working. Even if you create Microsoft.

That's what r > g means: that even the most successful worker in human history can't make as much as a person who merely has a lot of money, and the more money you have, the more money you make.

5. Pluralistic is five

Lot of interesting stuff in this edition of pluralistic. Whenever I come across something interesting, be it a movie, or a book, I try to find more about them. I google them. I read their Wikipedia, etc. After I read Cory's 'Big Brother', I searched and found Pluralistic. I immediately added him to my RSS feed reader - NNW.

This has tips about preserving your attention by shutting off all notifications, which I do already.

Also, this:

Instead, Hayes talked about how empty it feels to read an algorithmic feed, how our attention gets caught up by it, sometimes for longer than we planned, and then afterward, we feel like our attention and time were poorly spent. He talked about how reflective experiences – like reading a book with his kid before school – are shattered by pocket-buzzes as news articles came in. And he talked about how satisfying it was to pay protracted attention to something important, and how hard that was.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

About Garbage

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I read Craig write about Garbage in the latest edition of Ridgeline.

This obsession with the immediate “unburdening” of a thing you created is common in non-Japanese contexts, but I posit: The Japanese way is the correct way. Be an adult. Own your garbage. Garbage responsibility is something we’ve long since abdicated not only to faceless cans on street corners (or just all over the street, as seems to be the case in Manhattan or Paris), but also faceless developing countries around the world. Our oceans teem with the waste from generations of averted eyes. And I believe the two — local pathologies and attendant global pathologies — are not not connected.

I found myself nodding along as I read it. Nodding along, and thinking, I wish we had this back home.

Here in Finland, in the cities you have many garbage cans around, both on the roads, near bus stops and otherwise, on trails. Sure, the density of the garbage cans is not as much as in the cities, but there are designated spots along the trail where you can dispose it off.

In India, there are two problems:

You do not have garbage cans everywhere.
If you had garbage cans, they might be over-flowing anyway.

These assume, that you don't want to throw garbage on the street, or anywhere. I have seen people laughing, and throwing plastic packs from the toy train in Shilma, as if it was nothing. I have seen mounds of garbage on the Himalayas, as if God will come down and clean it up.

We do not have pride, in ourselves, as Indians. We do not have pride in our country. We will keep our homes clean, but as soon as we step out of our homes, the entire state, country becomes our garbage can.

Anyway.

I have done this, back home and here, in Finland, where I would carry plastic wrappers or any other garbage with me, if I am not able to find a place to dispose it away. I will put it in the little pockets in my bag, for carrying bottles. I will put it away at home, or elsewhere.

The other things is about abdication, about turning our eyes away. Its as if you can't see the garbage, it does not exist! It does.

We sort our garbage. We put garbage in different cans. Plastic goes to a different place, diapers go to a different can, cardboards to a different place, organic waste goes someplace else. I don't know what happens to it after it is collected.

It should be easier to have this information. Or, we should be taught what happens to our garbage.

Garbage is not bad. We create it. We own it. What happens to it, is or rather, should be, our responsibility.

Reading Is Better Than Watching Movies

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I have been wanting to read Cixin Liu for a long time. I knew of the three body problem, but some other book kept interesting me more.

Then came Netflix’s announcement that they were working on an adaptation. I was intrigued once more. But once more I could not get to it.

This book is extremely popular at the library. There is a long waitlist. I had to cancel the reservation a couple of times.

Then I watched ‘three body problem’ on Netflix last year. I enjoyed it and was intrigued once more to read it. This time I kept the reservation open for long. Finally I got the book this month and started reading it.

I am enjoying it very much.

Also, I’m realising I prefer the written medium more than the movies.

The first time I had this feeling was when I was reading Harry Potter. I had watched the movies first. And I felt no need to read the books, because it’s all stories after all. I felt like I knew the story beforehand. There was no point.

But when I read it, I realised there are things that the movies never got around to. As an example I never understood the whole thing about the deathly hallows in the movie. But it was very clear when I read the books.

Books have time. That’s the difference. Books have time to delve into things. To give things time. Movies have a limited runtime, a canvas to work on. Books truly are limitless.

And that makes a difference.

About Reflections on Writing

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I love reading people talk about the craft of writing. I love reading people who have been doing this since long. I came across Dave, courtesy of one such post.

It speaks to my beliefs on the value of consistent effort and how hard work trumps talent every time.

I read today, Matt Webb’s Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected

Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not. And they roach-motel you by owning your audience, making you feel that it’s a good trade because you get “discovery.” (Though I know that chasing popularity is a fool’s dream.)
Writing a blog on your own site is a way to escape all of that. Plus your words build up over time. That’s unique. Nobody else values your words like you do.
Blogs are a backwater (the web itself is a backwater) but keeping one is a statement of how being online can work. Blogging as a kind of Amish performance of a better life.

Twenty five years! I have been doing this for a year more or less. Blogging for lesser than that time. I hope to continue doing this for that long.

One thing I took from it was this idea of weekly writing being a thing that is important. Streaks are important. When wanting something to become a habit, I believe it needs to be done regularly. But it is important to give yourself some leeway. So, having two day gap is OK. Not more than that.

When it comes to writing, I try to do it everyday. But sometimes I am not able to. And that should be OK too. The weekly streak makes more sense to me than a daily one. It allows me to fail, without feeling as if it’s the end of the world.

Savya-Sajal

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I’ve heard earlier about how people in a marriage change (transform, coalesce, merge) into something which is a mixer of something different, something more than what they are individually.

Most of these changes happen gradually. One thing here, the other there. I’ve started cleaning the kitchen counter tops at night, almost every night. I did not care about this earlier. One reason why I’m living in the flat I am living in, is because it has glass top induction stove. In my old apartment, we had left it dirty for so long that there was a nice layer of muck on top of the stove. We worried we would have to pay someone to clean it up. In the end what worked was scratching it away with a butter knife.

These changes happen gradually, and they happen both ways.

A thing that I did not realise happened or I did not read about it anyway, is what happens when you have a kid.

There is a very funny, very adorable thing that happens these days. When talking to me, Prerna calls me Savya first, and then corrects herself quickly, calling me Sajal after that. When talking to Savya, she sometimes calls him Sajal, then Savya.

I’ve become Savya-Sajal.

references:

How the Coffee Breaks Have Changed

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There are two factors here:

The people I go on coffee breaks with, mostly talk about things I’m not interested in. Things either related to work or investing.
As a result of this, or tangential to it, most of us are mostly on our phones now. We hardly look at each other.

/how it used to be

While I was working in Gurgaon, we did not have coffee breaks. We had a breakfast break, and a lunch break. We would go to the canteen on the second floor. We would order food, or open our lunch boxes and eat. After the lunch break, we would go down, walk in the shade of the building and talk (bitch and moan, basically.)

There was no free coffee while I worked in Gurgaon. So there was no coffee in our breaks. We did sometime go and have coffee at CCD, but that was a special occasion thing.

We did not use our phones during these breaks, even though these were the same group of people I mostly always went on these breaks with.

/how it goes now

Since moving to Helsinki, i go to a great office space with standing desks and ergonomic chairs. The coffee machines are OK. This is the routine now: twice a day we go for coffee breaks.

During the breaks, as I mentioned earlier we sit and look at our phones. Someone might say something, and then we might chime in, but almost always, we have the phones in our hands.

I don’t like it. I tried to not do it. But I returned to it eventually. I said I would talk to people more often. And I am doing that. But still there is this thing that I’m not good at. About allowing myself to be bored. This thing is so damn addictive.

Week of Love

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #47, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

A year of mornings is out today on Amazon all across the globe.

Go ahead and buy, leave a review, share it with the world.

When we were first deciding what date we would get married on, I had thought 14th is Valentine's, 15th we will have our anniversary. Every year we would have a carnival in February!

I love you, Prerna. This here, is year two.

This was year one. We had celebrated the anniversary with a dinner at Lie Mi, and a cake from Prisma. Last year, there were other things on our mind.

To celebrate our anniversary this year, we got a cake baked from a baker and went to Classic Pizza.

We spent most of the morning wondering whether we would leave Savya with friends and have an hour for ourselves. Just the two of us. We ended up not going that route.

It should not have been such a big deal. But we are at peace when either of us can see him and know he is safe.

Back to Classic Pizza.

I like the ambiance of the pizzeria. The lights are dim, the furniture is classy. It feels like you are on a date.

The staff was very helpful and showed us to our table. They later brought a high-table for Savya to sit in and some paper and crayons for him to draw on the papers. Savya does not care about drawing in this moment. He took the colours and threw them on the ground. He had fun.

As did we.

Classic Pizza have a thing going on for Valentine's week. You get a percentage off on a few pizzas. We ordered the vegan pizza and the pollo picanti without the chicken (they added basil, and tomatoes).

The vegan pizza had dried tomatoes on them which provided it a different flavour than the slightly subdued flavour of the picanti.

Even though Savya was with us, we found time to sit and talk and laugh. When we're at home, all we see is work. Going out on dates is important. Life is for living!

/five things to share

1. Three Observations by Sam Altman

The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.

2. Advertising is a cancer on society by Jacek Złydach

Advertising as currently practiced shares these characteristics. It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role.

Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet. It infected every communication medium in existence, both digital and analog. It shapes every product and service you touch, and it affects your interactions with everyone who isn't your close friend or family member. Through all that, it actively destroys trust in people and institutions alike, and corrupts the decision-making process in any market transaction. It became a legitimized form of industrial-scale psychological abuse, and there's no way you can resist its impact.

3. A little faster than you by Seth Godin

Our velocity through life is always relative. The pace of our career advancement, the expectations we have for change, the number of followers we have online–none of them are absolute.

4. The year I didn't survive

A beautiful story about love and loss and birth at the same time.

I used to feel like we were getting older together. Now I just feel like I'm getting old. I hadn't realized how different those two feelings are.

5. My Wife’s Enemies Are Now My Enemies, Too

That’s part of what love is. When the person you love decides that someone in the world brings him or her only frustration and pain, that person is your enemy, even if that person has always been cool to you in the past, or you’ve never actually met the person, or your partner has never actually met the person. The more you love someone, the more ardently you should feel not just obligated but driven to want to destroy the people your loved one wishes ill.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

A Year of Mornings

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Release Date: February 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-952-65637-0-1
Pages: 102

A year of mornings

About the book

A year of mornings is a collection of fifty love poems. It follows a young heart as it finds love, finds the strength to be in love and finally, finds the strength to let go.

The collection is divided into three parts: new beginnings, a year of mornings and from desperation to despair.

A note on the poems

I wrote most of these poems from 2017-2018, in the back seat of an old Tata Sumo while travelling to work. The world would be asleep then, the roads empty, the morning air cool and calm.

By the time I would board the cab, most pickups were already done and I would have to sit in the back. I did not like sitting there. Whenever the Sumo went over a pothole, I would be thrown up in the air.

I came to appreciate it as time went on. Most days I was the only person in the back. While my colleagues slept, or watched something on their phones, I would open my phone and write.

I wrote a poem a day for a full year. I would write the poem, send it across the ether and then sleep. Or look outside, at the dogs in the street, the birds on the trees.

This is a collection of fifty poems plucked from that set of poems. Once I had collected the fifty poems I wanted to publish, I put them in one of the three parts this collection is split into: the hopeful beginning, the joy of a mornings and the despair in things concluding.

These Are Just Poems

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

These are just poems,
And not serious ones at that.

There are not going to
start revolutions and win wars!

These are just poems!
You read them, nestled in
the cozy corner in your home,
your bed or your sofa.

You read them,
with a hot cup of tea in your hand,
while the world is white,
with fresh snow all around.

These are just poems!
You read them and smile,
or laugh, or cry. Whatever.
You do something.

And that is all!
These are just poems after all!

A year of mornings is out today on Amazon all across the globe.

Go ahead and buy, leave a review, share it with the world.

Books by Sajal

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Books by Sajal

2025 - A year of mornings - Poetry collection

A year of mornings is a collection of fifty love poems. It follows a young heart as it finds love, finds the strength to be in love and finally, finds the strength to let go.

About the Marshmallow Experiment

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

A good early measure of whether a child will be successful in life is if they are able to delay gratification. Most famously this was tested in the marshmallow experiment.

From the wiki:

The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a study on delayed gratification in 1970 led by psychologist Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University. In this study, a child was offered a choice between one small but immediate reward, or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time. During this time, the researcher left the child in a room with a single marshmallow for about 15 minutes and then returned. If they did not eat the marshmallow, the reward was either another marshmallow or pretzel stick, depending on the child's preference. In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores, educational attainment, body mass index (BMI), and other life measures.

I had read this some where, and for the longest time known about this part only. It seems like an obvious thing too. Of course if you’re able to say I would rather do the work first and then get the reward, you would get ahead in life. It shows maturity, patience and discipline in a person. Discipline above all else is required to succeed.

Yesterday, I read, Marshmallow Test and Parenting - @desunit (Sergey Bogdanov)

First of all, it’s not just about willpower. A follow-up study showed that kids from stable, reliable homes were much more likely to wait than kids from unpredictable ones. If you’re a kid and the adults in your life constantly break promises, why would you trust them this time? Why wait for the second marshmallow if history tells you it might not show up? Waiting isn’t a character trait; it’s a strategy. And strategies are shaped by experience.
So what’s the takeaway here? It’s simple, really: as parents, we set the tone. Our actions, promises, and reliability shape how our kids see the world. Are we building an environment where they feel safe enough to wait? Or are we teaching them that they need to grab what they can, when they can?

That made me question my beliefs regarding this behaviour in kids.

If a kid trusts the parent to follow through on their promises, they are more likely to wait eating the damn marshmallow. It matters that they are coming from a stable home, where they know there will be food on the table.

More than this being a quality of the kids, it becomes a property of the environment they are brought up in!

Most of what kids learn, is not things you say, things you want your kids to learn, it’s things you do, day in and out.

It’s important to be the person you want them to become. It’s important to give them the environment where they can delay gratification, and show discipline. It’s important to give them an environment to succeed.

Sync Less, Please?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I wish Net News Wire had a feature where in I could dictate the frequency of its updates.

This is how I read these days, compulsively, almost exclusively on NNW. I have a few feeds I follow. These feeds get updated through the day and night. Whenever I pick up NNW, it auto-updates.

Most of the feeds I follow do not get that many items in them on a daily basis. The HN feed gets many articles though out the day. And it lefts me feeling like I’m in this race to constantly get it to zero. I don’t everything, I mark things as read, which do not interest me.

That is not a nice feeling. I don’t want that feeling. But I have to get it to zero. I just have to.

The idea I had yesterday was this: how nice would it be, if NNW updated just once a day. At night, would be my preference. And then throughout the day, that count will not increase. It will just reduce. I will not be in this race to constantly checking the feeds, marking things as read.

I checked in the mobile app and this does not exist in the app.

I was a little sad about it.

I don’t know how others who use feed readers, read. Do they get the same feeling I get, to make sure everything is read, that there are no pending items?

Or do they ignore the notifications?

Or do they just read the today view and let everything else remain unread?

Or do they have like five feeds?

This is still better than read it later apps though.

Why Work?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I was thinking about work some days back. I have been thinking about this capitalist economy we all participate in, since longer, since I read the solarpunk novellas: A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy.

In certain moments I do question the value of the work I do. How necessary is it for my survival? How often is it something that I want to do? What is the cost of all this work? What is the cost of the this incessant growth at all costs would we seem to be living in.

Today, I read The Mythology of Work and it felt like it was written just for me. Or why did I not write this? Or, I wanted to write just this.

Most work that we do, has a separation from what we need to survive. We are not growing our food, most of us, at least. And that is the thing we need to live.

/myths about work

Work is necessary
Work is productive - sure, but what does it produce? What does it destroy?
Work creates wealth - this as well is not zero-sum. For someone to be wealthy, others have to be poor.
You need to work to make a living - how are you living exactly? Every step of the let’s get wealthier ladder, expects you to do more to stay on that ladder. Spend more. Work more.
Work is a path to fulfilment - on the contrary, everything teaches us to defer our happiness. That’s all we are taught - obey people higher up than us.
Work instills initiative - we lose initiative for everything other than toward work.
Work provides security - You can be fired at any time, if the leaders do not handle the money correctly.
Work teaches responsibility - Not really. Being an employee absolves you of responsibility. You are just following orders. It shouldn’t but it does.

Work is entwined with our shared existence. When they say AI will take our jobs, we are worried. What would we do? Let AI take the drudgery, if it can, let it clean the sewers, cut the grass, build our buildings.

We may be left with better, less tedious work.

/why I work

This is what I tell myself: I work so that I have the freedom to do what I want to do, some day. I am fairly certain that some day would come very late or not at all.

Work is a means to an end. I do enjoy my work, but I understand that is a luxury not many people have.

A friend used to say that he did not care for the work that he did. What mattered was the money that he got at the end of the month.

I did not agree with him. It matters if you’re happy with the work you do. You spend around 40-50 hours per week, working. If you did not enjoy yourself for this much of you waking hours, you could not be happy.

/further reading

From The Mythology of Work:

For hundreds of years, people have claimed that technological progress would soon liberate humanity from the need to work. Today we have capabilities our ancestors couldn’t have imagined, but those predictions still haven’t come true. In the US we actually work longer hours than we did a couple generations ago—the poor in order to survive, the rich in order to compete. Others desperately seek employment, hardly enjoying the comfortable leisure all this progress should provide. Despite the talk of recession and the need for austerity measures, corporations are reporting record earnings, the wealthiest are wealthier than ever, and tremendous quantities of goods are produced just to be thrown away. There’s plenty of wealth, but it’s not being used to liberate humanity.
How many people who never miss a day of work can’t show up on time for band practice? We can’t keep up with the reading for our book clubs even when we can finish papers for school on time; the things we really want to do with our lives end up at the bottom of the to-do list. The ability to follow through on commitments becomes something outside ourselves, associated with external rewards or punishments.

Some Times We Wait

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Sometimes, things take longer than the time allotted to them.

Sometimes a day is not enough to mould and shape a thought into something substantial.

We must not rush these things.

We must let them breathe, percolate, become what they were meant to be.

Sometimes we must take time.

Preparedness Day

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #46, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

We have been fighting flu this past week. Savya and Prerna caught it first, followed by me. It's usually the other way around. It does not feel good to be the carrier of infections in a household.

After Savya was born, for the longest time I was so worried what would we do if Savya fell ill. He could not tell us how he was feeling. He would just cry. What would we do then? What could we do?

Just imagining it, made me feel so damn helpless.

It happened though. Last year, for a month, we had flu on and off. Whenever it felt like we had beaten it, it came back. For a whole month!

I could not do yoga. I could not go for my walks. Work was affected too.

But we navigated it well. I have a similar fear for when Savya will start going to daycare. The vectors for infection would increase manifold.

I guess we will cross that bridge, when we get to that bridge.

7th Feb is National Preparedness Day in Finland. The idea is to be prepared in case of any emergencies with enough supplies to last 72h.

There's a test here.

We do not have enough things stockpiled at home. It might be a good idea to have some things at home.

Water is essential. Back home, whenever they would clean the water tank or something, they would cut off water supply for half a day or something.

We would have to store some water in buckets, etc. It was such a chore. Even when these things were informed to us in advance. Even when we had time to plan.

So many of these things are almost magical, if you think about it. I can just turn a tap and I get fresh running water (drinkable, here in Finland).

Here is the full list of recommended supplies:

Water containers (clean and with a lid)
Food that is easy to prepare and suitable for all family members
Food for pets
Battery-powered radio (and batteries)
Battery-powered torch (and batteries)
A back-up power supply for charging your phone, for example
A camping stove and matches
Cash
Essential medicines
Iodine tablets
Hygiene supplies
First aid supplies
Portable fire extinguisher/extinguishing blanket

/five things to share

1. Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem | Los Angeles Review of Books

An interview with Ted Chiang (Exhaltation, Story of your lives) about the search for a perfect language, the state of AI, and the future direction of technology. Interesting read.

I think we need to think about the possible bad outcomes and work to mitigate them; if we do that, we have a chance of preventing them from coming to pass. I don’t know if that’s optimism, unless everything except fatalism is optimism. I suppose it might be a moral duty to not be fatalistic. We have to believe that our actions have the potential to make a difference because if we don’t believe that, we won’t take any action at all.

2. Everyone knows your location

This should not be surprising to anyone at this point. If you have a phone on you, they know everything about you. It is scary. Unfortunately there's no easy way to opt out. It feels funny how these things have remained legal for so long. Why is it OK for companies to be able to spy on people without reproach.
Also, Meta/Facebook is a shitty company and they get your data whether you have their apps installed or not.

3. Researchers trained an OpenAI rival in half an hour for less than $50

This feels like this is the future? The next evolution of these things.

The researchers based s1 on Qwen2.5, an open-source model from Alibaba Cloud. They initially started with a pool of 59,000 questions to train the model on, but found that the larger data set didn’t offer “substantial gains” over a whittled-down set of just 1,000. The researchers say they trained the model on just 16 Nvidia H100 GPUs.

4. The timeline apps are here, and they’re awesome

I use NetNewsWire, primarily for following the blogs I follow on the web. I guess the Today view in NNW is like a timeline in itself?

These things are awesome. I am done seeing algorithmic timelines. Reverse-chronological timeline apps, social or otherwise are awesome.

Timeline apps are sort of a spiritual successor to RSS readers like Google Reader and Feedly. (Some of them, like Reeder and Unread, are just updated versions of longtime RSS readers.) Years ago, RSS readers were designed to help you keep all your blogs and websites in order, back when maintaining your blogroll was a lot of work. Now the job is vastly more difficult. You’re following creators on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, keeping up with your favorite memes on Tumblr and all the news on Bluesky, refreshing your favorite subreddits over and over all day, and checking your favorite news sites a few times, too. None of these platforms interoperate because their business incentives are to make your life miserable , but when you boil all those things down, they’re just feeds of content.

5. Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without Noticing, Back into Superstition & Darkness” (1995)

It is a scary proposition indeed.

We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

The Three Types of Code I Write

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

All code is not created equal.

Slapdash

Some times all I want to do is get some information. I am told we need this information, now.

I don't worry then about error handling, or creating objects to store the output, or exporting it properly.

I write a line or two, put it inside a for loop, and output to standard out. I copy paste things into excel and format/edit it manually.

Scrappy

A step-up from slapdash. This code will be used by me primarily. These are things that make changes or gather information.

There would be proper exporting and logs. But I don't think too much about error-handling or edge cases.

Production-grade

The highest degree of work that I do. I spend a lot of time on error-handling and user input and how to idiot-proof these things.

These things are out in the wild, used by my colleagues. These things delete stuff. So, the code needs to do precisely what it says it would do.

You can not trust the person who runs the code to read the comments. They don't. Things can break.

Logging is very important. It allows you to revert changes in case something breaks.

Some Times

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Sometimes all you want to do, when you’re spent after a long damn dam, is to lie down in bed and scroll through reels.

You don’t have to be productive all the time.

Some times it’s OK.

The Last Work Left in This World

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I was listening to a podcast and walking. The podcasters were talking about the future of work, what AI is good at and not. Whether there will be software developers in the world. And I had this thought: what if the only work that remained in the world was feeding training data to the AI.

See, all these companies have spent a lot on AI. Google expects to spend 75 billion on AI, Microsoft will spend 80 billion on AI, Open AI is planning to spend 500 billion - 125 billion per year and others will be spending billions as well. That seems like a lot of money. They would want to get that back money. They are all investing this money.

Now, regarding work, work is what the corporations pay us to do. Given the amount of money they have spent, and how big big tech is, they will not just write this off. All of this spend, needs to account for something.

Now, walk with me.

Suppose, whatever these corporations want, comes true (I don't think it will). AI is everywhere. AI can do everything. AI will replace all workers.

The only thing left for humans to do in such a world, would be to train the models. Because these models would forever need the data. These models are us, they are not creating anything new. All that they know, is all that we know. S0 they would always need more data.

Or, like in case of Amazon's magical checkout service, humans are the backend for AI. Whatever the corporations say AI does, well in the backend, there is a human sitting somewhere, manually labelling the data.

That would be fun.

Should You Pay for Search?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There are two ideas or thoughts here.

1. Some things are common good/public utilities.

They should be free or subsidised. Governments may own and run these services. Some things may not start this way, but may become so in due time. Things like internet, public transport, networks.

2. If quality information requires you to pay that means there’s no equality in the information that people are getting.

There will be no shared reality. We are already living in bubbles, which is great for the corporations. Not so much for us.
Quality journalism, search is going behind subscriptions and paywalls. I know it’s either that or ads. But we have to find a solution.
Not every one can afford to pay 5 dollars a month to access NYT, Wired or TheVerge. Or run Kagi for an ad-free and quality experience.

the future

There has to be enough space in the market for a search.gov, a Google and a Kagi. How do we ensure money to the journalists and artists outside of billionaire owners? I don’t know.

Once Upon a Time, We Almost Lost Everything

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I was talking to a friend after a long time yesterday.

“What’s new?” I asked him after we were done with the initial chit-chat.

“We nearly lost everything”, he said with a chuckle, “There was a targeted cyberattack on Dad’s phone”.

Targeted cyberattack? That’s being a bit dramatic. Maybe it was SIM spoofing or a phishing attempt, I thought. Maybe uncle clicked on a link he shouldn’t have?

What happened was this. Uncle has retired from a bank. There was a demand from the unions that retired people should get better healthcare coverage. It was supposed to be done very soon.
Uncle started seeing a message on the WhatsApp groups from his friends and colleagues that here’s a link, you need to fill out the details here to get this better coverage.

He ignored it at first. But then after he saw that message getting repeated many times, he clicked on it.

The link was an .apk. The app/malware installed itself on his phone. He opened the app scrolled through, and then thought he would fill the form later.
While he was out for groceries he saw many OTP requests regarding login to banking services, requests for password changes, etc.

My friend happened to get home early on this day. When uncle told him wrist was happening, he asked uncle to return home.

The first thing they did was get their accounts frozen. At around the same time, their WhatsApp account sent the same .apk to other users in their WhatsApp chat. My friend tried to take control of WhatsApp but was not able to.

They went to a police station to file a complaint, where they were told to go to the cyber cell. The cyber cell is close to where my university used to be.

The first day they were told to go back as it was late. The second day they were told to return later as the cyber cell expert (and there’s only one for the entire district) was away for a court case. Finally, when they returned the cyber cell expert ran a tool and told them what was happening. They removed the app and told them the phone was good to use.

My friend did a factory reset.

The ordeal was over.

This is basically the setup for The beekeeper.
We don’t have a Jason Statham defending us though.

Whenever we read or listen about these things we always think this could not happen to me. Or, we blame the victim. This is a thing I have been thinking about this week. Not everybody has my technical know-how. What is par for the course for me, might not be so obvious to most of the people I have in my life.

Still, despite being aware of phishing techniques I was still caught in one, during the last appraisal cycle. We had received a well crafted mail to check something on our internal portal. The UI for login was the same but without the Authenticator option. I felt weird but continued to enter my password. It was only when it failed the login, I got suspicious.

With the advent of AI, these attacks get better (worse?) by the minute. There was a report of an employee transferring 25 million because they thought their CFO asked them to do so.

There are a few things you can do:

Use a password manager
Use 2FA everywhere
Use passkeys where possible

None of these methods are fool-proof. But they help.

So much of our lives are lived on our phones now. Our communications, banking, documentation, everything lives on our phones. If that device is compromised, we can lose everything. With this push to digitise everything and with growing unemployment everywhere I feel like instances of cyber crimes will increase.

Education and awareness are critical to ensure we remain safe in this environment.

Good Food, Good Life

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #45, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

I finished working on A year of mornings this past week. It will be published on February 15, 2025. The kindle edition is available to pre-order now!

A year of mornings is a collection of fifty love poems. It follows a young heart as it finds love, finds the strength to be in love and finally, finds the strength to let go.

Finnish government aims to tighten permanent resident permit rules.

The proposal calls for permanent resident permit applicants to live continuously in Finland for six years, rather than the current four-year requirement.

Additionally, if the changes go ahead, successful permanent residence applicants will also be required to have "sufficient skills" in either Finnish or Swedish, as well as have a two-year history of work in the country.

However, people could still obtain permanent residence permits if they meet one out of three requirements: earning at least 40,000 euros per year, having Master's or postgraduate degrees that are "recognised in Finland" along with a two-year work history, or having "particularly good skills" in Finnish or Swedish as well as a three-year work history in the country.

I understand it. I understand the fear and the want one has to protect themselves against the others. It is a particularly easy thing to feel. Right wing extremism is on the rise all around the world.

The common thing is this: they rile the people up, everything is unfair. When in power, all they do is consolidate power and money for the rich.

The rule change do not affect me. At least that's what I understood. But if the aim is to attract high tax-paying immigrants, I don't know how changes like this would do that.

Anyway, on to sweeter news.

We tried Runeberg torte this week.

I had seen these in the Prisma bakery section a few times and wondered what these were. Then, on Wednesday I read that these were Runeberg torte, a Finnish delicacy named after

Johan Ludvig Runeberg, Finland's national poet.

Runeberg pastries are a confection featuring jam and arrack, punch or bitter almond oil, often disappearing from shops and cafes after 5 February. 5th February is Runeberg Day.

It was yummy. If you can, go try them before they go out of stock!

We were invited to a birthday party on Friday. The food was great. The party was great. It was held at the bio-dome at EIS.

The thing that I want to talk about is cleaning up after the party was done. Which is a thing that you have to do at most venues here in Finland. Which is also a thing, which never stops being amusing to me, with us being Indians.

Before the party started, we put the chairs and tables to the corners. We put the food on a couple of tables. I inflated the balloons on the table-tennis table. Kids sat and jumped around on other furniture kept in the bio-dome.

The bio-dome was interesting with its high ceiling and two massive plant things on either end of the room.

Anyway, after the party was over, we cleaned the room, put everything back where it was. Someone had clicked a before picture so it was fun trying to figure out which chair went with which table, and so on.

After the party, a clean room.

It was fun. Here, you either pay for someone to clean up after you, or you clean up yourself. This happens on events like India Day as well. There is a nice lesson in this for us all. Cleanliness can not be taken for granted.

After the party, we went and sat at our friends' place for a bit to talk and play Ludo. That awoke something in me. I went and bought Ludo from Clas Ohlson.

It does not look like what we have in India. It is fairly minimalist, but I dig it. We played a round. I won. Go home!

/five things to share

1. This VPN is the resistance tool of choice for millions

A wonderful feature on Proton VPN. I feel a great sense of camaraderie whenever I read a piece on the infrastructure side of things. I feel a bit visible.

VPNs work by providing users a parallel infrastructure to access the internet. Rather than going through local servers, VPNs route traffic through a separate network, often in a different country outside the user’s location. That means that a user in Russia, for instance, can access sites as if they were sitting in Switzerland, circumventing their own country’s internet censorship. Even their own internet service provider can’t see what they’re looking at online.

2. Why so many people need glasses now - Vox

A short video on myopia and why its on the rise. Very insightful. The reasons as postulated are we spend more time indoors, focusing over shorter distances. The preventative fix for children at least is to get them outdoors.

3. Once You're Laid Off, You'll Never Be the Same Again – Mert Bulan

When I looked back on my time at the company and all the things I had accomplished, I was surprised to be impacted by the layoffs. It wasn’t because I thought I was better than others—it was because I believed I was doing more than what was expected of me. However, during a layoff, it seems that who you are and what you do doesn’t matter. In most cases, the decision is made by people who don’t even know you. This realization made me question the concept of work, which is part of the reason I’m writing this blog post.

4. The Future of AI and LLMs - Hugh Howey

A succinct take on the current state of AI. This came out after I wrote about it this week. I wish I had written this.

The two main things Hugh talks about are :

We are LLMs: that's what we do with language.
LLMs are us: They basically have all of human knowledge in them.

Which, like all great things are so simple, and have been said before, but the beauty of good writing is that it makes you nod along, and say of course!

AI could do much to alleviate drudgery and suffering without causing economic upheaval and exacerbating income inequalities. It could … but it won’t. Because we will not choose this route. Instead, we will choose a route that causes more heartache than is necessary and provides fewer mental health benefits than it could all while we are as uncreative and immoral as humanly possible

5. Austin Kleon - So what

This week's newsletter by Austin spoke to me. I enjoyed most of the things in it, specifically the part about practicing something you want to do for 28 days and try to suck less. That's it.

/new posts

Five new posts on the blog this week. Go an give them a read!

Why do I read more on the web - About convenience and the device I carry with myself everywhere.
A week of AI news - Deepsek and OpenAI's agentic system. I still feel the same way about AI.
Designing a book - I loved the design of Murakami's Men without women.
Murakami, Haruki - Men Without Women - A review of Men without women, which I realised I was re-reading half way through the book.
Sleep well - Yoga gets you closer to your body.

Have something to say? Reply on this mail, or hit the comment button. If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Sleep Well

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The thing with doing yoga everyday is that it makes you very much in sync with your body. You are more attuned to it.

One of the things I am trying to do now is do a forward bend as part of the surya namaskar. I can, stretch and touch the floor. I hold the back of my thighs and try to push my back closer to my legs. This makes it easier to touch the ground. But I can't do it in one smooth, elegant, motion.

This is progress of course. There was a time when no matter how much I tried, I never could touch the floor.

Now, I can.

I can feel the stretch in my glutes and my lower back as I do.

On Friday night, before sleeping I had turned off all alarms and the robot vacuum's scheduled cleanup routine.

We had returned from the party and by the time we were done with getting to sleep, it was around 1AM. So, I shut off all alarms and woke up when Savya decided to wake up, which was around 9:30 AM.

When doing Surya namaskar today, I could feel the difference a rested body makes. While doing the surya-namaskar it did not feel like my body was fighting me. I was in a state of bliss. I felt at one with my body, with everything around me.

This is still seldom enough, that I cherish these mornings. These mornings when it feels like I am progressing in my journey. Where it feels like I am touching the divine. Where it feels like I am divine.

So, sleep well I guess. That's the lesson. Every body needs sleep. Every body may need a different amount of sleep. So, try to find that time, and sleep for that time.

Designing a Book

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I am reading Murakami’s Men without women, hardcover.

Usually, all books have the same design, on top of the page, you would have the name of the book and the author. While at the bottom, you would have the page number.

This is book is so joyful in that, the page number is on the right and the story name is on the left, and it moves down with each story. There are seven stories in this book and after every story, the place where the page number appears slips down a little.

Here’s how this looks in the first chapter.

And here’s how this looks in the last.

Books matter. How you design them matters. I will steal this some day!

A Week of AI News

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Last week, was another big week for AI. It feels like every week is a big week for AI news.

OpenAI announced operator, its agentic system that can do things on the web. Which spurred a bunch of existential dread and many many articles.

DeepSek’s models led to drop in valuations of a bunch of tech companies

I read a bunch of these posts and was going to write about it, but then I wrote about messy households instead.

My thoughts on LLMs have not changed that much in the past months. There is no moat. Hence this week’s loss in valuations makes sense. These technologies will become more efficient, more commonplace and more useful. Companies that have the data already or control over the devices users use will have an advantage. But in the end, for a common person, these will be commodities.

There was a post from Seth about Trusting AI this week that talked about this a bit. About the things you can trust an AI with and not. I believe we will get used to it as the technology reaches its zenith.

For developers and people like me, who work in IT, the situation will be slightly different.

Depending on who you ask, there are two visions of how things will end up being.

The doomsday scenario is this: AI will eat everyone’s lunch. Nobody needs developers. Lay every one off. Ask ChatGPT to build you a startup.

The best case scenario is this: AI will make us super productive and we will build things we could not earlier because now we will have more time on our hands. I have seen many posts comparing AI to a junior dev. It gets you 70% of the way there, then you need to do the remaining 30 %.

From Ignore the Grifters - AI Isn't Going to Kill the Software Industry

Some developers think AI isn’t going to change much of anything and we should just sit tight and wait for it all to blow over. That view is just as short sided as the doomer side of the equation. Software development has always been a career where you are either learning new things or stagnating. AI doesn’t change the need to keep learning and evolving.

I don't where this cycle will end. LLMs are certainly good at some things: summarising things, coding things, providing the first draft of certain things, or a spring board of sorts.

But it is not, as of yet, good at a whole lot of other things. The CEOs of the world want that not to be true. But alas it is.

In all this, policy will play a big role too. The governments would need to agree on what is OK and what is not OK.

If the end goal is AI everywhere, who will the AIs work. Will the world be a bunch of AIs talking to each other? Maybe, that's what the corporations dream of.

But the amount of money these corporations have invested in this, and the amounts they have committed to spend on this, there has to be someone willing to pay for it. There has to be some use for it. Otherwise, as mentioned in The AI Bubble Is Bursting, they will start shoving AI down the throat of everyone, whether they want it or not.

Why Do I Read More on the Web

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I thought about this today, while I was reading something on NNW.

To be honest, I have been thinking about this since I read the latest Roden by Craig Mod. It was all over the place in the right sort of way, dense, packed with stuff. My kind of a post (article? essay?).

I haven’t slept with a phone in my room in over a decade. (The weirdest flex, yes.) If possible, I don’t sleep with it on the same floor. Chatting with Simone Giertz a few months ago, she had a brilliant idea: what if the only way to turn on the electricity in your home was to dock your phone at the front door? Me, I dock it in an avoidable corner to charge so that I don’t accidentally see it when I get up. I try my hardest to not look at it until after lunch (a phone-free morning is something I’ve been writing about for 10+ years). But even if you can’t go that far, at least get it out of your bedroom. The only networked device (only screen) in my bedroom is a Boox Palmaand I love it and still use it daily after about nine months. It has two apps: Readwise Reader (for whom I’m an advisor) and Kindle. That’s it. If I wake up in the middle of the night (which is thankfully rare), I just read a little on its gently-lit screen, and am soon re-slumbering.

when do I get to read?

When I get up, I take my phone to the toilet. Then, I read the feeds I follow.
While travelling. During weekdays that’s from home to work and back.
Sometimes, at home. If there’s nothing else.

the device that you carry with you all the time

That’s this phone, the one I’m typing on.

I decided to write more, write daily. Ever since I read Hugh Howey’s definition of a successful writer, I decided to be more protective of my time, guarding it like Gollum does the ring. I stopped listening to podcasts while walking. It’s mostly classical chill or Weightless (10 hour version) on Apple Music.

I write while I travel.

That has meant no time to read. Or half the time I had while travelling than earlier.

Most of the times, all I have is this phone with me. I love reading the book, but I can’t pull out the book in the middle of work and start reading.

And so most of what I read is the web.

I could read on the kindle. But the book I am reading is borrowed from the library. It is a hardcover. I love hardcovers. That does not sync to my phone.

a problem with no solution

That’s what this feels like. And why I am super tempted by the Boox Palma, or a similar device.

But that would make reading pleasurable. It will not sync the hardcover to the Palma.

And it is also why I feel I will continue reading more on the web.

Why I feel that fast is a problem, is because there is comparatively less time available on the web to get an idea across. Some things for sure work better here, but not all things.

Celebrating the Republic

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #44, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

Most of the republic days back home, back when I cared, were spent watching the republic day parade from the living room. The tanks were my favourite part of the parade. Republic Day is a public holiday in India. We celebrated it a day before at school.

For celebrating the 76th Republic Day of India, we visited the Indian Embassy in Helsinki.

We woke up early. There are some things which can not be skipped, including yoga and breakfast. We had avocado toast.

The Indian Embassy is at Kulosaarentie 32. The closest metro station is Kulosaari, and then a ten minute walk to get to the embassy.

There is this little hill that you climb which goes next to a school on the way to the embassy. The football ground was frozen. There were a couple of kids kicking the ball about.

As we got down the hill, on the lane the embassy is in, I did not have to tell Prerna which one the Indian embassy was.

The embassy was draped in the three colours of our national flag. There was a big tricolour draped on the second floor of the main embassy building.

There were not that many people there when we walked in. There were a few people setting things up. Prerna asked if they needed any help. They did not. So we took the camera out and took some pictures.

The ambassador arrived at 10 AM. By that time there were a lot more people in the embassy grounds. The air was nippy, the sky gray. Typical Finnish winter weather.

I was not surprised when the flag did not unfurl when they tried to. This same thing had happened at almost all the times my principal had tried to unfurl the flag in our school.

The flag did unfurl. We sang jana-gana-mana. I felt patriotic and emotional. The ambassador gave an address. There were refreshments.

We stood amongst friends, talked, laughed and celebrated the Indian republic.

/five things to share

1. 24 hours in an invisible epidemic

If you don't click on any other link in this edition, click this one. Go scroll through this page. It is beautiful and sorrowful.
Loneliness is an epidemic in the developed world. This shows that.

2. Life Lessons from the First Half-Century of My Career – Communications of the ACM

Some highlights:

The cost of praise is small. The value to others is inestimable.

Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.

There are no losers on a winning team, and no winners on a losing team.

3. Trump tries to end birthright citizenship

One of President Donald Trump’s first moves in office was an executive order repealing birthright citizenship — something he promised to do but didn’t deliver on during his first term. The move, which is almost certainly unconstitutional, would affect more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country as well as people in the US on non-immigrant visas, including more than 580,000 people with H1-Bs.

4. Google’s Gemini is already winning the next-gen assistant wars

There are other ascendant AI assistants, of course. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Copilot all have strong underlying models, and some share the same multimodal capabilities as Gemini. There are lots of good reasons to pick them or even something like Perplexity over Gemini. But they’re missing the most important thing: distribution. They’re apps you have to download, log in to, and open every time. Gemini is a button you can press — and that’s a big difference. There’s a reason OpenAI is reportedly working on everything from a web browser to a Jony Ive-designed ChatGPT gadget: the built-in options usually win.

5. Open AI announced Operator

It is an agent which can do things on the web for you.

OpenAI’s Operator Lets ChatGPT Use the Web for You

At WIRED’s request, Operator was asked to book an Amtrak train trip from New Haven, Connecticut, to Washington, DC. It went to the right website and entered the necessary information correctly to bring up the timetable, then asked for further instruction. If a user were logged in to the Amtrak website or into a browser profile with stored credit card information, Operator would be able to go ahead and book a ticket—although it is designed to ask for permission first.

A take from Simon:
Introducing Operator

My initial recommendation: start a fresh session for each task you outsource to Operator to ensure it doesn't have access to your credentials for any sites that you have used via the tool in the past. If you're having it spend money on your behalf let it get to the checkout, then provide it with your payment details and wipe the session straight afterwards.

And finally, ChatGPT Operator system prompt. It's always fun reading these things. These systems don't have any other safeguards other than things tacked before whatever you, the user asks the LLM. It feels a little like looking behind the curtain, like you know how the magician did it! So, fun.

/new posts

Six new posts on my website this week, if you haven't read them yet.

You can’t have one without the other
The next four years are going to be a drag
The two factors that allow services to be terrible
I need to talk to more people, more often
Embracing the light - Are you a light or dark mode person?
What a mess! - I discovered myself a bit while writing this. A little proud of this one.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

What a Mess!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I was going to write about AI today, about OpenAI launching Operator, about trusting AI, about how things might turn out for us in the future. But I do not feel compelled to write about it now. Maybe I will tomorrow.

Today, I want to talk about something else.

I visited my friend today, who lives in Matinkylä also. He used to live in the same apartment complex, but moved some time back. Now its far enough that I can't just get up and go. But not so far enough that I have to take a bus.

They had a baby a week back. We wanted to give them a little time to settle and then visit them. So we did, today. We walked from our apartment to theirs. I talked to Prerna about Yaris, and Volkswagen, and what car should we buy next year.

We left the pram at the ground floor of their apartment (there's no lift in their apartment). We climbed up the two sets of stairs and reached their apartment. My friend was at the door. We said hi, removed the three layers of clothing the three of us had, moved to the hall and sat down on the sofa.

The baby was being fed. So, we had some time on our hands. We talked to our friends, their parents who were visiting. And I found myself looking at how clean and organised everything looked!

I had just left my apartment in a mess. With toys strewn about. Toys for kids Savya's age is all sorts of crap - a plastic bag, an empty IKEA carton, a spent toothpaste bootle. No, he does not care about the stuffed panda or lion. No, give him the plastic bag any time.

Anyway.

I had just left my apartment in this mess. And everything was so clean and beautiful here. One thing about living as expats is you're never sure how much money you can spend on getting stuff. You never feel at home. Maybe you do after a certain amount of time has passed. But not in the beginning, or where we are now.

My friend's home does not look like ours. The layout is different. Their kitchen is to a side and more like a small room. Ours branches off from the hall - there is no separation as such. They have a big sofa which is in the centre of the hall and is basically the centre of the hall. Our sofa was a second hand I had purchased in 2023. Theirs is brand new.

But the home was clean. And it bugged me.

Anyway. We met the baby. She is so tiny! It felt ages ago when Savya was so small. I held the baby in my hand. I could feel her breathing. She was so small and cute.

We came back. I went on a walk. I thought about what to write about. About how the AI piece will flow. What would I write. And so on.

Prerna made dal-chawal-bhindi. It was great. We had dinner.

After dinner, while I was setting the plates in the dish-washer, it clicked for me.

We have a baby!

Our house will remain a mess.

Every day we will clean our house when we go to sleep. Every damn day. And the very next morning, it will become a mess.

I have seen my sister go through this. Kids are like that. They will make a mess. And it's OK.

Things get into an untidy state not in one shot. You will put one t-shirt one day on the empty chair. Maybe you were just tired. Then you would put socks on it the next day. Soon, it will just sit there, reminding you of what a sloth you are!

To maintain order, to keep things tidy, requires a consistent, constant effort.

And that's OK too.

Embracing the Light

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I remember being very excited when the system wide dark mode came with iOS13/MacOS Mojave. I had wanted this for so long.

As soon as it was out, I turned everything dark all the time. I was on non-OLED iPhone then, and the benefit of darkening the pixels, namely better battery life, would have been non-existent for me. And yet, it looked so damn cool. With iOS18 we got, tinting for app icons, which further made the experience better.

There were still some laggards along the way, some apps were late to support dark mode. Some websites don’t read the system state and switch to dark mode automatically. In those use cases the experience was not optimal.

I was so enamoured by dark mode that I turned my website background dark as well. I am on Ghost’s starter tier so can’t play around with the themes yet. Which is a shame.

I also made everything as dark as I could on my work laptop. Windows did not allow system wide dark mode toggle then. It does now. When I first made the transition, getting used to Outlook and Excel in dark mode was challenging. I got used to it though.

How things have changed now.

What changed?

Two things happened, more or less simultaneously.

I read Please Don't Force Dark Mode — Vishnu's Pages, which talked about the challenges of forcing dark mode on people on the web.

pure white text on a pitch black background can strain my eyes and be very difficult to read. The contrast ratio of this combination is 21:1.

At work, there was a lot of glare on my monitor from sunlight and it was hard to concentrate on the screen. I was looking for options in the dell monitor and came across comfort view. Comfort view adds a tint to the monitor and blocks blue light.

What did I do?

After enabling comfort view, I went back and forth between light and dark modes. I did not need the color accuracy that this mode hampers, so there was no issue there. I settled on light mode being the default for the office laptop. I changed the setting to light for a couple of apps that did not recognise the system setting - vs code and SNow.
Next, I update the iPhone's theme to light as well. I added the dark mode toggle to the control centre.
Finally, I updated the site to update the background colour from black to white. White seemed, too white, so I picked a grayish colour (#ececec).

How do I feel about the changes?

I feel good. Black text on white background is easier to read, than the other way around. I have reduced the brightness of the displays, as I don't need the screen to be super bright in order for it to be visible.

But, I don't need to be a stickler for this. In some scenarios, like in dark rooms, at night, the dark theme might be a better fit.

In those scenarios, its good that all I need is to press a toggle and I will be back to embracing the dark side!

I Need to Talk to More People, More Often

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I am reading Murakami’s Men without women right now. I feel like I had read it earlier.

Men without women is a collection of stories. The story that I am reading now, Scheherazade, has made me almost sure that I’ve read this earlier. I remember this story. I do not remember the ones I had read before. But this one I remember earlier.

I had first started reading Murakami, actually I don’t remember when I first read Murakami. I had started with What I talk about when I talk about running. I was interested in running and writing. I had searched for a book that talked about writing, and this and Stephen King’s memoir - On writing were both highly recommended. I had read it and loved it so much that I had gone and picked up other books of him.

During this time, I am fairly certain I read Men without Women first. But I don’t have any record of having done so. I was not keeping notes then, nor was I publishing book reviews on my blog.

Anyway.

While reading ‘An Independent Organ’, the story preceding ‘Scheherazade‘, I realised I do not talk to people as often and as much as I should. Prerna had told me something similar after I published NL43. She said, ‘You did not talk to the owners of Toni’s place. You did not ask them when did they come here. When did they start the restaurant? What’s their story?’

And I realised I did not. I had not asked them anything. I used to do this. I used to talk to people, and then I used to write stories about them. I have not talked to anyone in a long time. That’s not good. If I want to write stories, I need to listen to stories too.

That’s what I love about Murakami. His stories are about people, going about their lives. Somehow he makes them engrossing.

I want to emulate some of that.

The Two Factors That Allow Services to Be Terrible

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

From Pluralistic: Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital,

These are the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints. If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit.

My personal experience of this comes from the time I tried to quit WhatsApp.

This was back in 2021, when Meta changed its policies about how it shared WhatsApp data with Facebook. There was a lot of brouhaha, a supposed mass migration to Signal. Meta had to come out with FAQs, and full page ads in newspapers in India.

I felt that the time was right to push people to use Signal. I managed to move my one friend chat group to iMessage. I also managed to move one friend to Signal.

I had removed WhatsApp, and made it clear that I will be reachable on Signal only.

But it did not work. I was steadfast in my opinion and usage of Signal, but no one followed me to Signal. The storm passed. People continued using WhatsApp.

I was missing out on chats, both personal and work related. And so, eventually I reinstalled WhatsApp, and realised no matter what Meta does, no matter the privacy issues, or ads, or whatever, I will not be able to quit WhatsApp. It is an essential service.

That’s the thing, a lot of these essential services are controlled by private companies. Benevolent dictatorship is not a good model to manage essential services. And WhatsApp is that, for a big portion of the world. It is the de-facto support channel for a lot of businesses, small and big.

I have a lot of chats archived from businesses at this point. But there’s not much I can do. I just have to deal with this worsening service. Meta/Whatsapp have me captive.

The Next Four Years Are Going to Be a Drag

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I woke up today, opened NNW and had a familiar feeling sink in as I opened The Verge’s feed. Five or six posts were about things Mr. Trump had repealed or planned to repeal. Things repeated to environment, to reduce subsidies for EVs, and so on. It was a similar situation at Wired. At Wired, there was also a piece on Mr. Trump pardoning the rioters of Jan 6th.

I don’t care about TikTok. Let them sell it, shut it down. I don’t care. But I care about their environmental policies. You can’t ignore what the US does, it just is so damn big. Hence the dread.

I don’t want to feel this way. It’s the same reason why I don’t follow any Indian news channels. It’s all a stream of one shitty thing followed by another. I don’t want to know that. I am an optimistic person, but there a limit to my optimism.

We knew this was going to happen. This is the promise of Mr. Trump, after all. But just because you know something is about to happen, does not mean you will not feel bad when it happens.

I used to feel similarly about Mr. Modi’s second election. I felt a similar sense of dread. That India’s institutions will suffer, democracy will suffer. But I realised that there is an aspect of theatre to politics. Things are not as bad as they might seem. The world is not ending now. There is a place for hope in the world.

You Can’t Have One Without the Other

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I went out for a walk today, same route, same time. The thing about walking in the cold air is it freshens you up. You can feel the air going inside your lungs. It wakes you up. Sure you’re cold when you begin, but soon your body warms up and then there is no cold.

I love the winters here. I love the snow. I love the cold in general. It’s not ideal of course, but I will take cold over hot weather any day.

The snow transforms. When it falls, it’s cotton-like, soft, fluffy. You can walk on it. As it continues to snow, you get layers of snow. Then sometimes it rains, and then the snow becomes ice. It becomes treacherous.

Most side walks in Espoo/Helsinki are cleaned on a regular basis. They spray little rocks on the sidewalks to improve friction. But there are areas, nature trails for example, where it is not possible to clean the ice.

Icy walk, this is where you slip and fall.

Last year I had walked in inches deep snow. As the weather warmed, it had become slush, and I had walked in it too. It is impossible to walk on snow or ice without spikes under your boots. Sure I’ve seen Finns almost skate through on ice. But I wasn’t born here. So yes, I need spikes.

My last pair broke in April, so I had ordered a new pair from Amazon. I have worn them only once this season.

This has been a fairly warm winter in Finland. In general conversation, I’ve had a lot of people tell me that this does not feel like winter. I have said the same thing to others.

We complain, but the consequence of this weather is that there is no snow where we walk. No need to slip and fall. No more funny reels!

I was walking today, and I thought about this. About actions and consequences.

I had a friend back home, who loved rains but hated what came after. The traffic, the smells, the mud and muck.

You can’t have one without the other.

If you have rain, you will have muddy streets.

If you have snow, it will freeze, and you will slip.

Sakraat Redux

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #43, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.

/what goes around

Today is an anniversary of sorts.

Almost a year back on 27th January, I published the first NordLetter. It was not called NordLetter back then, and after publishing two more, it went on a hiatus.

That's the thing about anniversaries, you can pick any date to celebrate. So, I am picking this.

The other reason is that first post was about celebrating Sakraat in Finland. We celebrated Makar Sankranti on Jan 15th this year at Tony's corner.

Tony's corner is a nice cosy ravintola in Tapiola. Compared to last year, it was a smaller cosier affair this time around. Last year, we had to set up chairs and tables for snacks and food. This year, we were in a restaurant and the food and everything else was already setup.

The rest of it was the same as it was last year.

We ate dahi-chura with gud and aloo matar sabzi.

We had a little bon-fire outside. Prerna and I had prepared the playlist. We sang and danced and warmed ourselves up outside. Some kids threw popcorn into the fire. The wonderful hosts at Tony's served us tea.

Then we went in, sang our hearts out. I was trying to find the karaoke option in Apple Music, but couldn't. So we ended up searching and playing karaoke mixes on Youtube.

We finished with khichdi, papad, aloo-sabzi and achaar.

Thanks BJPRF.

/five things to share

1. The people should own the town square - Mastodon's ownership will transfer to a non-profit

I was using Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon at one point. Bluesky never spoke to me, in a way Twitter/X never did either. I was mostly posting on Thread and Mastodon. Even before Mark's U-turn on moderating, I was feeling happier at Mastodon; Mark's announcement was just that little push that I needed. I uninstalled Thread from the phone last week.

Mastodon's ethos, it's commitment to federation, and remaining ad-free and algorithm free, better aligns with my beliefs.

Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.

With this change, Mastodon is making sure what happened at X, or what regularly happens at Meta, can not happen to Mastodon.

2. Wired - US Supreme Court Upholds TikTok Ban Law

Lot of drama around this one. The Supreme Court has upheld the law, which means TikTok should get banned in the US now.

India banned TikTok back in 2020. Five years too late US?

3. Wired - The King of Ozempic Is Scared as Hell

A well-rounded piece on Novo-Nordisk, which I did not know was a Danish company.

For a biotech company overseen by a nonprofit to hit on the magic ingredient and to achieve, however briefly, world dominion and otherworldly profits, it was almost Faustian. I couldn’t shake the idea that Novo was at increasingly steep odds with itself, like a body devouring its own pancreas. And now Wall Street was “disappointed” that Novo’s latest drug didn’t induce weight loss more precipitous than 22 percent. Perhaps investors won’t wholeheartedly green-light Novo again until they see returns of 100 percent weight loss, the full deletion of human bodies.

4. Cheating is All You Need

There has to be one AI piece here. This is that, for this week.

Coding assistants are coming. They’re imminent. You will use them this year. They will absolutely blow your mind. And they’ll continue to improve at an astonishing rate.

They will feel gloriously like cheating, just like when IDEs came out, back in the days of yore. And for a time-constrained developer like me–and I say this as someone who has written over a million lines of production code…

5. In 2009, Sweden chose to replace books with computers. 15 years later, it allocates 104 million euros to reverse course

Fast forward fifteen years, and Sweden is having second thoughts due to some major problems cropping up. Research shows that reading on screens (especially those with bright lights) can cause more eye strain and less focus compared to paper books. Plus, understanding what you read and remembering it takes a hit when you’re staring at screens.

We had become so enamoured and maybe a bit FOMO'd by Byju's to get my little sister a tablet and a subscription to Byju's. It did not go as I had hoped. She managed to side-load chrome/youtube on the "tamper-proof" tablet.

More or less aligns with how I feel about reading as well. Tablets and phones just have that manic, look notifications, vibe about them. There is always something to look at, something to get distracted by.

E-ink display devices might be a solution. And of course, real paper is always there.

/new posts

Three new posts on my website this week.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Parenting Is Full of Contradictions

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Before the child is born, you take care of what you eat, only good things, no alcohol, healthy stuff - apples, almonds, less oil.

Afterward, the child has phases - when they might put dirt in their mouth.

Savya puts anything in his mouth. It’s endless.

You love your child to death. They are so cute! Their eyes so full of life, and inquisitiveness. The way they sit. The way they talk. Everything.

Still, by the time evening rolls around, they get so irritating.

I mean, how difficult is it for the child to realise that they are sleepy! Go sleep, son.

Savya will not sleep until he just can’t be up. Then he sleeps wherever he puts his head on. My chest, stomach, upside down, foot against our head, bum on our head. Anywhere.

The Value of Consistency

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I wrote about how hard work trumps talent every time. There is an additional element to it, of discipline and repetition.

I was doing yoga today, like all mornings. There are things I can’t do yet, like being able to do forward fold, properly, in one smooth motion.

When I start, my fingers are left some 2-3 inches from the floor. Then, I stretch, bend myself more, and touch the floor.

There was a time, when I started doing yoga that I could not do this. No matter how hard I tried. I kept at it though. Every day.

I can see the progress now. The forward bend is just one example. I can feel the flexibility in other movements I do too.

I can feel that in my writing too. This act of publishing something every day. Of writing daily. It has changed things. It has made writing easier. It has made the translation from thought to written word easier.

Doing something consistently, makes you better at that something.

I’ve Become Afraid of Keeping Thoughts in My Head

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Has this happened with you before?
You think of something.
You are not able to act on that something, in my case write it down somewhere.
And then, you forget about it.
Or, the idea itself does not seem that great after a while. You lose the passion for the idea.
Or, you forget what it was that you wanted to write in the first place.

I had an idea in the morning today, mostly about what I wanted to write as an acknowledgment for my book.

And I found myself wanting to get on the Mac and type it down. Right then and there. I was afraid I would lose it, this thought.

And I thought, why am I so afraid to keep this thing in my head. Is it so feeble, that if I not right it down this very second, I would lose it? And if it is so feeble is it any good?

I do not work things over in my head anymore. I do not exercise that muscle anymore. I think on paper, while writing. I do not know if it is good or bad. It just is.

I have this appendage that I have exported my thinking to, my phone. This was not how it was earlier, and yet, I was able to think and work on the thought in my brain, till it was ready to be on paper.

I need to exercise that muscle more.

Ice, Ice, Baby!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #42, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads and Mastodon.

Snow + Prerna = Snowball-fight!

It snowed! There is a nice layer of fresh snow around our home.

We stayed home and cooked, this week. I made aloo-paratha over the weekend and it was perfect. I tried it again during the week and that one did not go as well as planned. So now, I am not sure if I am good at it or not. Prerna made ragi-roti. I prefer dosa, but that has more oil. It will be an acquired taste, if it gets acquired ever.

I continue working on the book. It will be out on 15th Feb. Pre-orders should be live by next week at the maximum. More to share on that soon.

/five things to share

1. Marc Scott - Kids can't use computers... and this is why it should worry you — Coding 2 Learn

I have myself wondered if the new generation is better at technology then us. Sure they use phones, TVs, tablets, etc. more. But do they know how to fix things if anything goes wrong? I don't think so. Neither does Marc.

Technology affects our lives more than ever before. Our computers give us access to the food we eat and the clothes we wear. Our computers enable us to work, socialise and entertain ourselves. Our computers give us access to our utilities, our banks and our politics. Our computers allow criminals to interact with us, stealing our data, our money, our identities. Our computers are now used by our governments, monitoring our communications, our behaviours, our secrets. Cory Doctorow put it much better than I can when he said:

"There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears."

2. Dark Energy May Not Exist: Something Stranger Might Explain The Universe

Dark Energy is what is posited to explain why the universe continues to expand at a faster rate. More matter means more gravity, which means time passes slower there. So, in bubbles across the galaxy time might be passing slower than elsewhere, which would explain the observant expansion, when there might not be any.

Discrepancies in how fast time passes in different regions of the Universe could add up to billions of years, giving some places more time to expand than others. When we look at distant objects through these time-warping bubbles, it could create the illusion that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.

3. Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?

“The thesis is that we’ve been focussing too strongly on the individual nutritional components of food,” Hall told me. “We’re starting to learn that processing really matters.”

If the goal was to minimize processing, then a diet that includes butter might be healthier than one that includes margarine, and one that includes cane sugar might be healthier than one that includes zero-calorie sweeteners. The occasional whole egg, which contains more than half the daily recommended dose of cholesterol, might be preferable to packaged liquid eggs, which are protein-rich and sometimes cholesterol- and fat-free, but often contain preservatives and emulsifiers.

4. How a food crisis in India fed America's library collections

Signed into law by President Dwight D Eisenhower, PL-480 allowed countries like India to buy US grain with local currency, easing their foreign exchange burden and reducing US surpluses. India was one of the largest recipients of this food aid, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s when it faced severe food shortages.

5. No more needles! Tracking blood sugar on your wrist | Waterloo News

Non-invasive sugar tracking remains the holy-grail in consumer devices like Apple Watch. It seems to be something which is always five years in the future.

“We’ve developed radar technology that can now fit inside a smart watch and sense glucose levels more accurately than ever before,” Shaker said. “Just like you use glasses to improve your vision, our technology helps for better sensing of glucose levels.”

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. ��

Until next week.

How to Complain

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Complaining is easy.

"The code base is bad."
"These people have no idea what they are doing."
"I would need to rewrite everything in order to fix this."

In knowledge work, as you go higher up the chain, the things that you are responsible for, increase.

As a manager, it is far more useful to me, if a person gives me solutions. I know things are broken, I need someone to fix the same.

If you complain, provide a fix as well.

Second, things are not as bad as they seem. Sure, the entire customer's business might be down. But if all you do is run around screaming, bring this up, bring this up, bring this up. You are not doing anything of value.

Given enough time, these things don't really matter.

Meta Will Not Do Fact-Checking Anymore

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Mark announced changes to way it does content moderation across Meta properties - IG, FB, Threads.

The main announcement was a video from Zuckerberg, and then a thread on Threads.

There were a lot of takes on this. Mostly everyone agreeing that Zuckerberg has catapulted to Trump and made worse changes. I think, as do many others, that Meta never had any spine. The whole Meta loves Fediverse thing was a sham. And God bless America!

The noise on Threads was so much that I deleted it for the time being. It might remain

I liked John's coverage of this announcement at Daring Fireball, the best. It was concise, to the point and not screaming, the world is ending. John went over all the points in Mark's announcement.

I agree with him on most points, especially the fact that the problem is not who is allowed to say what, the problem is amplification. If all Meta did was show a chronological feed, then great. But they do not. Meta wants engagement, above all.

The question isn’t what sort of posts Meta is now going to allow, but rather, what sort of posts are their algorithms going to promote, and to whom.

I highly recommend you read it. If nothing else.

I have removed Threads from my phone. This is not a political statement.

I caught myself spending more time on Threads. Idle time. So I removed it. I do this with all social media apps. In the past, I have done this with IG, Reddit, LinkedIn.
I enjoy Mastodon more now. I did not in the beginning, but it has grown on me. I like the crowd here. The timeline is chronological. If I want to see things from elsewhere, I can go to a tab and look at popular things. What an idea, eh Mark?

It will be interesting to see how things evolve in this space. Will we get an open social web?

About Glue Work

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

One of the problems with managing a bunch of people is figuring out who is doing what. Tasks can be tracked through Jira boards or tickets locked in SNOW. But how do you track the things that are not on the board? Does that make those tasks not important?

There is a word for tasks of this nature: glue work. The extra work that one does to ensure things run smoothly. The things that no one asks for. Like cleaning up resources when they are not in use, like updating SOPs when processes change, like creating documentation in the first place.

There is a problem with this though. These tasks are difficult to track. And these tasks do not often align with business goals.

Business goals are generally, ship new features. It could even be fix bugs, or improve security. It is never improve processes. Improved processes help with better results. They help improve results.

Glue work, hence, can be harmful for an individual worker.

From, Glue work considered harmful:

first, you’re inevitably going to burn out, which will be bad for everyone; second, it’s better to let your team get used to operating at the base efficiency level of the company instead of artificially removing friction for a brief period.

If you do want to do glue work, it must be done tactically, in lean periods, at the star or end of a project, for projects you own or are responsible for.

For other things, do you regular work.

Would You Enjoy Killing More Human NPCs?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Nvidia’s AI NPCs can become your teammates now. This is coming in PUBG at some point. But, this or similar technology should proliferate so that it becomes par for the course for all games, or rather most AAA games.

Imagine how much better career mode could be on FIFA. Just kidding, EA does not care about career mode.

This can be used for making the enemies better as well. Reading this gave me a pause though.

I loved The Last of US 1 and 2 both. But I never could get myself to play through again. It felt heavy, always. The story, the mechanics. Even without AI, just the fact that these random NPCs were calling each other out by name, they would scream when they found out one of their friends had died, meant that I felt guilty, not wanting to kill these NPCs. I would try to sneak around as much as possible.

The game was heavy, a great experience but not something I would want to replay. After you complete it, additional game modes are opened up, which make it more game like. But I could never forget how harrowing the base game was.

There are a lot of these fodder NPCs in action games. We all complain about stupid AI, not able to figure out that I am hiding behind that box. But, if they became more human like, I don’t think most people would enjoy killing them. Killing them will feel more like killing a person.

Games should be enjoyable. There should be a disconnect. There should be some stupidity. We want a better villain but if that’s all that you have in the game, I am not sure how enjoyable that would be.

In other news, Nvidia also announced a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits

Which is cheap I guess for 3000? You have Macs that are costlier than that and are not AI supercomputers.

This would also proliferate more as time goes on. More computers with the AI component in them, in a general purpose computer way. These things will become OS components.

Sometimes All It Takes Is Magic

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I read Hugh Howey's Writing Insights series recently. I wrote about it too - about when to write.

One insight that he had at the very beginning was about who a successful writer is:

A successful writer is one who finishes what they start while striving to improve their craft.

Later on, he also talks about being the hardest work, completing things, publishing things, before you start worrying about marketing.

Wait until you have five or six novels published before you start to spread the word. Pour every spare minute and every ounce of energy into the writing while you can.

This is not common advice. A lot of the advice on the self-publish wiki, for example, is about marketing. A lot of the posts on the sub are about marketing. People asking for advice, people giving advice.

Recently, I also read Allen Pike's An Unreasonable Amount of Time.

He talks about a similar thing, about craft taking time.

It can be difficult, psychologically, to commit yourself to spend an extreme amount of time and attention towards a goal, no matter how worthwhile. Doing impossible things feels, well, impossible.

There was a particular quote by Teller, which stayed with me.

Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.

The two things complement each other well.

Being a successful writer means working harder at this than any one else and improving myself.

Which, practically means two things:

Read more. Learn from these things. Whether books - fiction or non-fiction, or articles.
Write more. Meaning books. Meaning finish the draft.

A Happy New Year

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello and happy new year! I am still in Matinkylä and this is still NordLetter. This is edition #41 of NordLetter, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads and Mastodon.

Work continues on 'A year of mornings' , my poetry collection. I continue working on the book. Self-publishing involves a lot of these admin types of tasks, getting the ISBNs, figuring out the description, getting things ready on KDP, creating the cover, formatting the book for the different formats, and so on and on and on.

I am mostly there. I should have more to share in the next NordLetter.

Prerna and I completed our yearly review. We started this practice last year. We mostly look back at the year that was, some of our favourite memories from the year gone by, the places we visited, the things we did.

And, simultaneously looking ahead. Setting some goals for the coming year.

It is also a time to review. I looked at some of my professional goals from last year and thought, wow was I hopeful. I had hoped to complete AZ-104 by February, 2023 for example. That, did not happen.

I think the benefit of these things comes after doing these for a few years. Then, you get the patterns.

I do recommend it. It is fun, when you find out how long a time a year can be. And how short!

We spent the new year visiting the ISKCON temple in Helsinki. This was our third time visiting the temple. We had visited once during Janmashtami and once earlier than that. The temple is open during 5-7 PM on weekdays. We left home aboard the M1 till Sörnäinen and then too the #73 bus to the temple.

It had snowed in the morning and there was snow everywhere. It was snowing as we got off the bus. We left our boots and jacket outside, which made everything super cold when we left the temple.

A lot of other people, had the same idea that we had as there were many people at the temple. The priest acknowledged the same while wishing us all a happy new year, after reading a few verses from the Bhagavad Gita.

We sat, meditated, listened and chanted for a bit. It was peaceful, being in the space. I like temples like that.

We went to Ravintola Parikar after that. It was a brisk 1.5 km walk from the temple. We were cold by the time we reached the restaurant.

We ordered momos, Kadhai paneer and veg kofta. The naan was good.

/five things to share

1. Wired - Healthier cities will require a strong dose of nature.

when we directly interact with nature, biochemical pathways are triggered in our bodies that result in significant beneficial health impacts.

Clinical experiments show that something as simple as having a vase of unscented roses on your desk, for instance, can significantly lower your blood pressure and bring about physiological and psychological calming. So too can having leafy plants in your home and office, particularly those with green and yellow foliage.

2. Chuck Nelson compares early stage Google and OpenAI search

If Open AI goes the way of Google with tons of choices and mental fatigue, it can still be successful, but will be battling to be king of the hill.

But if it can keep it simple and trustworthy , it can own the most valuable digital real estate as the sidekick with the single answer.

3. Financial Times - Are we becoming a post-literate society

A culture does not have to force scholars to flee to render them impotent. A culture does not have to burn books to assure that they will not be read . . . There are other ways to achieve stupidity.”

Proficiency improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14, and declined significantly in 11, with the biggest deterioration in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland.

4. Bad year for IT professionals

The Verge - Volkswagen had a massive data leak exposing location data

For months, the location information of around 800,000 electric Volkswagen vehicles was available online due to a data leak, according to a report from the German news magazine Der Spiegel. The leak reportedly stemmed from the software running inside Volkswagen vehicles and could've allowed a bad actor to trace a driver’s exact movements, as noted by Electrek

And, The register - Salt typhoon breach for AT&T

5. A few end of the year roundups

Wired - 24 things that made the world a better place in 2024
Few highlights for me:

Routine Childhood Vaccination Against Malaria Began
SpaceX’s Starship Completed a Stunning Vertical Landing
Los Angeles Showed the Benefits of Becoming a Sponge City
A Startup Unlocked a Way to Make Cheap Insulin

Simon's roundup of LLMs in 2024
Some highlights:

LLM prices crashed, thanks to competition and increased efficiency The environmental impact got better The year of slop

/new posts

These are the posts I’ve written this week. Click the links to read them.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

I Do Not Know What to Do

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

These are the moments, when I feel like the only thing that would give me peace, is having my own website. Using Hugo, or Jekyll. The problem I think would be around the newsletter. I had self-hosted ghost for a bit on LighSail. Sending emails was the thing I could not solve, and the reason I had started with Ghost Pro.

I just wish they would allow custom themes with the starter plan.

Yesterday, I had felt I had figured out what I wanted to do. By the time I finished writing that post, I did not feel like I did.

It felt weird. It felt like there would be a context switch between what I wanted to say and the links that would come up after that.

I tried to come to terms with it.

I tried to like it.

I told myself, give it time.

I just don't like it. I don't like it so much that it made me question the five things to share section in nordletter. Is it any useful?

What I want to do is have different ways of showing the link-blog vs everything else.

The only thing I can think of for now is creating a page for the links I want to post and keep updating it.

But I don't want that. I want to post how I do normally, and based on the tag get it formatted differently.

Also, all these link-blog type items should get auto-collected into the daily post. Like how it works on Dave's blog.

That would be possible with custom themes. But that would mean bumping up to the creator plan. And I can't justify spending that money at this time.

Hence, my desire to go to self-hosting.

Let me do whatever I want to do.

To be honest, I don't think it matters as much. I don't think how the website looks matters to my readers as much it matters to me.

But it matters to me. And it is making me restless and not good.

Gaah!

I Figured out What to Do

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I figured out what to do. Yesterday, was me thinking out loud about how to write on this website. I had originally wanted to edit the post before it went live, with details about what I planned to do.

I did not figure out what to do yesterday.

I had three options basically:

Publish each thing I wanted to link to as a separate post. Like how John does it at Daring Fireball.
Create a page for everyday and add links and thoughts to it throughout the day. Like how Dave does it.
Don't change anything. Continuing posting as I have.

So, I decided to go with the fourth option. Which is in fact a bit of regression in terms of how it will work. I used to add links to my daily notes in Obsidian and combine that as part of NordLetter.

I will start doing that. These links that I collect through the day, I will append to the blog I write.

This is the inaugural edition. Enjoy!

Look at this

Den Delimarsky - Be A Property Owner And Not A Renter On The Internet
I wrote about building a bridge to your corner of the web. This is a similar post. The thing that spoke to me specifically was Den's disclaimer that this is meant for people who are proficient with technology. So often, we do not think about this, about our bias, our background, our knowledge. This could be a post on it's own. Maybe it will.

I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life

So now I’m in Hawaii. I’m learning physics. Why? The reason I tell myself is to build up my first principles foundation so I can start a company that manufactures real world things. It seems plausible, but I’m learning to just accept that I am happy learning physics. That’s the goal in and of itself. If it leads to nothing, that’s ok.

Yuval Noah Harari - Dictatorships Will Be Vulnerable to Algorithms

The Russian Constitution makes grandiose promises that “everyone shall be guaranteed freedom of thought and speech” (Article 29.1) and “censorship shall be prohibited” (29.5). Hardly any Russian citizen is naive enough to take these promises seriously. But bots don’t understand doublespeak. A chatbot instructed to adhere to Russian law and values might read that constitution, conclude that freedom of speech is a core Russian value, and criticize the Putin regime for violating that value. How might Russian engineers explain to the chatbot that though the constitution guarantees freedom of speech, the chatbot shouldn’t actually believe the constitution nor should it ever mention the gap between theory and reality?

Beyond RAG: Building a Knowledge Management System That Enhances Rather Than Replaces Thought

A zettelkasten shouldn't be a mirror of the world's knowledge - it should be a reflection of your understanding of that knowledge.

Glue work considered harmful

The core problem is that you’re deciding for yourself what the company needs instead of doing your job. Isn’t it your job to make your team run smoother? No! Your job is to execute the mission of your company’s leadership. It is better to execute that mission at 60% efficiency than to spend all your time increasing efficiency in general (or even worse, to execute some other mission at 100% efficiency). Why? For two main reasons: first, you’re inevitably going to burn out, which will be bad for everyone; second, it’s better to let your team get used to operating at the base efficiency level of the company instead of artificially removing friction for a brief period.

Should you never do glue work? No, you should do glue work tactically. That is, you should do this kind of extra work for the projects you lead - the projects whose success you’re accountable for - in order to make sure they succeed. You won’t be rewarded for the glue work specifically, but you will be rewarded for the success of the project. For other projects, you should just do your regular job

Rethinking What and How I Write on This Website

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

What do I write now

Things that I learned (the source could be anything from books to articles)
My observations or experiences
Book reviews (mini)
Poems
Stories

The struggle

I wrote earlier about maybe posting daily. I have had that constant itch to have a link-blog. To just share things I found on the web. I partly scratch that itch by posting those things as part of every nordletter. But nord-letter comes out once a week, and there is an immediacy effect to some of these news things.

This is what Twitter type thing is for, I suppose. But I don't want to just post anything on the socials. Everything I create should ideally be here.

Hence, I find myself thinking again about the things I write. And how would the structure for sharing things look like?

Should there be a daily post, where I can put these links and thoughts. A link-blog is not that I guess. It is one post per link. The problem is that I don't want to publish for the sake of publishing. And that is the struggle, I guess. The balance between wanting to share links and filling the site up with stuff. That's the balance I have to find.

About categories

In Ghost, we can use custom routes to create content collections. This allows for filtering posts based on tags. Which is what I have done here. The original aim I had was to create a custom landing page, but that requires a higher tier of Ghost Pro, or for me to self-host. The costs don't make sense though. So I put that on a back-burner.

But I use the same collections to basically have menu items on the site. I am thinking now about the types of things I write about and whether I need blog (or linkblog) in the menu.

Everything is a blog post. I don't think I need to create a collection for that. It's the default. Poems, sure. Of course, the main thing is the RSS collections. So maybe I will just remove the menu item and keep the custom collection.

The problem (feature?) with collections is that it creates this inherent filter. Anything you add in a collection is removed from the root collection. So if I click on See All on the home page its all wonky.

Maybe I could just remove the collections and just use tags. All tags have feeds. The thing I would lose is the nice url I get with collections.

How to Use Habituation to Your Benefit

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Habituation, i.e. becoming used to something can have both good and bad affects.

If you're doing something you enjoy, taking breaks from it, helps you enjoy it for longer. It helps you appreciate the thing more. I have done this many times in the past, when I would listen to a song on repeat till I got sick of it. It makes sense to create breaks. To avoid getting used to a good thing.

On the other hand, if you do not like doing something, it is better to do it in one go. Household chores, meetings, anything you don't want to do. It is the same concept. If you do it in one go, you feel reduced pain. If you take breaks, you never get accustomed to it. Every time the pain feels fresh.

The challenge of course is to recognise habituation. To recognise if it is a good thing or bad. And then take action.

I do not remember when I read about this originally, but came across this again on Wired.

Hard Works Trumps Talent Every Time

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

When I was in tenth, because that’s when it starts, I was told, all I had to do was study hard till twelfth, get into a good college, and that would be it.

Just till twelfth. Get into a good college.

So I did, I studied hard, and I got into DCE.

When I had gotten into DCE, I had dreams. I would find love in college. I will have an adventure. I will find friends for life. I will go on a road trip.

And a promise, I will not study for the first year. In the first year, I will relax, no more studying.

I wish, someone had told me, that you need to study in college too. I wish I had the view that I do now, of life long learning, of taking notes.

I got a back in the second semester. I could not recover from that. To clear the back in even semesters, I had pressure. I could not clear it and got another back in the fourth semester.

By my second year in college, I had come to the realisation that I needed to study. I was a topper after all. I was good at this. But, in DCE, everyone around you is a topper. I tried but I could not get the marks. The books were massive and I did not learn anything during the semester.

In my third year, I made a friend who made it simple for me. Take copies of notes, study from these notes. I also had a friend who told me I should study for the sake of studying. I tried both things and my marks improved. But my marks were set already.

I was reminded of it while looking at the requirements for masters at institutions. That academic record will stay with me for life. Of course it does not matter as much during life in general. But it mattered when I sat in the interviews for those companies in college. And it will matter if I ever go for higher education, a proper degree.

There were people around me, friends who did not make this promise to themselves. They continued studying through college. They got good grades.

I had the best rank in AIEEE among my friends. I got the worst grades at the end of the four years.

Today, of course, all of us are doing good. I am in Finland, a friend is in Japan. One is in HPCL, one in Honeywell, and the final one will switch soon for a good package at Accenture.

Hard work trumps over talent, over any other thing, every single time.

If you want to create something in this world, you have to work for it. You have to keep working hard for it.

Build a Bridge to Your Corner of the Web

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I was not on the old Twitter (just Twitter?). I mean I was there, but not really posting there.

Twitter used to be very good at this thing, where it was basically the customer care for a lot of these companies. These companies had other channels as well, but if you tagged them there, you may or may not get a response. If you tagged them on Twitter, or DM'd them, you would get a response. This is the reason why I had a Twitter account, to complaint, ask for support. And it used to work brilliantly. I got my lost Kindle back thanks to Twitter!

I was not posting things on Twitter, so I do not understand the pain people feel now, when they are having to leave all of their content behind, thanks to Elon. Or, politics. Or, whatever.

I did use to post on Facebook, but I stopped doing that, because I did not want to suffix all my posts with 'Hey! This is a joke.'

The only platform, if it were to tank tomorrow, I would be sad about, is Instagram. That is also the reason why, I am still on Instagram, even though it has transformed into a shopping app. There is nothing like it. Plus, network effects. All my friends are on IG.

I read - don't build your castle in other people's kingdom today. There are rules, Chris talks about:

Build your castle on land you own.
SHAMELESSLY USE THE OTHER KINGDOMS JUST LIKE THEY ARE USING YOU!
Always move people back to your kingdom, never to another kingdom.
Operate like your castle can get shutdown tomorrow
Be suspicious of new kingdoms that give away easy visibility
Give good reasons to go back to the Castle in your Kingdom. And be persistent!

Most of this makes sense. I believe in open standards. I have always had a website. I did self-hosting for a bit. From the colophon:

I started blogging back in college (around 2012). I had a Blogger site for a while, but I don't think I posted anything there that was worth scavenging. I move to WordPress soon after that. Or, simultaneously. I used the default free version for a WordPress site for some time.

I purchased a .com domain at some time, when I wanted to take this seriously.

Then, I moved to a .net domain, which is where you are now.
But WordPress was slow. Or so I read everywhere. So, I moved to Ghost. First, a self-hosted version on AWS LightSail, using docker compose. But it was an effort to get everything working. There were challenges, mostly around getting email to work. I found myself spending too much time keeping things running, than doing the actual writing.

So in April, 2021 I moved to Ghost Pro. And have been on it ever since.

Platforms are finicky. They may change rules on a whim. Their ownerships might change. They may enshittify.

You should have your website (not substack) on a domain you own.
Social media is like shouting in the ether. Trying to find people with hashtags and such. They may follow you there, but they are not really yours.

Most of my posts on Threads and Mastodon are links to my blog and a little bit about the post. They are bridges to my corner of the web. Hopefully, some of the people subscribe to you directly.

Even if they don't, if the platform goes down or bad, you still own your content. Everything is yours. If your hosting company goes down, you can take your website to a different host.

Rain, Like Mist

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Rain,
like mist.
Does it pour?
Or, does it spray?

Does it matter?
I walked in rain today.
The ground was wet.
But different kinds of wet.
The asphalt had a shine to it.
The mud, was darker than it would be.

I had put on my cap.
The spatter of rain,
Against my ear,
These were not
Violent sounds.

It was rain,
But mild,
Like mist.

It distorted what I could see.
It made things muddy.
Unclear. I took a picture,
And there was a weird quality to it.
Not drops of water on the mirror.
But a foggy, hazy thing.

It was rain.
But mild,
like mist.

Writing and Publishing

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #40, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads and Mastodon.

I finished editing the poetry collection I am working on this week. Next up is figuring out how to format the book for publishing. I will do paperback and ebook. This will be a collection of 50 poems. So a small paperback will be a good thing to have.

I have been struggling with so-many options that are present in all these tools. As I write this, I think the better way to do this will be to focus on one format at a time and ignore the rest.

I can for example, focus on the Kindle edition first. And once that is done, move to the print edition.

Most of this exercise is one-time work. Whatever I learn now, will be useful for later. And yes, there will be a later. Many laters in fact.

The Iso Omena Library has a VOX section in it. The VOX section is where you have things like video games, a pool table, a table tennis table. I used to think it was for youth only.

I went and asked last week, and they told me the table tennis table could be used by anyone. You do not and can not book in advance. Each person gets a 15 minute slot. There is a library employee sitting there, you tell them you want to play, they put your name in an excel, and then you play.

I have been looking for a place to play table tennis for so long. There used to be a table in our office, but they removed that table.

On Sunday, I invited my friends to play table tennis. We played a few singles. All of us won 1 game each. There were three of us. And then a kid there asked if he could play with us as well. We ended up playing five doubles games with him.

I had fun. I love table tennis. The best I was at Table tennis was during my school days. I just could not find any place to play the game after school.

I have a place now.

After the match

/five things to share

1. The California Job-Killer That Wasn’t

California increased minimum wages, and while everyone claimed that it would reduce jobs, it actually did not.

In the six months after California’s new minimum wage came into effect in April, the state’s fast-food sector actually gained jobs. If anything, it proves that the minimum wage can be raised even higher than experts previously believed without hurting employment. That should be good news. Instead, the policy has been portrayed as a catastrophic failure. That is a testament to how quickly economic misinformation spreads—and how hard it is to combat once it does.

2. Honda Nissan and Mitsubishi are merging.

I asked my friend if this means they will be bigger than Toyota.
He laughed.
"No", he said.

3. How taling over a wall changed my direction as a programmer - Andrew Wulf

Basically talking over the wall, and going to that random meeting, gave me the idea that I should stick to programming, and never looked back.

4. The paper passport is dying - Wired

It mentions India and Finland, two places where there are programs going on to reduce the need to stand in immigration lines. Coincidentally I had to wait at immigration both while I landed in Delhi and Helsinki.

Digiyatra is of course enabled for local travel in India. I love the facility. The not standing in lines is again a great feature to have.

I can not wait for this to be done soon.

5. About Temu and how it is changing tactics to deal with US regulations

In NL38 I had linked to an article about how the Chinese EV industry is winning against European counterparts. One common link between both (Temu is a Chinese company) was the fact that the Chinese companies seem to be able to iterate very quickly. Be it cars or apps.

/new posts

These are the things I've written this week.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

When to Write

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I finished editing the poetry collection I am working on, this week. This was not the original plan. I was planning on making the first book I publish a novel. I am still working on it.

I will be self-publishing the book via KDP at first, so I have been doing a lot of research on this. Mostly reading the r/selfpublish sub-reddit.

Through browsing that sub I came across Writing Insights Part Two The Rough Draft - Hugh Howey. I was thinking about this section in particular:

We all have that time. For me, I gave up the hours I spent playing videogames and watching TV. I kept the time spent with my family, the time I spent hiking, and going to work, and cooking, and household chores. I just gave up some passive entertainment and replaced it with writing-as-a-professional entertainment. I soon found myself going to sleep earlier and waking up when the house was nice and quiet to write before the sun came up. Perhaps you find your writing hour after everyone has gone to bed. Or during your lunch break. Make it consistent; make it daily; make it happen.

Well, I have given up video-games. We do watch TV sometimes. I watch Manchester United matches regularly, which for now happens twice a week. I have found time. Time enough to write one of these blog posts. Ideally, I would like to do more.

There was another insight related to this, about how most of the writing happens away from the keyboard.

What used to kill my writing process were the hours spent staring at an open document not knowing what to write next. Writing should not take place behind a keyboard. Your computer has too many ways of distracting you, and nothing puts on the pressure like a blank page and a blinking cursor. The time to write is all the quiet hours spent away from the computer. This is a challenge, because we have become allergic to quiet time. The aspiring writer needs to fix this immediately and with absolute stringency.

Quiet time means driving to and from work or school without the radio on. It means wearing earbuds on the subway but not playing any music. It means taking up yoga or meditation. It means putting an end to perseverating on conversations with friends and colleagues that aren’t productive. Our minds race, no doubt. Keep your mind racing on your novel. Not only will this help with writing, I believe it helps in general.

I read this and thought, I used to do that. When I was writing my first draft. The draft so bad, that it will not see the light of day!

Anyway.

I used to think about that book, every time: while getting on the metro, while classes were going on, at work. Everywhere. Every-time.

I am not doing that for this new book.

While I am on my walks, I listen to podcasts. Which are useful in their own way. But it is eerily similar to the digital consumption that does not let me work. I feel productive. But I am consuming. And while I am consuming, I am not creating.

So today, while I went on my walk, I put on the Classical Chill playlist on Apple Music. And I walked. And thought, and found one way to move forward with the book. I also got the idea to write this post. And further thoughts on formatting and publishing the poetry collection.

Quiet time is important. That's when we think. That's when we create.

So, go create.

Playful Eyes

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Playful eyes.
Looking here,
Looking there,
And now back here.

You are looking
for things to get
your hands on,
things you could
put in your mouth.

Why?
Does the TV remote taste
absolutely delicious?
Should I taste it?

Do you need to smack
some sense into the actress
on that show?
Should I try it?
Will it stop her
from going into that basement?

Playful eyes.
Looking for things to grab.
Playful eyes.
When you look at me,
it feels as if you are
peering into my soul.

Soulful eyes.
Dreamy eyes.
Playful eyes.

Two Lessons on Work

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

When I joined TCS, all those years back, I started with a healthcare project. The company we worked for had DCs all across the world, including two in India. Or was it three?

It does not matter. This is not about DCs.

There was this one person, whom the rest of the team did not like as much. They were senior to me. Everyone was senior to me at this point. But I was not especially close to them. I did not expect much from them.

And yet, they told me two things which have stayed with me in the years since.

Show your work.
Ask for help

Show your work

If you did something, tell people you did something. Most of the times we assume that our leads should know what we are doing. Our work should speak for itself. They are bad managers if they do not know what is going on.

But here's the thing, they are also humans. No body know what you are doing. Show your damn work! Talk about it. Make sure people are aware of what you are doing.

Ask for help

We have all had times, when we were unsure of something. Should it be X or Y? Is this stupid to ask, in this meeting? What would the rest of the team think?

It does not matter. If you need help, if you are unsure, ask for help. No one came here knowing everything. We learn. We grow. Asking for help, helps on this journey. As a bonus, it might help prevent a production issue!

Books I've Read This Year

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Books I've read this year

I got inspired to this after seeing Cory Doctorow do this on Pluralistic. This will be a yearly ritual going forward. And I do hope to read more this coming year. So this will be a good measure for that as well.

Fiction

Kevin Kelly - Excellent Advice for Living
Scalzi, John - Redshirts
Dick, Philip K. - Blade Runner
Doctorow, Cory - Little Brother
Weir, Andy - Project Hail Mary
Chambers, Becky - A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Chambers, Becky - A Prayer for the Crown-Shy
Scalzi, John - Starter Villain
Chambers, Becky - To Be Taught If Fortunate
Chambers, Becky - The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
Chambers, Becky - A Closed and Common Orbit
Chambers, Becky - Record of a Spaceborn Few

Poems

Neruda, Pablo, and W. S. Merwin - Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Riddell, Chris - Poems to Fall in Love with

Non-fiction

Catmull, Edwin E - Creativity Inc
Bickham, Jack - Elements of Fiction Writing - Scene & Structure

Sitting and Talking

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There was this thing we used to do back in college. And for years after, while we got busy with our jobs.

Once a month, we would meet, the five of us. It could be Sarthak's place or mine. We would either go out to eat, or order in. Then during college days we would play Counter Strike. Later, we grew out of CS. Though some of us still want to get back to shooting the others across the map of De Dust.

The bonds of our friendship were forged in these Coke fuelled CS nights.

Today, while reading about the German practice of Stammtisch, I found myself reminiscing our CS days.

"In every German village there is the corner bar, and in the corner is a table. It's reserved for the sort of elders or other regulars. And they sit in the corner and they drink their beer and smoke their cigarettes and pontificate on the town and all of its craziness."

We did not drink alcohol during our CS nights. But it was regular, we did not have to worry about where we would sit. It was home, after all. We did laugh, sing and dance.

Men in particular can find it hard to be vulnerable with one another, added Hein. But amid the ambiance and repeated meetings of a Stammtisch, something starts to happen.
"You open up on things, on your very personal things," Hein said. "Nowadays, I have to almost say it's more important than ever to have a kind of Stammtisch."

That is also something we did often. But during the winters of Delhi, we would sit on the terrace, burn some wood and talk. Talk about things we could not to anyone else. Talk without worrying what they would think. Talk without objective or want. Or maybe sometimes to get advice.

And it was nice.

Now, I liven in Finland. Uchit is in Japan. Sarthak and Saurabh are in Delhi. Pankaj is in Bangalore.

And man do I miss it.

Sitting and talking.

Advanced Civilisations Could Be Indistinguishable From Nature

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The Fermi paradox is about the lack of advanced space-faring civilisations we have come across (none) given that there are a lot of stars in the galaxy, which should have a lot of habitable planets surrounding those stars.

There are a few solutions to this:

Life is not so common. And advanced civilizations are exceedingly rare. We could be the only one.
The great filter solution. There is a step that no civilization has been able to pass. A natural catastrophe, war, something that kills civilizations before they can become space-faring.

There is an underlying assumption in the reasoning behind Fermi paradox. It is biased on only one observation: our own history, our own planet. Our evolutionary history might not be common through the universe.

There could be a sustainability solution to the Fermi paradox which is postulated in this research, titled: The Grass of the Universe: Rethinking Technosphere, Planetary History, and Sustainability with Fermi Paradox). That is humanity needs to transition to sustainable development in order to avoid collapse.

And if, other civilisations in the universe come to a similar conclusion then there worlds would look very close to nature. There would be a convergence with nature.

And so the way we are looking for life outside of our solar system might not find anything. This breaks the Kardashev scale as well. As there is just no need to consume more and more. To build Dyson spheres to get energy from our local stars. Then, systems to consume energy on a galactic scale.

Food for thought.

Feels Like Christmas

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #39, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads and Mastodon.

It feels like Christmas!

We went to Tripla Mall today. The stated aim for the visit was shopping at SinSay. Sinsay is a brand, like HnM. You get stuff for cheap. Prerna wanted to buy some stuff for cheap.

We don't shop in Tripla often so I was a bit confused by where to go and how. Plus travelling with a pram can be a challenge in itself. You have to use lifts. There was a lot of go here, no go back, go there.

The mall was decked up in seasonal decorations. After shopping we ended at Delhi Rasoi. We were there at eight, there was no one else in the restaurant at that time. It felt like we had booked the entire hotel for ourselves. The restaurant is neat, the interiors are well done.

Per usual, I ordered a samosa. Additionally tikki-chat and their special paneer. The samosa tasted like a bastardised version of my beloved samosa. It lacked flavour. And they had put gobhi in it. The tikki-chat had plenty of flavour. The paneer was pretty great too.

One thing that surprised me back in 2021 when I had first arrived here was all gravies are served with naan and rice. You don't pay extra for that.

There is a seasonal attraction in the form of a winter themed space for children to play in. After dinner we sat for a bit there and let Savya play in the area. He was very happy. He does not usually get to play in that much free space or with other children.

All in all, a good day.

/five things to share

1. Why are laws written in an incomprehensible fashion - an MIT study

Just as “magic spells” use special rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority, they conclude.

2. The decaying internet - The Verge

There’s a phenomenon that happens where I live along the rugged coastline of Northern California, when conditions are right, or, more accurately, wrong: a layer of green, foamy scum clings to the surface of the ocean so that when the waves wash your footprints away, they are replaced by a layer of vile, reeking slime dotted by writhing marine organisms. This is, at times, how the internet feels right now. We are being slowly erased, but instead of passing peacefully into the vale with the ebb and flow of soothing waves, we are being actively replaced by garbage.

3. The ghost artists of Spotify - Liz Pelly

Around this same time, I started hearing jazz piano playlists on Spotify that disturbed me. Every track sounded like it was played on the same instrument with the exact same touch and tone. Yet the names of the artists were all different.

About how Spotify is filling up mood playlists with music from Swedish studios, whom they pay less. Also read the ugly truth about spotify is finally out, which basically talks about the same thing.

4. How automakers created the rules around jaywalking

It’s strange to imagine now, but prior to the 1920s, city streets looked dramatically different than they do today. They were considered to be a public space: a place for pedestrians, pushcart vendors, horse-drawn vehicles, streetcars, and children at play.

Can you imagine such a time?

“The crucial thing it said was that pedestrians would cross only at crosswalks, and only at right angles,” Norton says. “Essentially, this is the traffic law that we’re still living with today.”

5. Parker solar probe will fly into the sun

The probe will fly into the sun then out multiple times as it tries to understand the source of solar winds. It is technically impressive as something if heated and cooled rapidly becomes brittle or might sag.

/new posts

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

How Do I Know If Someone Subscribed to Me via RSS

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I love RSS. Ever since I've discovered it thanks to Net News Wire, I have moved a lot of my reading to it.

Reading in NNW via RSS enabled me to delete the browser tab I had for reading. It also enabled me to expand my reading list. There are twenty five items in the list. One perpetual to-do item I have now is creating a blog-roll on my website.

I so prefer the whole experience that I unsubscribed to a few people, and now read them via RSS instead. I was getting weekly posts from seths.blog for example. Now I subscribe to them on RSS instead.

I want RSS everywhere.

One interesting conundrum I've found myself in is from the writer's perspective though.

As a writer if I cared only about whether people read me or not, I would have no issues with RSS. But if I want to know how many people I'm reaching, then RSS by its very nature does not provide any solution.

Email subscriptions do that. I can see how many people read my emails. With basic analytics, I also know who opened my email. I don't need more. The problem with emails is that email apps do not provide a good reading experience. The UI problem is easy to solve though.

If someone subscribes to me via RSS, how do I know they are subscribed to me?

There are people who would tag or reach out via socials or email. But most people do not want that. I think. I imagine most people to be me. I just want to read.

Does it matter? That I don't know if fifty people subscribe to me or forty? I think it does. I keep going back to thousand true fans. If I don't know who has subscribed to me, how can I talk to them. How would I know that I will have a thousand true fans?

Can the RSS protocol be updated to include some sort of very basic analytics?

No Pity for the Bosses

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Here's the thing. The reason why people don't support taxing the rich is this: we all hope to be rich one day. We all have that hope. Even though none of us will ever become rich. We imagine ourselves as rich, and think, no I would not want to be taxed. I want to keep all the money!

When I had started working, or even now, a couple of years back, when I heard of workers trying to unionise at Apple, or Amazon, I used to think, why would these people not let Apple (or Amazon) do the work. I believed the company line.

I used to believe that unions were antithetical to good businesses. They did not let businesses do the good work of serving their customers.

I do not think that anymore. In most cases, we the people do not get a voice. Monopolies decide to make services worse, while raising prices. We, can not and do not do anything.

Doctorow writes about this often at Pluralistic. He wrote about how this is a thing for nurses in America.

Take Shiftkey: nurses are required to log into Shiftkey and indicate which shifts they are available for, and if they are assigned any of those shifts later but can't take them, their app-based score declines and they risk not being offered shifts in the future. But Shiftkey doesn't guarantee that you'll get work on any of those shifts – in other words, nurses have to pledge not to take any work during the times when Shiftkey might need them, but they only get paid for those hours where Shiftkey calls them out. Nurses assume all the risk that there won't be enough demand for their services.

Each Shiftkey nurse is offered a different pay-scale for each shift. Apps use commercially available financial data – purchased on the cheap from the chaotic, unregulated data broker sector – to predict how desperate each nurse is. The less money you have in your bank accounts and the more you owe on your credit cards, the lower the wage the app will offer you. This is a classic example of what the legal scholar Veena Dubal calls "algorithmic wage discrimination" – a form of wage theft that's supposedly legal because it's done with an app.

The way we treat our healthcare workers and teachers and most people for that matter, is truly hideous. All, in search of, in service of profit. The businesses do not care about their workers, or society. The only thing that matters is shareholder value. It's weird.

When you target the vulnerable, and not to improve their lives, but to make their lives worse, you should know you are in a shitty business.

The Net Good or Bad of AI

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

What is the net result of IA? Is it good or bad?

I am thinking about it in the short term of course. No body knows what we can do with it in the long term.

There are three ideas here:

We can't skip the intermediate step. If we want to get to the end state of AGI (or anything else), we can't skip the intermediate step. The intermediate steps are not great. LLMs consume a lot of compute, which is causing even more pollution. But without these worse steps we can't get to a better state.
What are LLMs good for? LLMs in their current state are built up on stolen things, and for what? For a fancy auto-complete/grammar-check/code-complete? Now, because we have the hype-cycle going on, everything needs AI. Everything. Whether it is making the product or the experience better does not really matter. Universities are struggling with how to deal with AI generated papers. Of course, they are also using AI systems to deal with this.
Creating problems and then solving them. The use of these LLMs and AI systems are creating problems which were not their earlier. So of course, we need to have new AI systems to deal with the problems created by these AI systems. Which is like a self-perpetuating cycle. Youtube will come out with a system to detect and remove creator ai likeness.

Of course, OpenAI and their ilk want all of us to think AI is a platform shift. They will get to make a bunch of money out of it. But it needs to be viewed against the cost. Are the perceived benefits enough. Is humanity so far gone that only an artificial god can save us?

We Don't Own Anything in This Age of Subscriptions

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

We don't own anything in this age of subscriptions

On the 14th of December, I got into the kitchen in the morning, put the pan on the induction stove, and said, 'Hey Siri, play Gayatri Mantra'. Siri replied, 'Sorry I could not find anything on Apple Music.'

I was miffed. But it happens sometimes. Siri is a bit iffy. But Siri had been working fine since quite a bit. So I was a bit miffed, but continued my cooking. Breakfast was getting into brunch times, and I was hungry.

Next day, I tried again. And got the same reply. This time, I had time, so I picked up my phone and opened Apple Music. To my surprise, Apple Music showed that I needed to subscribe to listen to my music. My music.

I had Youtube premium. So I dowloaded Youtube music and played music there. I did not like the Youtube Music UI. I am not judging it. I am not saying it has a bad UI. I am accustomed to the Apple Music UI. I was miffed.

I had this weird feeling in the back of my mind. My music. Where did my music go? This thing happened, I don't know how, and suddenly all the songs and albums and music I had added to my library was all gone.

I did not have anything. I am a tenant. As long as I am a paying customer I have access to stuff. If I stop paying, I don't have anything. This is not unique to Apple of course. The same thing exists for example on PS5 as well, where any games that I add from PS Plus are not really mine.

It is a weird thing. Paying for something, but not owning it. One could argue that that is the case with our phones too. That Apple or Samsung, whatever, owns the device, and they lend it to you for three four years. You can't do anything you want to with it. It is not really yours. It's on lease.

In this age of subscriptions everywhere, we do not own anything. Most of the times, things work as they should and we do not notice this fact. But the fact remains, whether we notice it or not.

Eventually, I talked to Apple support and got the issue rectified. Somehow, the subscription got cancelled. The remaining money was refunded to my account. I tried using Youtube Music for another day before I subscribed to Apple Music again.

For a little time there, my library was empty, while Apple Music was syncing. I was scared. Would I have to recreate my library?

It did finish the sync process though. I got my library back.

And so I asked, 'Hey Siri, play Gayatri Mantra.'

We Can Have a Fun Conversation With Max Four People

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

After celebrating a birthday in Leppävaara, we had taken the 520 to get back home. The four of us were sitting around the middle of the bus, chatting, laughing. The four of us, and Savya, who was mostly getting fussy, chatting and laughing.

We were a bit loud. Nitin remarked at one point that we had turned this into our drawing room. No body says anything in Finland, they stare daggers at you. I did not notice anyone, others had though.

At Suurpelto, a fifth friend joined us on the bus. He sat a little bit at the back, and I could sense the conversation shift as he joined. It wasn't that we did not like him. We did.

He would chip in from time-to-time. But it did not feel as natural as while the four of us were talking earlier.

Turns out, there is a good reason for this.

Professor Robin Dunbar has a theory for the maximum number of people who can join in a conversation for it to remain fun. That number is four.

He said: “You very rarely get more than four people in a conversation. In the normal run of things, when a fifth person joins a group, it’ll become two conversations within about 20 seconds.” Alternatively, a “lecture” situation develops in which one person holds court and the others act as an audience.

In larger groups, “you have to decide whether the person who is speaking is really so important you’d rather be standing there saying nothing”, he said. If the speaker is not very interesting, the audience tends to splinter into groups of four or fewer. Dunbar believes that the underlying reason is that we can only track what a certain number of people are likely to be thinking at one time.

He also has a theory for the maximum number of connections we are able to sustain: 150.

I have seen this in action many times earlier. Of course I did not know the magic number then. But on long tables during lunches or dinners, conversations tend to split off. Or one person becomes the centre of attraction: talking everybody's head off.

Neither of these scenarios are permanent though. Smaller groups eventually splinter off with their own conversations.

We got off from the bus at Matinkylä and continued to our homes. All I was thinking about then was to not slip on the icy pavements!

Digital Consumption Does Not Let Me Do Actual Work

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There are two types of people in the world - those who create and those who consume. Facebook, IG and the rest evolved from social networks to social media. They honed the product (their algorithms) to such a degree so as to get maximum engagement from their users. This is visible in Meta's user hostile decision to always default to the algorithmic 'For You' feed on Threads.

When some of the smartest people in the world want you to get addicted to something, you will get addicted to it. And so many are. Doomscrolling is a thing. Ask someone what they saw after an hour spent scrolling, and they would not be able to reliably answer.

I take pride (ego?) in the fact that I recognise this fact and am able to take action from time-to-time to test my resolve regarding social media.

Whenever I find myself scrolling IG uncontrollably, for example, I uninstall the app for a few days/weeks/months.

I do not post to Facebook since a long time now. I enabled auto-posting between IG and FB, so all my recent posts are that. I did not delete FB. Never felt the need to, actually.

And yet, despite it all, I found myself nodding along as I read digital consumption keeps me from getting better at my job.

There are a couple of things which spoke to me in paricular:

I write. I used to have great vocabulary. Now, at times I struggle to find the right words. I space out on simple things.
I find it hard to engage with longer content. Books, or longer articles. I bookmark them in NNW for reading it later. But never do.

I have recently discovered NNW, and I find myself struggling with wanting to read everything. Get the notifications down to zero. I feel productive while doing so. And there are a lot of good things I come across on the web too. But I wonder now, am I getting better at things at my job. Or things that I am working on now.

The answer I think is no.

Sure, I am getting a lot of articles to talk about for NordLetter. Which is good I guess, but there is only so much time in a day. If I am spending that time reading on the web, I am not spending that time working on my book. Or reading that AD book for work. Or preparing for AZ-305.

I don't have a solution at present. I need to find a balance. There is also a mental aspect to this all. This deluge of content is not healthy. I could remove the Hacker News feed, for example, but there is some really interesting stuff I come across on that feed sometimes. This sivervepunk article for example.

I do not have a solution at present. Turning off the notifications might work. Which is the default state for almost all the apps on my phone. Maybe its the unread badge which is making me anxious and not at peace.

I do not have a solution at present. I will report back when I do.

The Families We Make

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #38, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

It snowed today. Today, being Saturday. This is the time for the annual, winter-wonderland photos. So here it goes.

No matter how many times I see this, the first snow of the season is such a joy. It looks beautiful, everything feels pristine.

It never lasts though. But that is for another time.

Families are weird. You don't have a choice mostly, who your family is. All families have dysfunctions. And yet, you would die for your family. No matter what they do. Unless they fuck up real bad.

One aspect of leaving everything behind, and coming to live in a new place, anywhere: a different city, a different state, a different country, is that you leave your family behind as well.

We are social animals. We need people around us. People to talk to. People to have fun with. People to support us when needed.

We get to pick our families here. Sure we might not talk to them everyday. We might not live under the same roof. But we are a family.

It's a good thing.

We celebrated the first birthday of a child in our family. It was good fun. We got the cake from somewhere near Vanta. The food was good. The kids running around were too many! We had fun.

Prerna shares her birthday with this child. We got a lime cake from Prisma and cut it on the 12th night.

I made a reel and put it up on IG. It’s my early meditation on love and what it means to love her.

/five things to share

1. One good and one ok news about electric cars

Electric Cars Could Last Much Longer Than You Think

Bad batteries are perhaps the major reason why I’m unsure if I should buy an electric car. If this holds true, then it would be great. These things (batteries in particular and technology in general) only improve with time after all.

The electric shock behind Europe's stuttering EV future - and how China has leapfrogged major car-exporting nations

Making a battery is very, very different to making an engine. It's chemical engineering - not mechanical engineering. The skills built up by European carmakers over decades are simply not directly transferrable. Even if Europe was the only continent in the world making cars, it would still be an almighty challenge to shift from one industrial model to a very different one, without having a rollercoaster ride along the way

An interesting look at why China is taking the lead in electric cars. This and the subsidies provided by their government.

2. A hopeful bit of news about rebuilding classrooms with lego like blocks

Classroom of Hope has partnered with Finnish company Block Solutions, which developed the modular building system for speedy construction, making it the first of its kind for disaster relief construction. A dedicated Block Solutions Indonesia factory was opened in the south of Lombok in June 2023 to reduce the costs and carbon footprint of shipping the modules from Finland.

3. About how the rich can pay for human service while the rest of us go talk to an AI agent

But no one is talking about what happens when we limit human contact to those who can afford to pay a premium. Technology does not arrive on a blank slate, but intersects with existing inequalities, and in this case it amplifies the stratification of human connection. In 2025, the affluent will get their connective labor from humans. The rest will get theirs from a machine.

Seems obvious, while reading the article, but this was a fresh look into the whole AI hoopla for me. The further alienation between the rich and the rest.

4. The age of plastics might be coming to an end

Since 2022, policymakers in the United Nations, representing over 170 countries, have been negotiating a legally binding Global Plastics Treaty addressing the full lifecycle of plastics, from design to production to disposal.

There are two factions, the first led by the Nordics who want plastic production to be reduced. The second option about recycling, etc. is preferred by oil manufacturers like UAE, etc.

5. The age of average - Alex Murell

Alex looks at how everything is becoming the same across most of our society: cars, fashion, homes, movies, art. Everything.

This bit from the fashion section:

“Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70. We are so conformist, nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff, we have been trained to be consumers and we are all consuming far too much. I’m a fashion designer and people think, what do I know? But I’m talking about all this disposable crap.”

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

The Things We Don't Need

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The things we don't need

For the past couple of days, I had been getting an SMS from my bank informing me that a 699 rupee charge was not going through because of a bad expiry date on my credit card.

It was the Netflix charge. I pay for the highest tier available in India. It is the same plan that I had from when we were sharing it in the household.

We can't do that anymore. We are in Finland, and our family is back in India.

Anyway.

I logged into Netflix today to add the new card to Netflix, so that that subscription could go through. I looked at the tiers that were available: mobile, basic, standard and premium. I thought about going to standard, but that comes with 1080p max resolution. I want that 4K.

And then, just in that brief moment, I thought how much do you use Netflix now? What was the last thing you watched on Netflix? Do you need this subscription?

I have been thinking about consumption and this want for more since, ironically, I saw that documentary on Netflix. I also came up on this post by Steph - Buy wisely.

Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use. Sometimes I consider other priorities such as cost per smile , cost per thrill , cost per externality , and cost per lesson.

I try to do that too. Imagine how often I would use something. What would be the cost per use.

That is one of the reasons why I feel one should spend more on quality underwear or socks. Things that you wear day in and out, many times over. The cost per use of a product like that will be good. I do similar calculations around the phone I buy and for how long I keep it. And so on.

The insidiousness of subscriptions is that we don’t subsequently question whether we need this thing anymore or not. There are no doubt benefits too for the consumer. But businesses bet on the fact that most people will find the cancellation cumbersome. Or they employ dark-patterns to make it difficult for people to cancel.

Netflix , helpfully, gave an option to pause things for a month, instead of cancelling.

The answer was that I don't need this subscription. We don't watch TV anymore. I mostly watch PL matches, twice a week. If we both want to or get to watch something we do that on YouTube.

So, I cancelled my subscription to Netflix.

If we want to watch something, which is on Netflix, we will subscribe for a month, then cancel it. That feels like a good decision.

What Is Love?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

what is love?

an year has passed since,
i wondered that out loud last.

a lot has changed,
over this past year.

an year of firsts,
it was. is still.

we grew. became more.
grew fuller perhaps.

we travelled a bunch,
to places we hadn’t been before.

we tried out new cuisines,
remember that vietnamese?

we brought life here, in this world.
now we get to watch it grow.

so much has happened in this year.
so much has changed.

what has remained the same,
is how you make me feel.

Music Can Remind You of Things

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Here's what I do.

I get up, do yoga, take a shower, eat, put my headphones on, kiss Prerna good-bye and then walk to the metro. While I'm walking to the metro I am listening to ATP.

Once I step inside the metro, I find a seat, open my bag, takeout the book I'm reading, pause the podcast, open the Music app, go to all songs, and press play.

For the next twenty odd minutes as I go from Matinkylä to Sörnäinen, I read my book while the music, plays in the background.

Previously, I used to do this routine on the bus.

The list of songs I would listen to, was slightly different then. These days it mostly starts with Linkin Park's From Zero.

Today, when I played this album, these songs in the kitchen, I found myself transported to the story I was reading in the metro. The music felt like the background score to the story.

I was transported. Not just to the metro, but to the story I was reading, I was in, then.

Music has the power to transport you to places. Places where you had heard it in a certain context.

Music can transport you, across time and place.

Birthdays Are Funny

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

We start with celebrating the birthdays. The first birthday, then the fifth, the tenth and so on.

The nature of the celebrations varies, of course. The baby does not care about the birthday to begin with. The baby does not know that it's their birthday which is being celebrated!

With time they start caring more. About the cake, the return gifts, the theme, and so on.

Till they don't. Till birthday parties become cringe. And not cool anymore. When the cool thing to do is to hangout with your friends. Or something else.

You spend enough time on this planet, you're not sure what are you supposed to celebrate anymore.

You start losing people. Your friends, siblings. Your people. Not your parents. Not your uncles, or aunts. Your people.

And then, I don't know how that feels. It must feel your heart with impending gloom. You must look back at your life and think.

I want you to know you lived a good life. It was your birthday yesterday. I don't know how you're feeling now, Dad. You lost your sister recently. I don't know how you're feeling now. I hope you're good. Or will be, soon. I love you.

Writing More vs Less

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Writing more is better. Right?

But I love the elegance of Steph, or Derek or Craig. I love the elegance of single word urls: https://stephango.com/self-guarantee.

I love the idea of reducing thoughts to their very core. Of editing, of making things simpler.

I love the idea that there might be few things on my website, but they will mean more, somehow.

Writing lesser, more evergreen notes type of things is better. Right?

But I love the daily ritual of opening Daring Fireball, or Seth's blog. How good is that url, btw? https://seths.blog.

I love that you would have a reason to open my website each day.

I love the promise.

I love what it says about me. I am a writer, because I write. Every. Single. Day.

I love that it allows me to think.

Notes on Obsidian

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Mobile

I use Obsidian mobile. A lot. Almost every day.

I do not enjoy doing it.

It is not seamless. It feels bolted on. I have two shortcuts I use (part of the Lumberjack plugin) more than I use the app directly.

Obsidian on Mac (or PC) is a different thing than Obsidian Mobile. Or should be. It is a different product. The developers should look at it as a different product.

The vault can remain the same. But we don't need the myriad options that are available on the desktop app.

The mobile app should primarily be for two things only:

Quick capture
Quick reference

I could argue that if they just start with the first item, i.e. quick capture, it would perhaps be enough.

I saw on the roadmap that they are working on mobile quick capture. It is planned. So, they will start work on it soon. But that would be another thing on top of this. Whatever Obsidian mobile is, at present.

They need to burn it all down. And then build quick capture.

Longform

I am not sure what the problem is, but Longform does not seem to work for me. I use an iCloud vault. I am fairly certain it has something to with sync, or missing permissions.

Here's the problem:

I create a new project.
I add scenes to it.
I close Obsidian, but then everything is gone. The project does not stay in Longform.

I found links online, but nothing exactly describes my issue.

I removed and re-added the longform plugin. I created new projects. Nothing worked.

I opened the index file and found out that for some reason it does not update with the scene list.

I created a new draft and moved all the scenes to that draft, and with that at least, the index file was updated. But any scenes I add after this are not added to this new index.

I don't know if I close Obsidian, will the state go?

I don't want to use Scrivener. Please don't make me.

Before and After

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #37, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

Finland celebrated its 107th Independence Day on Friday.

Happy Independence Day to those who celebrate!

May Finland continue to be all that it is today and more.

Winter arrived in Finland. By winter, I mean snow.

There was snow in Helsinki, a couple of weeks back when we had landed. But then it got warmer, and the snow went away. It snowed these past couple of days.

Here's a before and after of the road I walk on, on my way to the office.

Sini-tarra is a wonderful sticky clay like thing. We used it to stick all the Ikea frames on the wall.

We bought the Yllevad frames for Ikea and were considering getting some sort of adhesive hooks to hang them on. Prerna talked to our neighbour and she told us about sini-tarra. She had some, so she showed us how to use it.

I went and picked some from Suomalainen Kirjakauppa in Iso Omena. Lo-and-behold! We had our photo-wall ready!

/five things to share

1. An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet

In his 3,000-word story, the writer imagines a world consisting of an enormous and possibly infinite number of hexagonal rooms. The bookshelves in each room hold uniform volumes that must, its inhabitants intuit, contain every possible permutation of letters in their alphabet.

2. I don't know how to build software and you don't either

In my experience, you only start to see long-term consequences at the three-to-five-year mark at a company. That gives you at most four different perspectives into how software development gets done at different places (for instance, you might see a doomed monolith-to-microservices refactor at one workplace, and a more successful one at the next workplace). I don’t think four data points is enough.

3. Intel removed Pat Gelsinger. Why?

If Intel is falling apart, this isn’t just a business story. The United States government has called it a national security story, too. Intel isn’t just the world’s former leading maker of computer chips; it’s one of the last companies to both design and manufacture them itself instead of outsourcing the latter part to Asia.

4. Seth - Who owns your words?

Take a moment to think about whether you mean what you just said or perhaps are simply cheering for your team. If they’re not your words, you still might be responsible for uttering them.

5. ISS will be decommissioned in 20230.

Sometime in 2030, astronauts will pack up their belongings, turn out the lights, and depart the International Space Station (ISS) for the last time. The trajectory of this grand old structure will be adjusted, putting it further into the path of Earth’s atmosphere over the next year, and then a specially designed deorbit vehicle attached to the station will perform one long reentry burn, pushing the station down into the atmosphere.

Sad. Just sad.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Building Furniture

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Finland celebrated its 107th Independence Day on Friday. It is a public holiday in Finland, which made this a long weekend.

Coincidentally, Ikea delivered the Billy bookshelf I had ordered from them on Saturday.

I spent a good part of my day looking at diagrams and assembling the said furniture. There is something about assembling the thing yourself which makes owning the furniture better.

You can say, I put that together. Even though the designers at Ikea made sure that putting the furniture together was as easy as it could be.

We all used to build things in the past. Some still do. Most of us don't.

It is nice to have built something with my hands. And not just type it out, looking at a screen somewhere.

Happy Ikea day!

Beating Death

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The first I came across the concept was while reading Asimov's Robot series - The caves of steel in particular. I was fascinated by the idea. Of not having to die. Of having longer lives. The book talked about that. That people were able to do more with their lives.

I had wanted that then. Some way to live longer perhaps.

There are merits. Not having disease. Being in your prime, for longer. For perhaps, as long as you were alive.

Today, I was reading about a scientist advocating for the same. The article starts with a great example of someone living with T1, before insulin was available. Hardly living, on just the minimum amount of food. She survived, just, and the world got insulin. The little girl lived till she was seventy. It was compelling.

But, it felt wrong.

I believe now, that at the core of that piece was fear of death. And the consideration that we are different, better somehow.

I think that is at the core of a lot of issues we have these days. We don't consider ourselves to be part of nature. Every natural thing, every thing that is born in nature, dies.

It prevents us from being good toward the fellow species we share this planet with. It leads us to make unsustainable decisions. It leads us to wreck the planet.

Humans have the power to affect a lot of things. I don't think we have wielded that power correctly. I know we can be better. I am hopeful.

Living forever is not the answer.

Types of Workers in an Organisation

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There exist archetypes of people around us in an organisation. Everyone to an extent is a mix of some of these archetypes. There might be some who map exactly with the archetypes. But not many.

Far more common, I think, is that we start of as an archetype but we evolve.

The risk for burnout, is too high, otherwise.

The four archetypes are these:

Grinder
Coaster
Believer
Grifter

I started of as a mix of believer and grinder. I used to feel that my work spoke for itself. Over time I realised that if the higher-ups did not appreciate the work I was doing, it was as good as if I was not doing any work. There was no shame in making sure they knew what I was doing. Everyone is busy, we can not expect the higher-ups to go out of their way to figure out what we are doing.

I started managing my work and time a bit better. I decided to trust others with the work that they were supposed to do. I used to try to finish all work. I have realised now that work is endless. There will always be more work the next day. Time management and prioritisation goes a long way.

Duo All the Way

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I am using Duolingo to learn Finnish since (checks phone) longer than the 108 day streak I am on now. There were shorter streaks before that.

I moved to Finland in 2021. Learning Finnish was a big part of the conversation here. And I wanted to. To better understand the culture and the people perhaps. I wanted to make an effort, in any case.

I have finished Section 1 and am on Section 2 now. I know a few words.

Duolingo is good for that, for building vocabulary. But there is no explanation. It is a bit of pattern matching. Similar to how I got 97 in Sanskrit in my tenth grade.

But, there are no explanations. I don't know much about the grammar. I don't know for example, why do they add an extra 'a' to words. Why?

I will finish this section soon. There are not that many sections for Finnish. And it would be nice to know that there are certain things that are allowed to end in this world.

I will find something else then. But till then, I will continue Duolingoing.

Why Are There No Small Photo Sharing Apps

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

"You can see the Hudson from here", she said.
I could. I thought. 'Yes' I said.
"That's what I keep on doing these days", she said.
"That is not a bad thing", I said.
The view really was nice.
"I loved the pictures you had sent yesterday. Nice decorations!" I said.
"Yes. Yes. Took time. But turned out real nice! I don't put things online. I just message whoever I want to share it with" she said.
And I thought, where have I heard that before?

There are no socials where you could share pictures with your loved ones. Pictures, messages. I guess WhatsApp is that? In a way.

Facebook and Instagram used to be that. A long time. Now, our timelines are filled with AI slop. Everything is engagement bait. Instagram is filled with influencers wanting to sell you stuff. In fact, all of Instagram is nothing but a shopping app masquerading as a photo/video app.

I get that an organic, with no goal of maximising engagement, photo-sharing app might not be super-profitable. It might be good enough to sustain itself though. Somebody should make this app.

I am done with algorithmic timelines.

Proprietary Formats

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I spent most of Saturday morning at the library, transferring the almost 150 poems I had written around 2017 from Notes to Obsidian.

I like Notes. Back in 2017, there was no Obsidian, only Notes.

I, had no idea what Markdown was. I don't know if I knew at that time that Gruber created Markdown. I don't know if I was reading Gruber in 2017. Man, 2017 was so long ago!

Anyway.

Exporting anything out of Notes is a chore. You can export to PDF, and that's it.

PDF is not a great format for editing. These notes are after all just text.

Hence, my desire to move to Obsidian and Markdown. Anything important I write now is in Markdown and Obsidian.

I had paid for Scrivener back in the day, and because of the disdain I have for closed formats, I am looking at the Longford plugin to write longer content in Obsidian as well.

In Obsidian, everything is markdown files. Files that sit on my Mac. I can do anything with these files. No one else owns these files and my work, but me. And that is valuable to me.

Now, to create a collection from these poems.

Helsinki Christmas Market

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #36, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

We visited the Helsinki Christmas Market on Saturday. It is the oldest outdoor Christmas market in Helsinki with thousands expected to visit.

The Christmas Market is arranged at the Senate Square, the Helsinki Cathedral and surrounding buildings serving as a majestic backdrop. Last year, we visited the market on Christmas, and everything was closed on that night. We took a picture with the Christmas tree and that was that.

We were in India when the tree was transported to the Senate Square and lit up. So, we wanted to visit as soon as we could, and it did not disappoint.

There are two yards: deli and restaurant, with a beautiful carousel at the market's heart. There are six entrances, lined with canopied shops, where artisans sell their wares. Some with candles, some selling hot chocolate and glogi, some selling roasted chestnuts!

If you're in Helsinki, be sure to drop in.

/five things to share

1. On captcha and designing trains

A fun set of videos.
Captcha is what you use to tell a website, I am not a robot.
The video goes through the history of captcha: the why of its creation. And then, how it changed over time.
The other video is about train-compartment design. Fun stuff.

2. Seth Godin - Understanding pricing

The money we exchange for a service or item isn’t based on how much it cost to make, how hard it was to produce or how much the producer likes it.

3. Training rats to drive a car

As animals – human or otherwise – navigate the unpredictability of life, anticipating positive experiences helps drive a persistence to keep searching for life's rewards. In a world of immediate gratification, these rats offer insights into the neural principles guiding everyday behaviour. Rather than pushing buttons for instant rewards, they remind us that planning, anticipating and enjoying the ride may be key to a healthy brain.

4. The deterioration of Google

About how ML used by Google does not rate these independent websites highly. Nobody knows why. These websites are not getting any traffic and since they depend on this traffic to make money, they're dying.

Not good.

5. Building LLMs is not a good business

Some wonderful ideas about industry structure and what makes a business successful. Building the models has never seemed like a business with the moat. There does not seem to be anything that separates one model from the other. The techniques are well known and public. This is why OpenAI seems so focused on the product, making sure ChatGPT is everywhere.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Love and Despair

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I read Pablo Neruda's twenty love poems and a song of despair.

I wanted something out of this book. I did not go in just wanting to read it, and see what comes of it.

I wanted to know how poem-books are constructed. How many poems should one have in a book. It was research, basically.

I started reading the book, but did not feel anything. Those poems in the beginning did not do anything to me. I did not feel anything. And that's what poems are supposed to do. Make you feel stuff.

But things changed, or changed just bit by bit, by the time I reached the end of the book. The last love poem hit me like a ton of bricks.

I hope to make you, dear reader feel stuff.

Life Everywhere

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The cosmos is teeming with complex organic molecules, the building block of carbon-based life.

Everywhere we look, space seems to teem with biology’s raw materials. Saturn’s moon Titan has lakes of liquid methane and ethane that are made of organic molecules, as are its hydrocarbon sand dunes. Organic molecules called tholins are probably responsible for Pluto’s reddish blush. Veritable zoos of extraterrestrial organics are found in meteorites. Organic dust drifts between the stars and rains down on Saturn from its rings.

It remains one of the great mysteries, how did life start on Earth.

The “PAH world” hypothesis, for instance, posits a stage of the primordial soup that was dominated by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Out of this slurry the first genetic molecules emerged.

This is the subject of so many great science fiction works. It could be a super-intelligent alien species. Or is it just pure chance, that life happened here? We don't know yet. But organic compounds exist in abundance in the extremes of the cosmos. It is not a big stretch to imagine that something similar could have happened on other planets in this universe.

The second piece I read, which goes nicely with this is about what happens to the natural world when people disappear.

But scientists continue to find evidence that the old idea of humans as antithetical to nature is also wrong-headed, and that rosy visions of thriving, human-free environments are more imaginary than real. “People are still imagining nature as this kind of pristine place that’s going to be saved from people,” says US environmental scientist Erle Ellis. “That is definitely a misunderstanding.”

There is this assumption that humans are the problem. One surprising insight in the article was that that is not necessarily the case. Diversity is important, in nature, and in human societies. Previously, mammoths, bisons, etc. roamed the land and caused this great diversity. Now, humans remain one of the only species which can cause this change. Otherwise, monocultures are much more likely to form in spaces devoid of people.

Be Positive

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Positivity can be contagious. When dealing with others, people can pick up on positivity. They might think you're weird. Because positivity is so scarce in this world.

You need to be this person, in order to receive the positivity in the world.

I am not that person. Usually, I have my headphones on, listening to something, reading a book or some article on my phone.

My first thought, reaction to something asked of me, is usually, no.

No, I don't to go to the beach.

No, I don't want to go to the mall.

No, I don't think this super complex thing can be done in a week.

Even if you feel something will be close. There might be a 50-50 chance if something will be done successfully. It would be beneficial to be positive. It might be the thing that helps us succeed. It will lift those around us for sure.

Be positive.

Trusting People to Do the Work They Were Hired to Do

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I graduated college in 2014 and joined TCS in October of the same year. The first two months after joining TCS were earmarked for training.

There were two streams primarily, technical and non-technical training. The technical training was designed around Windows server technologies. The non-technical training was around communication skills primarily, managing others, and other similar things.

Training was fun. I made friends. It was a good ramp from college to professional life.

There were a couple of lessons I took from the training period. The first one was around how to give feedback’s. The second was about managing people.

When we become managers, there is a tendency to micro-manage, to hand-hold. We can’t seem to let someone else do the work they were hired to do. During training, we were split into teams of five, with one lead. I would end up doing other people’s work as I felt their work was not good enough. That I could do it better. This is a bad tendency to have.

There was a study done in England, which determined that a leading cause of how happy and satisfied people felt at their jobs was if they had independence to make their own decisions. It seems intuitive enough.

And yet there is a prevalence of systems designed to monitor employees. To grade them. To scold them. I was reading Cory Doctorow’s post on bossware and I’ve been thinking about this since.

The fact that AI can't do your job, but that your boss can be convinced to fire you and replace you with the AI that can't do your job, is the central fact of the 21st century labor market. AI has created a world of "algorithmic management" where humans are demoted to reverse centaurs, monitored and bossed about by an app.

As managers and bosses, we need to be better. We need to curb this tendency we have of micro-managing. We need to trust that the people we hired, will do the things we hired them to do.

Where You Do Yoga Matters

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The day I landed in Delhi, I had tears in my eyes. Not because I got emotional about being home after more than a year, but because of the pollution in Delhi.

I was tearing up. I felt some irritation in my chest.

It was after all, the Diwali time in Delhi. It feels we are going in circles. I heard the same thing in newspapers and on TV. The same Supreme Court asking the Government wtf was going on. The same finger pointing at stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana. The solution is not technically infeasible. During odd-even and otherwise we notice the improvements. But the will is not there. Or so it feels.

On the same day that I landed, I had a flight to Bangalore. Once there, we were staying in a hotel with limited space.

Bangalore weather is great. I had wonderful breakfast at Udupi Grand almost every day.

I could not however do any yoga there. Because of time and space constraints.

I returned to Delhi and after celebrating Diwali, we travelled to Bihar, to my ancestral village to celebrate Chath.

Winter was late in the North. By now, in early November, there should have been a bit of a chill in the air. There was none here.

However, after spending a day to settle down, I started with my yoga practice. I was sleeping late and getting up later. And so, it was not ideal. By the time I woke up, the sun was already high up in the sky. It would be warm, not the heat of the summers, but still warm enough. Not ideal.

After spending five days in Bihar, we returned to Delhi.

I continued yoga at home. But it never felt right. By now a little bit of fog had started falling in the morning. And in Delhi, fog=smog.

I remember being in shavasana, and it felt as if someone was standing on my chest.

Today, after doing two days of yoga, here in my home, I can feel the difference. I can feel my body bending, stretching. I can feel my breath. I can feel the joy that yoga brings.

Yoga is not independent of the place and time it is being done in. The air that we breathe in matters, even though my body had gotten accustomed to the poisonous Delhi air in my two continuous weeks there. People living there might not feel anything. I, for sure, did not. But just because we get accustomed to almost anything, does not make it good, or right.

Where Is Home

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #35, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I am back in Finland today. It was a long nine hour flight, followed by around an hour or so waiting at immigration. I missed picking Savya's pram from the special luggage belt, and so had to go back in and get it. The cab I had booked cancelled, and so I had to book the same cab again. I am not sure if I got charged twice. I should check that out. Tomorrow, though. Today, we sleep!

I haven't had too much time to think yet. Travelling can be a fairly stressful thing, especially these long-haul flights. We worry about security checks and excess luggage, and so on and on.

A month back, when I was travelling to India, I had said I was going back home. Today, as I sit on the sofa watching United play Ipswich, I feel, I am home.

What is home?

It is a weird thing for us, who leave their families and friends to come live in different places. We live in rented places in these new towns and cities, not sure how much of this place is ours. How much of it can we make ours.

We can't let go of the home that we left behind. Nor are we completely at home in our adopted cities.

We go on holidays back home. And we return to our homes which feel more like our homes than the homes left behind.

/five things to share

1. Derek Sivers - 3 thoughts, 2 sweet pets, 1 travelog

I got an email from Derek Sivers listing out a few of their new articles. I did not even know I was subscribed to him. I appreciated that. Not being bombarded with communication.

I especially liked the ones on wealth and the pet rats.

2. How I Got My Attention Back

The internet goes off before bed. The internet doesn’t return until after lunch. That’s it. Reasonable rules. I’m too weak to handle the unreasonable.

An old Craig Mod essay that I came across this week. It was a fun read.

3. Protocols Not Platforms.

Bluesky blew up this week. Or was it last week.

Why Not Bluesky talked about a vision of a protocol based conversations. I also read Mike Masnick’s Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech. Which basically talks about the technological approach to this.

4. RSS all the way

Gruber was talking about how Apple News+ is great. A little further down, he says:

I don’t look to Apple News for anything related to tech. I definitely want to do that via RSS (which for me means NetNewsWire), the web (Safari), and social media.

I was using Omnivore for a bit. But I just wasn't reading anything I sent to it. Then, they shut down Omnivore, and I removed it. Since then, I had been thinking about what should I use for reading. After reading Gruber, I downloaded Net News Wire.

RSS is everything I ever wanted. For the sites I visit frequently, the app just checks their RSS feeds and adds it to my queue. I love two features specifically:

Bonus article: Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader (16 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

5. The way forward is the Mac

Apple has built two separate models for running software on our devices. In one, there’s a gradient of trustworthiness that strongly encourages users to stick to the safe, well-lit paths–but allows competitors to go their own way and users to make different decisions than Apple would prefer they make. And, yes, at the extremes, users can behave in ways that might open them up to danger, but only after many warnings. It’s a very good system. Apple built it that way because it cares about the Mac, the Mac ecosystem, and Mac users.

I mostly agree. Most people will be happy with the defaults. For those who want to do more, let them do more.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Good Business

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Noida! This is NordLetter #34, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

The next week will be my last in India. We will be back to the usual programming then. Last year in Finland around this time we had celebrated Diwali and were attending the Chath Event in Vanta. This year we have already celebrated these festivals, here in India.

I recounted our visit to the Ashokan pillar in Vaishali.

There will be quite a few things I will miss once I'm back in Finland.

Some of those things are these.

/five things to share

1. Inside the $20 million business of gutting failed Bay Area tech companies

The furniture from the failed startups or the businesses downsizing, has to go somewhere. Better source does that.

“When it went bad,” Denny continued, “it went bad fast.”
Suddenly, there was a sea of used furniture with nowhere to go — and now, Denny has built a $20 million business out of it.

2. Google's AI learning companion

Takes the chatbot idea a bit further, with text boxes and other elements more suited to learning.

3. Language barriers and work-life balance — Foreign specialists weigh pros and cons of working in Finland

Both Strauss and Kocaman said they remain committed to living in Finland, drawn by its natural beauty, safety and potential for lifelong friendships. They also value the country's work-life balance.

Language remains a big barrier to overcome, but at least in the IT field it is not a huge requirement.

4. POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world

POSSE is about posting in one place and having it show up across all the social media sites. Which is why I am excited about Ghost's integration with Mastodon and hopefully Threads and Bluesky soon after.

5. The new Mac Mini is great — now do the iPhone SE

We could argue all day about the merits of iOS versus Android, but there’s one thing the Android ecosystem offers that you definitely won’t find from Apple right now: a decent midrange phone.

What is decent?

A newish chip (couple of years old or so)
A good main camera
The modern iPhone design (iPhone X design)
A good screen (OLED maybe)

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Visiting the Ashokan Pillar in Vaishali

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

My hometown is in a village called Agarpur, in Lalganj, in Vaishali district, in Bihar. Despite this, this was the first time I visited some places other than my home in Vaishali. I think that happens with places we call homes.

Vaishali was an ancient metropolis, with importance in both Jain and Buddhist religions. Vaishali has one of the most well preserved Ashokan pillars, with a lion on top.

The site is well-maintained, with lush green lawns surrounding the central stupa and the remains from ancient Vaishali. Up close, on the pillar are inscriptions from the Gupta period.

There is a brick stupa surrounded by ruins. The stupa was originally erected to commemorate the event of offering honey to Buddha by the king.

Among the remains are the Kutagarshala (where Buddha used to stay) and the swastika shaped monastery.

A nice exercise I did, or tried to do was imagine how people living in the ancient times would have seen this place, or used it. There is a museum nearby, where they have a picture which does that. Imagines how it would have looked amongst straw hats. If you're in Vaishali, you should visit the museum as well.

It feels sad at times, to see Bihar, which used to be the centre of ancient India, reduced to the state it is in, through centuries of incessant looting. Modern day politicians have played their part as well in this.

Visiting the monument was a positive experience though. Most of my memories of Bihar are from my childhood, and they are not great memories. There was no electricity, or roads or anything. Things are on the upswing now though. They can be better. Perhaps they will.

The Human Condition

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Noida! This is NordLetter #33, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

It has been a crazy couple of weeks. Last week I was in Bangalore. I was in Noida for a day, after which I got in a car and travelled to my village in Bihar. I was there for a week. We did Chath Puja at a river! It was great. Now I'm back, after being in the same car for the last sixteen odd hours, travelling the same thousand odd kilometres across the three expressways.

I will have more to share later, but for now, here are some pictures.

/five things to share

1. Scientists use proteins to cause cancer cells to self-destruct

Cancer is the worst. We need to have a cure for it. It will of course be better, if we can remove the elements which make it more likely. But, in case you have it, we should have a cure.

2. Suzuki and Toyota announce the e-Vitara

Sometime next year, I plan on getting a car. I so want to get an electric car, but they are costly, and I don't know what would happen after three years. That whole situation is murky at best.
The e-Vitara that Suzuki and Toyota have announced will launch in India as well as Europe. So, might be something that I take a look at.

3. Omnivore will be shutting down

I got a mail from the developer team about this. I installed Omnivore fairly recently, and was using it mostly as a read-it-later app.
I am torn about read-it-later apps though. They strip the web's character. But I was reminded on Threads, that most of the web is shit with pop-up ads, etc. So, read-it-later apps perform a necessary and useful function.
I am looking at RSS readers, nothing definitive at this point though. I do love going to these websites, refreshing them and seeing what is new. I will miss that with any app.

4. Trump will be the 47th president of the United States

And every tech CEO are desperate to want to work with him. I know why they have to do it. But just because they have to do it, does not mean I have to like it.

5. How it went

I have been reading John Gruber for a long while now. This is not his usual post.
It's great though. Go read it if you can.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

When to Let Go

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Everything that is born in nature, dies. We are all a part of nature. Death comes for us all. And yet, when you see someone, a loved one die, it always comes as a shock, with sorrow.

Is it better to die in an instant or have some extra time with your loved ones?

It’s the people left behind, who live in sorrow, who deal with the loss. No matter what happens after death. It does not matter if death is the ultimate full stop, or if there’s rebirth. It does not. Whoever you were in life, stops being after you die.

So, again, is it better to die in an instant, without knowing you’re going to die? Or is it better to stay in pain, withering away, while your loved ones mourn your passing every single day?

Once we know, there is nothing to be done for a person, would it not be kinder to euthanise a person? While they are more of themselves? While they are not in the pain they would be in? Or shorten the pain they might feel in their last days on this planet?

Two Places

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There’s so much life here. Different life. Life that does not exist in our cities. Life in my backyard: bugs, lizards, insects. They have their predators and the preys. A perfect cycle.

The only life we have in cities are rodents: mice, cockroaches.

But here’s the thing. We can’t control this life. So after dark, we need to keep our doors and windows closed, so that these bugs don’t get in.

I think we’ve forgotten what life is, outside of the cities we live in. Life in the cities is tailored to suit human needs. Anything that does not conform, is eradicated. I don’t know if it’s right or wrong.

I would like to think, being evolved means that we would take care of all life on earth.

Diwali at Home

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Noida! This is NordLetter #32, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

My holiday continues.

We celebrated Diwali at home this year. Last year we had celebrated Diwali in Finland. Prerna and I had invited some of our Finnish friends and hosted a Diwali party at our home.

Before that we were in Bengaluru. There are still things from the trip that I am yet to unpack. We visited Bimba. We visited Dr. Jha. It was a fun trip.

We are a bunch of South Indian food at Rameshwaram cafe and Udupi Grand.

Our return flight was from the new T2 terminal at the Bengaluru airport. It is beautiful. It gave me techno-utopian solarpunk vibes.

Today I am on the Lucknow Expressway, on my way to my hometown.

five things to share

1. Suggestions to improve your life

I came across this Reddit thread about life hacks. Some of the highlights for me:

I have a keyboard shortcut on all my devices where @@ automatically enters my email address. On iOS go to: Settings>General>Keyboard>Text Replacement
I am shocked at the number of people that don’t put their sheet sets in the matching pillow case for storage until use. It keeps it all together!
Do I need or do I want. If I need it, I get it. If I want it, I wait for a few weeks, do some research, see if I can fit it in and if I still want it a month or two later then I might go get it. Turns out my wants are not always there after a while waiting. It’s new for me but has changed my mindset drastically.

2. Democracy dies in darkness

Bezos stops Washington Post’s Kamala Harris endorsement. I have a few thoughts on this. Back in India there is no independent mainstream media left. No one can report on or investigate anything against the Prime Minister. So, welcome to democracy America!

3. AI running your computer

Google may announce an agent that uses the computer for you. Similar to the agent Rabbit has or described, which I talked about here.

4. OpenAI adds search in ChatGPT

OpenAI added search to ChatGPT Search is how most of the web gets paid. We need something new. A new way for people to get paid on the web for the things they make. I don’t know how that would work here.

5. New Macs with M4 announced

Apple announced new Macs:

On Monday, new iMacs and updated accessories.
On Tuesday, new Mac minis.
On Wednesday, new MacBook Pros.
They are all faster. The mini got the redesign. The welcome announcement was that everything starts at 16GB memory. Even the Air starts at 16GB now. Thanks Apple Intelligence I guess.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Happy Diwali

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Bimba

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Bimba is an expression of the love and art of Deepika Amma. Bimba stands in this time and space as a place of beauty. Of thoughts and love for mother nature. Of sustainable practices and vision that has shaped the buildings as well as the fabrics, metal, wood and clay into the pieces of art on display in the art hut.

While I was sitting in the courtyard, looking at the things on the walls, the building crafted by Amma, with her own hands. I wondered, what would happen to this place when they pass away. They don't own the land. There's no trust. There's no people who can do what Amma does.

Everything that she has done, will do, exists in this sliver of time and place. It did not exist before 2011. Nor will it, after a certain time. This inescapable truth of life can be hard to fathom, easy to forget. So we do, we forget it. And whenever we are faced with it, we shudder. Of what will be. Of th

But that's not what Bimba is. It is about the present. About the now.

And Bimba will remain. In our hearts and minds. In the lessons that we've learnt. In the art in our homes. In our memories.

How to Blog

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

How should I blog? Or write?

I want to do it everyday. A good format for that might be what Dave does on scripting news. Have a post for each day and write all thoughts there.

Why?
Because, not all thoughts come with a headline.

And the structure of Ghost is such that each post needs a headline. I wish there were some way to automate it though.

Going Back Home

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from India! I am sitting in a random room in Bangalore as I type this. This is NordLetter #31, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I travelled to India on Wednesday. The flight aboard Finnair was good, the best I've had by now. I could not point to one particular reason and say this is why. It just felt better.

I wrote about my dreams for the fediverse, and also about kindles.

/five things to share

Documentation as code. Good documentation truly is critical to all orgs. Both consumer facing and internal. Good docs describe how things work and can help in troubleshooting when things go wrong.
Falling birth rate prompts Finland to suspend baby box procurements. People in developed places are having lesser kids. Places like Japan, even Finland, provide assistance for people wanting to have kids. I think all of this is a product of people generally being pessimistic about the future, and the rising costs of everything, along with the stagnancy of salaries. Coming from India, it always felt like the world will die of overpopulation one day, but then I came across Kevin's article about population decline. I was surprised. It felt counterintuitive, but the reasoning was solid.
The 2025 Ford Mustang Mach-E gets sportier and more affordable. I will get a car next year in spring season. I am tempted to get an electric car. But I am worried about the battery life, basically. How long will the car last and how will it perform as the battery starts to decline.
A history lesson from Adolf's Germany. This election will be an interesting one for the world. The US is a big player, and it feels like Trump knows what he wants to do this time around.
Apple will announce the new Macs with M4s next week. There should be new MacBook Pros, a redesigned Mac Mini, maybe even new iMacs. It will be a week of releases, maybe something new announced every day of the week? We shall see.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

A Tale of Two Airlines

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I travelled to India on Wednesday aboard Finnair. I always use Finnair, but this was the best flight I had with them, which is not to say that the others were bad. Just that this was the most comfortable flight for me.

I watched two monster movies back to back. First, the latest Godzilla and second Meg 2. Meg 2 specifically was very bad. It felt every bit as what you would get if corporates wrote the script.

We need it to do well in China, so there’s a Chinese lead. In the face of three killer mega sharks, there is a villain hell-bent on shooting Jason Statham. Why? The big bad needs to be chomped by these little dinosaur things, so she needs to send the chopper pilot to look at something. Why would you not just fly away?

I watched two movies, read for a bit, then slept. By the time the flight staff woke us for snacks and then landing, I was feeling refreshed, even though I had slept for less than two hours.

I had booked SpiceJet to go from Delhi to Bangalore. The flight was supposed to start at 19.00. It was delayed to 23.15. When I reached the airport, I was informed that the flight is delayed and will start at 02:20 instead.

I roamed around the mostly empty T3 airport, took some pictures, ate at McDonald’s. I tried to sleep on the benches, but couldn’t.

Around 1:00 someone from SpiceJet came and offered us food at Biryani Blues.

Thanks SpiceJet!

SpiceJet upgraded my 36A seat to 8B. I just did not have any energy to argue by this point.

The person sitting next to me was watching some YouTube video on speaker.

All I could think at that point was of course, this would happen.

I put on my headphones and tried to sleep for the next few hours.

I was able to. Despite everything.

The rest of it went smoothly after that. My luggage came fast enough. I got the cab quickly. I reached the hotel very quickly.

Bangalore is beautiful. It is cleaner compared to Delhi. That’s what I kept thinking while I was sitting in the cab.

Old things look old. That’s ok. That’s not my problem with Delhi. The problem is cleanliness.

The second problem of course is pollution. I could feel it in my lungs; my eyes were irritated.

Bangalore does not have that. The weather is awesome. I love it.

Living With Bindis

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I saw your bindi,
on the mirror in our room.
I saw your bindi,
stuck on a wall in our shower.
And I thought,
Prerna was here.
This is a lived in place.
These rooms, this home.

It felt as if you were talking to me,
Saying hi, from a different time.

Going Home

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I am travelling to India today.

Prerna asked how was I feeling as I was boarding the P train to the airport.

I feel stressed I said. Even though I was on time. Early is on time.

Travelling on planes is not seamless. You have to prepare for boarding a flight, go through security, wait for boarding to begin.

It is not as seamless as boarding a bus or a train. Even though the airport here at Helsinki is the most seamless one I have been to.

As I type this, I am sitting at 65A. I don’t know who will sit next to me. The seat is empty at present. I will be very surprised if it remains that way.

Now back to the book.

The Future of Kindle

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Far too many times in the past, I was tempted to listen to The Vergecast. I did not start before now. But then, Amazon announced the new Kindles and the vergecast had an episode with Panos Panay discussing these same Kindles.

I added the Vergecast to Overcast and started the download of the episode.

It was a fun episode. The Vergecast is a fun show. Panos is a fun person to listen to. He is good at making you care about the products he is announcing. It was true back when he was announcing the Surface products. It is true now while he is talking about Kindles and hinting at future Alexa goodies.

I have a Paperwhite. I actually have two (11th Gen and 7th Gen). I got the 11th Gen a couple of years back. I had hoped to use the 11th Gen as much as I did the 7th Gen. But I couldn't.

See, I used to be a digital reading convert. Physical books did not make sense to me. I wanted to have a library. But the reality of modern life, moving between cities, countries, meant that I could not have my books with me. But then, some time last year I started going to the library.

All the things they say about actual, physical paper books, is all true. It is a different experience. It feels different, better even.

Ultimately though, reading more is what matters. Whatever the medium.

Anyway.

I was listening to the Vergecast and Panos talked about the ultimate vision for the Kindle. That it is a device that does a specific thing, and does it well, without any distractions. He talked about getting the Kindle as close as possible to the feel of paper: both in reading and writing.

I love my Kindle. Or used to, anyway. But I have never considered the Kindle as a note-taking device. The e-ink display is great for reading, but I can't imagine the slow refresh rate being good for writing. Heck, I am considering getting the iPad Pro, because it is the best device to use with the Pencil Pro.

And yet, Panos talked about how he uses the Scribe for taking notes. All notes.

I guess that's what Panos is good at.

Before this, I had no desire to use the Kindle. The Kindle has been sitting in my cupboard, since I don't know how many months. But I picked it up yesterday and downloaded some books on it. I will be travelling tomorrow, and I think I will take the Kindle with me. It is great for portability after all.

Remarkable also has Paper Pro, which is a tablet size device, primarily for taking notes. I think that is the direction that Kindle will go in. Not just as something you read on, but also something you can write on.

With Panos at the helm, it feels like Amazon might start giving better updates to the Kindle. The e-ink technology in itself can develop a lot. One of my frustrations with the Paperwhite is that it feels janky. It refreshes slowly. I would love it if it refreshed faster. If the page turns felt like page turns.

I am not sold on the whole note taking thing yet. Maybe one day soon we will get there.

Hopes and Dreams for the Fediverse

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I started this note in September. Almost a month has passed since I started thinking about this.

The original impetus for this idea was because Ghost had decided to build Activitypub support. This website is built on Ghost, and as I wrote then, when it was announced:

I would love to make this the centre of my online existence. I would love to create my identity here. An identity I own. An identity I can control.
I would love to post here once, and have it show at different places.
I would love for this to be the place from where I can interact with people.

Since then, I came across Dave and Scripting News, their blog on the web. And this idea of textcasting, with the stated goal of:

Interop between social media apps based on the features writers need.

I still want the same things.

A place of my own

This is the primary thing or motivation that I have. I want to own my content. Whatever I write, I want it to be present on my website. Whether its a short post, a blog, an essay, a story or a poem. I want it to reside on my website.

I want interop, so that whatever I write here, is visible on other social media platforms (Threads, Mastodon, whatever.)

How I write

This has changed, from when I initially thought about it. My initial vision was being able to write on Mastodon, for example, and that showing up on my website. It is possible to add your Mastodon feed using something like Emfed.

But as I wrote above, I want whatever I write to begin its life on my website. I sometime do write on my phone, but those are mostly quick notes, or ideas. I can wait, to be back on my computer to write the thing. Or use Ghost on the web to publish the thing.

On Scripting News, there is one meta post for the date and then inside of that, several smaller one paragraph posts.

What I want is to be able to tag posts that should get posted to Mastodon, etc. Posts that don't need to have a headline. I would love to have basic style (bold and italic).

And I want to write in Markdown. Ghost uses it, as does Obsidian, where I do most of my writing anyway.

Talk to the world

Finally, I want to be able to interact with comments, etc. that people make on the post across the Fediverse through my website.

Look at the Stars

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I was walking through the nature trail the other night. It was dark, and there were no lights. Just the light from the stars in the sky. And I thought how different life would have been if we did not have lights at night.

How would you feel if you woke up at night in a forest?

How would you feel if you woke up in the same forest at the same place, but in the morning, when there's light?

I thought back to that scene in the first Avatar. Where Jake Sully is alone in the forest at dark, scared of everything and how it transitions to him seeing the beauty of the jungle at night, as he gets better aligned with the jungle.

It's evolutionary, this fear of dark places.

Places and times, change how we look at things. The world looks different. What if we could see outside the visible range. Would we have been scared of the dark then?

Of Shinobis and Reading

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #30, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I had dinner at Shinobi on Thursday night. This is a Japanese restaurant near Kamppi in Helsinki. The restaurant has two sections:

Shokudo - the eat and drink section
Izakaya - the bar and snacks section

We had booked a table in Shokudo section. The restaurant has a unique sharing menu, wherein every item was supposed to be shared between two members.

The menu was not structured in a three-course meal fashion. Instead we started with sashimi and spicy edamame, followed by scallops and this wonderful crispy rice topped with avocado. The tofu was the best tofu I've ever had. I don't like tofu. It tastes weird, paneer is usually better. But man this tofu was so good.

For desserts, half the table got the chocolate cake, and the other half Lemon cake. I was in the lemon cake half. It was great. Everything was great here. The food, the service, the ambiance.

I will definitely visit again.

/five things to share this week

Apple announced the new iPad mini. Built for Apple Intelligence. Which, OK. I will be getting an iPad this winter. Not sure which. This is a good upgrade though. It gets the A17 Pro chip (Not M series). WiFi 6E. And support for Apple Pencil Pro.
Amazon announced new kindles. The Colorsoft has a colour screen, which means beautiful book covers on display. The Paperwhite was also updated with a larger screen and higher refresh rates. I want to get something to read on. I prefer actual physical books. But I also read technical books sometimes from O'Reilly. I need something for that. Unless Kindle allows running these apps, it has very limited usability for me at present.
Superstitious users and the FreeBSD logo. This made me chuckle.
The web I want vs the one we have and Use RSS to read stuff.
How to tax billionaires. The problem is all of us dream that one day we would be billionaires and when that day comes, we would not want to be taxed either. But that day would never come. Governments that we vote for, should have the power and money to invest in welfare.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

How to Tell Stories

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I had recently watched Ctrl (control) on Netflix this past week. I had heard some rave reviews about it. It is directed by Mr. Motwane. Which is all to say, I went into it with high hopes.

The movie is shot in a way similar to that episode in Modern Family where Claire thinks Hailey had gotten married in Vegas. Everything mostly happens on a laptop. Being the techie I am, all through the movie, I kept saying, no, no, hell no. But Ananya's character did give this stupid AI thing root access to her laptop. Bad things happened.

This might be a good reason why Apple needs to control what runs on the iPhone. Most people are not techies.

Stories need to surprise us.

At least the good ones. This story was not a good story in that sense. I knew what was going to happen. Good stories, like Mr. Motwane's last one, AK vs AK, need to surprise the reader/viewer.

There are other ways to tell the stories. Nothing is truly original. So, if the story does not surprise, then the characters need to be memorable enough, that you forget about the story. That's how I feel about Love Story, by Erich Segal. There were no surprises in the story though. It was a boy meets girl, something happens story.

I had cried so much while reading this book.

If You're Stuck on Something

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

If you're stuck on something

If you're stuck on something, ask someone to interview you on the topic.

Or talk to someone about it.

They might not know the answer. More like, they will not know the answer. But, this context change, when you're out of your head, might be enough.

If not, and the problem is more complex, then you might need them to ask you pointed questions. Which would then help you clarify your thinking.

You're Like a River

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

You're like a river

You’re like a river.

You're not stagnant. You flow.

Who you were yesterday, is not who you are today, or will be tomorrow.

You can change your mind on things, as and when you learn new things.

You're like a river. You flow.

The Problem With Read-It-Later Apps

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I read, a lot. Not as much as I want. But enough.

I read while travelling. I read in the breaks I take at work. I read while waiting for something. I read while I'm sitting on the loo. This last one I am not so proud of.

I read different things at different times.

While travelling, I read a book. Other times, I read from one of the few sites I follow regularly. I have a tab group called Read on Safari. At present it has the following tabs open on it:

I also have my own website open here. But that is mostly to check that whatever I scheduled for publishing has published.

It feels weird saying I read a lot. What is a lot? I read enough. Is that better? I don't know.

Most of these places I listed above publish things which can be read in one session. Mostly 1-5 minutes. I feel like that's a good length of time for something mostly read on phones.

For longer stuff, I had tried Instapaper and Pocket in the past. But was no longer using. Then in one of the Installers, David talked about how awesome read-later apps were. Omnivore being one of them and the other one being Readwise. At that time I was really tempted to get a Boox Palma, and was looking at apps which would help me read the web on it.

I started using Omnivore around June of this year. And I have done a lot of reading on it. I like the concept of it. But there are two things about it (not Omnivore, read-it-later apps in general) that I do not like.

The Inbox Zero problem. I do not like pending things. The articles that I have not read yet. I get that that is the point of these apps. But if you do not read stuff that you saved, it can become a long list of things that you need to get to. That I need to get to. It feels like a chore. It does not feel good. This makes me not want to open the app. Which increases the list of unread articles. You see where this is going?
I lose the identity of the people who wrote those articles. Their websites. The fonts they us, etc. Everything is the same. The same inter font. White text on black background. Which is good if the websites are trash. But they aren't. And I miss that in the read-it-later app.

Inbox Zero is something that I guess I could tackle. Maybe just delete everything that is not interesting to read now. I do that, if I don't like something. But, deleting something without opening it feels bad. And so the long list continues.

I have started to feel the second thing recently. I like looking at different websites. I am always looking for things to steal.

Reading something in a read-it-later app feels like stripping character from the piece.

And for that I don't have any solutions.

For now, I have stopped saving to Omnivore. The app is still there. I just open any link that seems interesting in a new tab in the same Read tab group on Safari.

Keeping Promises

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Last week I did the 2024 equivalent of Googling myself, and asked Copilot(ChatGPT?) - who is Sajal Choudhary?

Sajal Choudhary is a writer and newsletter author who shares his experiences of living in Finland, along with occasional short stories and poems. He writes a weekly newsletter where he reflects on various topics, ranging from personal growth to societal issues.
Does this match the Sajal Choudhary you were referring to?

And then there's a link to my blog.

First, it feels good to read that, on the surface level. A nice boost to your ego.

In the immortals word of Prerna, when I sent her this screenshot, 'you are famous!'

I'm not. But ok.

Second, I don't want to dunk on AI. But the weekly newsletter is not about personal growth or societal issues. The weekly newsletter is about cool stuff I found on the web, or read. But that's not what the newsletter says, it's about.

Sign up for Sajal Choudhary

A weekly newsletter on living in Finland + occasional short stories and poems

Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

A weekly newsletter on living in Finland.

That's what it says.

Prerna told me this yesterday. That I don't talk about Finland. That I can't just go out, take pictures of the autumn leaves on the ground, and call it a day. I have to talk about some things. It had felt invigorating then. Not when she was saying this, but when I was meditating on it while walking.

While walking yesterday, I thought about that. I thought about promises we make. About what the newsletter is, and isn't. It has evolved from when it started. I have a structure, which will change now, in it's thirtieth edition.

But keeping promises is important. We must meet the expectations we set. Both here, at work or in life.

Why Walk the Same Path Every Day

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Each day, around six or seven, after dinner, I leave the flat and go for my walk.

I leave the apartment building from the main road side. I take a left, walk parallel to the road for a bit and then take another left, down a walkway, which meets another road only for walking or cycling and the start of my almost five kilometer walk.

Each day, I follow the same route, the same trails, going over the same places. I don't see the same set of people. In fact I don't think I have seen a recognisable face on the trails, ever. When I would go to the gym, there were usually the same set of people at the gym. We would nod at each other as we continued working out. That does not happen during the walks.

Prerna often asks me why do you have to walk the same walk every day. Why can't we go somewhere else to walk.

I did not have a good answer to that before today.

I would say that I like the route. I like that we go through the trails, which takes us over the bridge, to the beach. It would be colder as we got to the nature trails. The air, a tinge cleaner.

Today, I was going to visit a friend. If I walked the same route, I would have to walk extra in order to get to their home. This is another thing about me, I love to optimize for these things.

It is a circle, this route I walk. I start and end at the same place. I go in a clockwise fashion. Today, I decided to do the walk in an anti-clockwise direction. And it felt weird as soon as I had started.

Everything felt new. Even though I walk through the same place, just in a different direction. And yet, everything felt new. I was looking at things in a different light.

With that, I got my answer.

Why do I walk the same route everyday?

Because, it allows me to ignore the path. I know the path. I don't have to pay attention. I am on auto-pilot.
It allows me to think.

A Head Full of Dreams

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #29, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

Autumn is in full swing here in Finland. Which means, gorgeous colours.

There was a beautiful crescent moon in the sky today. Which allowed me to flex the 5x zoom. So here you go.

This week, I finished reading Becky Chamber's 'To Be Taught If Fortunate'. I have started reading Becky's Wayfarers series. The first book in the series is The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. I am hoping to complete this series before I travel to India. It will be close.

This was also the first week in which I have written one post every single day. I had decided in September, that I would blog every day. I could not post something every day in the three past weeks. But I did do that this week. So, yay me!

Even without meaning to in advance, there forms a running theme to the things I think/write about. This week, it was mostly about AI.

I wrote about: a world full of agents, how the web is changing with all the training that these models do and what we want are slaves, not intelligent beings.

I also wrote about stories, learning things and leaving behind a better world.

/techStuff

Google must allow 3rd party stores on Android. Google is appealing of course. But does Google have bad lawyers? They seem to be losing all of their lawsuits. Google appeals judge’s decision forcing app store competition on Android
The Static Site Paradox Static sites load faster. They’re basically just html. Most blogs don’t need the complexity. I wish there was a faster way to do it.
The Internet Archive is under attack, with a breach revealing info for 31 million accounts. I am a little sad about this. Internet Archive is one of the good guys of the web, like Wikipedia in a way.
Elon Musk announce three things: a Cybercab, a robovan and dancing optimus bots. All of this is vapourware at this point. The cybercab is two-seater. OK. Goodbye my friends. The robovan looks like a train, and holds 20 people. And the dancing bots are just, wow.
Submerged is everything impressive and isolating about the Vision Pro. This piece of news is nothing special. A new video for a product which is too-expensive. But, I thought, one of the main complaints with this product is that it is isolating. If you are watching something, there is no way for anyone, your spouse, for example, to join in. But I imagined a future where the projected big screen, where you watch movies, could be a physical thing that you can anchor in the world, and it can be shared between three-four headsets. Of course not the 3500 USD headset. Prices will come down mind you at some point. And then it might make sense. It needs to get lighter too.

/reading

If You Meet ET in Space, Kill Him. This post argues that all life wants to live. If we try to kill it, they will listen to us. Which might sound counterintuitive, but it isn’t. What if the aliens in predator actually wanted to talk to us.
The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted
How to make Product give a shit about your architecture proposal
Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

We Don't Want Intelligence

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

We don't want intelligence

A few things happened, or announced around AI this week. As they seem to be almost every week now. Anthropic's CEO wrote a long post about how awesome the AI future would be. I haven't read the whole thing yet. As I said, it's long.

I wrote about it too, a couple of times this week: about a world full of agents and about the future of the web and how these models affect that future.

To say that I have been thinking about AI is an understatement.

Anyway. Reading through the dreams that people have about agents, and how AI will change medicine, education, personal productivity, the world; I realise there is a fallacy in all of this. We aim to create intelligent systems. It's called AI (Artificial Intelligence). But what we want are slaves. We will automate away the things people don't want to do. Autonomous cars will replace drivers. Agents will replace human reps. Assistants will help doctors detect cancer early (This sounds great by the way. Especially here in Finland, we have a shortage). The thing is what we want are slaves. Working on things, that we either don't want to do. Or we want to remove humans from the equation, because humans have rights! And we fall ill. And so on.

We are barrelling toward this world, where we have these intelligent things(beings?). Assuming, that they will not want anything else but do what they are told to.

If an ant comes to you, and tells you please help our colony. What would you do?

But that's what the goal is. AGI, or any other fancy way of calling the same thing.

Us, humans have general intelligence. Machines in the field that they are trained in, are way better at that thing than humans ever could. Think, the systems designed to play chess. Whenever we get AGI, the machines will be that better than humans at everything.

And then, how do we get them to care for us.

If, we want intelligence, then we better treat the machines as our partners. We can't both have intelligence, and then expect them to slave away filling out our excel sheets.

Who Will Advocate for the Future

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I continued watching Bill Gates' documentary - What Next on Netflix. The next episode after AI, was about misinformation, followed by climate change.

Climate change is truly one of the greatest threats of our time. The running format of this show, is that Bill sits with a group of people and then they talk about whatever the point is. In this episode, Bill sat with a group of young people/activists(?). One of these young people seems pissed, and rightly so about the state of the affairs. And the fact that we are doing too little. And in the end, it will be too little, too late.

It is easy to be pessimistic about this. Not easy. Normal. It is normal to feel pessimistic about climate change. One thing I have begun to appreciate more is that we have to do something. Just screaming that nothing is happening will not do anything. We have to find solutions.

It is easy to want an escapist solution. Some way to reset everything. But that's just fantasy. We live in this capitalist world. We can either tax carbon use, or encourage green technologies by making it profitable to use.

I had loved some of the ideas in Kim Stanley Robinson's 'The Ministry For The Future'. The main idea being that an organisation advocates for the rights for future generations as if they were just as valid as the present generation.

And that is the main challenge isn't. How to make the present generation care for the future generations. We humans can be incredibly short-sighted. And it is becoming easier to be that.

But, the earth, does not belong to us. We must hand it over to the next generation in a better state than we found it.

The Custodian for All Human Knowledge

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I was watching Bill Gates' new documentary - What Next on Netflix today. The first episode, perhaps unsurprisingly was about AI. It was on a whole, a well-rounded, hopeful take on AI.

There were two sections which jumped out at me.

It was only recently that the amount of content produced by us was enough so that the LLMs can guess better.
It is basically trained on the web.

It is trained on the web. All the stuff that is on the web.

In an altruistic sense, I am OK with using the world's knowledge for the benefit of humanity. For training something that can help us tackle a lot of things, which we frankly can not.

However, the world's knowledge should belong to the world. Not to corporations chasing profit. OpenAI has said as part of its recent funding round that they will be becoming a profit-chasing/making company within two years.

There could be an organization, perhaps the United Nations, which becomes the custodian for all human knowledge. Books, articles, images, everything.

Now if a corporation uses this data, to make profit, then there's no altruism in that. Then there should be a way for the creators to make money as well. I don't know how commerce on the web should work. Subscription fatigue is real. Maybe you pay a flat fee to access everything on the web. And that money gets distributed to everyone.

The web is a mess right now. Search is shit. There are so many content farms filled with AI generated slop. Google traffic is tanking, or has tanked for a lot of publications.

I have a list of websites/blogs that I have open all the time in my browser. Each day I go and refresh and read whatever new is published. I understand that is not how the rest of the world works.

Distribution is the problem.

Fediverse maybe a solution. Or a part of the solution. Wordpress has enabled fediverse integration. Ghost is working on it as well. So, maybe, this distributed future may provide a solution for the distribution problem.

Everything Can Teach Us Something

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I had a little tiff at work today. Nothing like how I used to get maybe an year or so earlier. Maybe two years earlier. I have grown since those days. It's true these things still affect me. I am not bulletproof in an emotional sense.

Things said to me, permeate.

They get to me. I get angry about certain things. Not as much and for as long as I used to, but still. As I said, not bulletproof.

There are times, when the only thing that you should say is 'OK' and let it go. Today was one of those times. So, I did. I said OK and removed myself from the discussion. My office friend went on for a while and then stopped speaking.

We had a tiff about how one should remain available during holidays. Or, how one should handover before going for a holiday. It started with me mentioning how when no one had closed any of the things I had assigned to them before going for my earlier leave.

I talked to Prerna about it and she told me, you should write things down in an email. You will have a frame of reference and a log. And once you return you can ask who has done what.

Prerna is brilliant.

At the moment of course, I was a little angry.

I have calmed down now. And now I think, this is brilliant. Through this unpleasant thing that happened at work today, I found a better way of going on leaves.

Everything, good or bad, can teach us something new. And that is always good.

A World Full of Agents

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The first time I came across this concept of agents was when the Zoom CEO was on Decoder. It was a little difficult to understand Eric Yuan at times, but the conversation was very enjoyable.

Eric's vision was that of a world filled with agents. Agents trained on my data, but with different personalities. Or, trained for different tasks.

Eric really wants you to stop having to attend Zoom meetings yourself. You’ll hear him describe how he thinks one of the big benefits of AI at work will be letting us all create something he calls a “digital twin” — essentially a deepfake avatar of yourself that can go to Zoom meetings on your behalf and even make decisions for you while you spend your time on more important things, like your family.

Today, I was listening to Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu on Decoder. He was talking about agents in a different context. These are general purpose rabbit agents, which go to the web, open a website and do things that we want them to do.

The thing that I took from these conversations and the thing that I agree with, is that these are very early days of this technology. And we don't have the killer app yet. All these companies, big and small, established and startups are trying things. Nobody has any idea of what will work.

There are many challenges, legal and otherwise. But mostly legal. It is about money in the end. There will be a moment soon when this will get resolved. There will be a new world order. About how things will work on the web. Will there be a web?

While listening to Jesse talk about the agent go to the web and click around as a user, gave me an almost Matrix like feeling, like the agent was Neo and he could just see html code, instead of the UI that is designed for us humans.

A web which is frequented by agents will be a different world than the one we live in now. The existing ways of monetisation does not work in this world. Will there be a web left? Or it will be an OS for apps and a playground for these agents.

There is a future, a common vision that most of these CEOs have. A future in which you can just ask Siri/Rabbit/Google/ChatGPT to go do something, and they do it. There are two aspects to this:

Understanding what you want
Doing the thing

The models are good enough in understanding what we want. It's the taking action part which is lacking.

The platforms would love to make the apps obsolete. Wherein apps are more like a backend, an API.
You ask Siri to book a ticket.
You ask Google to order food.
You ask Rabbit to book an Uber.
Whatever!

There are challenges there. Why would the apps want to be a backend? Why would they want to be even more separated from their customers. And hence the challenge.

There will be a reckoning for this. Soon.

Or, we might be left in a world of half-met promises. Siri will still only be setting our reminders and not do much more.

In all this, I can't help but think, we should be able to carry our data. I don't want my agent of choice to not be as useful because I use an iPhone and my email is on Gmail. There should be a stronger identity. Something I can carry around with me. Something that is me.

We all want our Jarvis, after all.

The Stories We Tell

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I was listening to The New Yorker Fiction Podcast - Rebecca Makkai Reads Jhumpa Lahiri today. In this episode they were reading The Third and Final Continent by Jhumpa Lahiri about an Indian immigrant who travels from Kolkata to the USA.

It is a beautiful story and you should go read it. Or, listen to the podcast and have the story read to you.

The format of the podcast is this -

An author reads a short story written by a different author
After that, the host and the author who read the story, discuss the story.

There is this section in the story, where the narrator talks about his marriage,

For five nights we shared a bed. Each of those nights, after applying cold cream and braiding her hair, she turned from me and wept; she missed her parents. Although I would be leaving the country in a few days, custom dictated that she was now a part of my household, and for the next six weeks she was to live with my brother and his wife, cooking, cleaning, serving tea and sweets to guests. I did nothing to console her. I lay on my own side of the bed, reading my guidebook by flashlight.

In the podcast, they were discussing this section. The said, the narrator did not put a hand around his wife. He did not love her wife. And I realised it was not that. They were strangers, and it was perfectly normal. They had not talked before they got married. And how that might have seemed bonkers to an American.

I realised they did not understand the place and time in which this story was written.

I realised how stories are a product of and belong in a certain time and place. How they are like time machines. How if you want to understand a place and a time, you should read stories written in that time.

And I realised how differently this story would feel to an American, than an India. It is of course an immigrant story, but the details are India. And if you aren't an Indian, you would not get the details.

And despite it all, it does not matter. Once we write a story and put it out into the world, it is out of our hands. The world can make of it, whatever the world will make of it.

Where Are We Going

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from the Iso Omena Library! Iso means 'big' and Omena means 'apple' from Finnish to English. Go Duo I guess!

This is NordLetter #28, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I started reading up on Active Directory and modern authentication this week. I watched John Savill's AD Deep Dive video and now after researching a bit, started reading Mastering Active Directory - Third Edition.

There was a section on password-less authentication in there. And so, I enabled passkey support on a few additional services. I have passkeys enabled for 7 services now.

Passkeys allow for password-less logins, which are the best form of authentication available. This website has a list of all the websites that support it. Add passkeys where possible. More services should support Passkeys. Looking at you Meta. WhatsApp has passkeys support, but not Facebook or Instagram or Threads. Or, am I missing something?

An interesting look at how public transit works in Helsinki/Espoo
The orange buses run for longer routes and don’t stop at frequent locations. Blue buses have much shorter routes and more stops. I love public transport here. It is one of the main reasons I don’t own a car yet. And don’t even want to to be honest.

Becca’s video on using the iPod Nano as a camcorder.
I have written about it in the past. About using simpler devices, single purpose devices.
It’s difficult to concentrate on a phone.
This video is good. But I am not going to trade-in m iPhone video for this. But the idea of a light video device is alluring to say the least.

/techStuff

Halide makers’ review of the iPhone 16 cameras. It is a beautiful post. The pictures are beautiful. As is the review.
Federico chose the 16 plus over the pro max. I can respect this decision. The weight is a big factor. Prerna’s phone is lighter than mine. And every time I pick it, I feel like I chose wrong. Promotion is also something that I can forfeit. But not the cameras. The Pro’s cameras are the best. And I want that.
Students use Meta Smart Glasses to dox people in realtime. They used Meta Glasses to stream to Instagram. Then used face recognition and other tools running on their computer to provide a person’s data to the app. They demoed talking to strangers in public, as if they knew them. It was weird, scary even. It feels like we’re barreling toward something from where we will not be able to turn back. I don’t want to live in Night City.
I love reading these what’s on your desk things. This one featuring David Pierce was a fun read. I guess with these I’m always thinking what to do I need to do to get to this place. And this one felt reachable.
Canvas mode for chatGPT announced. This looks genuinely useful. A new UI for editing changes to the output without giving prompts. It seems especially useful for the coding scenario.
Google is testing verified checkmarks in search. This just adds a Twitter style checkmark in front of trusted business. I think things like this will get more important in the age of AI slop.

/reading

I finished reading John Scalzi's 'Starter Villain'. I started the book on 30th September and finished it on the 1st. So that tells you everything you need to know about how much I liked that book. I have started reading Becky Chamber's 'To Be Taught If Fortunate' now. For those keeping count this is Becky's third book I have started reading.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Sing!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

During my first year in college, my friend and I decided to audition for a singing competition. The Drama-Music-Art society of the university had organised the event. There were separate auditions for Hindi and English singers. I was auditioning for English and my friend for Hindi singing.

This was after college, so after 5 PM. We were sitting on the ground. The organisers had erected a stage with a mike under the Science Block. There would have been around 20-30 participants.

I am not a singer. I have never had any training. I enjoy singing though. On whim, me and my friend had decided to do this audition. It was a low-stake, medium-reward situation for us. We were not expecting that we would win this thing. We were a couple of first years who thought, 'what the hell, why not?'

As I went through my four years of college, I lost this belief. It happened too slow for me to notice, or do anything about.

Anyway, back to the auditions. While we waited, and as the clock ticked on, I thought about leaving. It was getting late. My friend lived nearby, but I had to take a bus, then a metro, then a bus, and then walk to my home.

But we stayed back.

Finally, I walked upto the stage and sang Blackbirds. I think I sang OK. I sang my song and at the end, they asked me to sing another one. Either they had not heard the song and hence could not judge how I sang. Or, they wanted to hear another song to better judge me.

This time I sang, or tried to sing, In the End. The only other song I was confident I remembered the lyrics to. I started with Mike's rap, looking at this one particular person in the crowd, who was singing along with me. That gave me a little confidence. But by the time I got to Chester's part, I realised I had made a mistake. This was not a solo song. To be sung without music, or at least another person around. Also, as I said, earlier, I am not a trained singer.

So I stopped in the middle. Laughed a little and left the stage. You know in a way that was meant to say, 'Hey! I'm just goofing around here. I don't care!'

But I do care. I cared about this. I care about other things. But in life, over time if you don't get things. You tend to protect yourself by saying you never actually wanted it in the first place.

There is no lesson here.

I am done with saying that though. There are things I want. And I will own that. Whether I get it or not is a different matter. One that I can not hope to control. All I can do is do the work.

And so I am.

Blue Skies

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I absolutely loved the skies today.

It had gone dark by the time I stepped out to walk. But not black. The sky had a shade of blue. It looked like a painting.

And so, even though I don't usually do this, I kept stopping..

And stopping ...

Oh, and I love the ultra wide on the 16 Pro.

Professionals Are Consistent

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Professionals show up, each time whenever needed.

Consistency is key. You can have a bad day, sure. But still you must show up. You must fulfil the promise.

Self-discipline without talent can often achieve astounding results, whereas talent without self-discipline inevitably dooms itself to failure.
- Sydney J. Harris

Being consistent is more important that being talented but not having the discipline to do the work.

It is crucial to pursue professionalism in writing.

Science Fiction Does Not Have to Be Dystopian in Order to Be Interesting

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

t is easy of course. Dystopias provide better opportunities for conflict. It is easier to imagine villains. People preying on other people. People wanting power. And after they get the power, misusing them. Think Mad Max.

I think it's lazy. Maybe not lazy, just something that has been done many times before.

It is easy to create a villain in a broken world.

But, there are a few assumptions there that might not actually be true.

Studies have shown that disasters bring out the best in people. When faced with a disaster, people actually band together and form impromptu communities to help each other get by. Like how when Trump had asked the EPA to cut the climate page from its website and lots of people on the web banded together and started downloading the environmental data. Or how, people behave during actual calamities.

There is another trope we have about villainous robots, and aliens. Again, easier to imagine a robot as a killing machine, think Terminator. Or a killer alien, think Predator or Alien. It is easier to create a story out of that.

It is easier to imagine a broken world. It does not make much. Humanity feels like we have been on the brink for most of my adult life. But we need hope in the world.

And there can be different sorts of stories that can be told.

What Is an iPhone

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The iPhone is not a phone. It hasn't been a phone for a long long time now. Steve Jobs had announced the iPhone as being three things:

An iPod,
A Phone, and
A breakthrough internet communicator

The phone was a third of what the iPhone as a whole was. It is even less of a phone now, then it was then.

If not a phone, then what is an iPhone?

It is a pocket computer. For a lot of people, perhaps their only computer.
It is a camera. For a lot of people, their only camera.
It is a gaming device.
It is a screen, to watch stuff on.
It is a reading device.
It is a messaging device.
And yes, it can still make a phone call.

I have been thinking about this over the past week. As I have been playing with my new phone. Apple as a company is very good at making you want their new phones. This is my third iPhone. I upgraded to iPhone 13 after four years. And to 16 after three years. I feel like three years is a good time to upgrade. The battery had just started to degrade. So either I was going to replace the battery. Or, get a new phone. I got 350 euros for my current phone and so it made getting a new phone slightly more palpable.

But again, I did not have to.

There are people who upgrade every year. They talk about incremental updates. For me, even after three years, even though there are quite a few changes. It still feels like the same device. If only, there was a way to upgrade the cameras.

For me, primarily, an iPhone is a camera. I like taking pictures with it.

I feel torn. Between wanting something and seeing that it can't be good for our home.

iPhones should be built to last. All devices should. These are computers after all. Computers should be built to last. They should be easier to upgrade.

I don't know if there are any incentives for Apple as a company to make repairability a central theme of their devices. Apple could do it. They have the resources to do it. It is weird that in this world we live in, growing at the cost of everything else seems to be the only viable option for corporations. And still, Apple is the only company which updates each year on their environmental goals.

It feels impossible to think that we would get to that future. But I believe we will. Sooner rather than later. We have to. We have to think of the planet. There's only one.

Our Place in the World

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkyla! This is NordLetter #27, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I finished reading A Prayer for the Crown-Shy this week. This is a sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built which I had finished reading last week. Maybe it is a product of reading these books, but I have been thinking about nature and our role in the world. I wrote about trails and everything in nature that is born, dies.

Linkin Park are back. The album comes out on November 15th. The Emptiness Machine is out now. Go listen to it.

Barnes and Noble stores are becoming more individualistic to be profitable. This makes sense to me. The race to cheapest will always be won by the online business. Book stores and libraries are more than places you go to buy books. And so it makes sense to let each store manager customize it based on where it is located and what the patrons want to read.

How McDonald’s changes their menu items in different parts of the world. I do miss McAloo tikki a lot. Make it international.

Reading on screens is worse for comprehension.

From the conclusion:

The results of this study indicate that reading linear narrative and expository texts on a computer screen leads to poorer
reading comprehension than reading the same texts on paper. These results have several pedagogical implications. Firstly,
we should not assume that changing the presentation formatfor even short texts used in reading assessments will not have a
significantimpact on reading performance. If texts are longer than a page, scrolling and the lack of spatiotemporal markers of
the digital texts to aid memory and reading comprehension might impede reading performance. Furthermore, our results
suggest that implementing both reading assessment tasks (i.e., text reading and response tasks) in the same medium – the
computer – leads to additional cognitive costs

It does align with how I feel about reading on the phone, specifically. The amount of time I can concentrate on something is way too small. And the reason why I’m enjoying borrowing and reading books from the library so much now.

/techStuff

Meta has a major opportunity to win the AI hardware race. I don’t want Meta to win. The morality of the company is not at the right place. But I can’t deny that the low stakes nature of the Meta Ray Ban glasses make them a good product. Now that they have the initial product, they can iterate and make it better.
A new Ghost game coming out in 2025 hopefully. Sony has just released a brief trailer. It looks cool. We will know more in the coming days. Ghost of Tsushima is one of my favourite games of all time. It is beautiful and plays beautifully too. I have high hopes for this one.
Also a remaster for Horizon Zero Dawn. Not sure who was asking for this. But I guess it’s good to have a version for the current gen. Will they remaster both Zero Dawn and Forbidden West whenever PS 6 arrives?
The messy WordPress drama, explained. My view on this is regarding the human/kindness aspect of this. Do people deserve to be paid for the work they do on open source project? Can an open source project ask people to contribute hours? If you are building a paid product on top of an open source project, I think they should be allowed to.
OpenAI was a research lab — now it’s just another tech company. Most of OpenAI's founders have left the company now. It is raising a ton of new money and turning into a tech company.
Microsoft’s more secure Windows Recall feature can also be uninstalled by users. Good changes compared to when it was announced, when the DB was plain-text.

/reading

Amusing ourselves to death. I haven’t read Brave New World yet. Maybe I should. We were so focused on it being not a 1984 word, that we did notice as we slipped into the Brave New World.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Linkin Park Are Back

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Linkin Park are back. The first time I saw the Emptiness Machine, I thought it was a special sort of thing. Maybe a collaboration. Then, during the week I asked Siri to play me some Linkin Park. She did and she played this song. And I loved it. I was transported back to all the times I had listened to Linkin Park in the college days.

Linkin Park are the same band. A band is more than just the lead singer, Chester in this case. Linkin Park are still the same band. They are, and yet they are not.

Emily is the lead vocalist now. And for a time, since Chester passed away, as Linkin Park did not know where they were going to go. They were trying to release specials, re-release albums. It did not feel right. I was ready to be pissed at them, calling them sellouts, telling them the band had ended with Chester.

But, as I said, a band is more than just the lead vocalist.

Give it a lesson. The album comes out on November 15th.

Losing Someone

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

My nanaji passed away a couple of days back.

He was the last of my surviving grand parents. It felt like the close of an era. Something lost forever. For the longest time, I had kept feeling that I needed to see him one last time. I had that fear. I was able to see him last year. I had gone and met him. He had looked somehow younger than his age. But that had been after a long time.

And still, despite it all, I did not feel really sad. Sometimes I feel like I'm broken. I am too much at peace with death. And my nanaji did live a long life.

He had issues. He had diabetes. I remember my mother would put cream in his feet, whenever we went there. During summer break.

My mother. I remember she had cried once. Or I had seen her cry once. After she and I had just reached my maternal home. I think she was just tired. I don't know. Parents don't tell their kids their pains. They try to shield them. It is when the children grow, that there comes a change. Where the kids are not just kids. When the parent can sit and talk to the child, as an adult. Share their pains, a little.

I could never have that with my mother. I never will. But that's OK. There's nothing to be done about it.

Everything in nature, that is born, dies. If not today, then tomorrow. It's natural.

Everything in Nature That Is Born, Dies

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Everything in nature that is born, dies.

I was walking today and I noticed a lot of brown plants on the trail today. Which is not to say that it started happening today. I noticed it today. And then I could not stop noticing it. From the tall grass in the stream to the tall brown grass on the beach.

I have spent three winters here in Finland. This will be the fourth. Autumn brings with it beautiful orange-brown hues, fallen leaves. Then the trees shed all their leaves. All through winter, through heavy snow, they survive. And come summer, the leaves grow back. As if the last four-five months of winter did not happen.

It is magical. It is beautiful.

Everything in nature that is born, dies. And that gives meaning to the little time we have on this planet.

What Are Trails

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

What are trails but the paths others have walked upon.

Like most games, there are two ways to play Death Stranding:
1. Online
2. Offline

How it differs from other games is that, even in the offline mode you do not see other players in your game. You do not interact with other players. What you interact with is the things they leave behind.

As an example, if you build a bridge in your game, it might show up in another player's game. Any time they use that bridge, they leave a like. And so it goes.

Death Stranding is about connecting the world, one road at a time, one bridge at a time. And it is something you must do alone, through punishing terrain. And after you connect a region, all these things get populated in the world.

And the first time I came across this game mechanic, this idea, it felt so hopeful. A world worth living in. A kinder world.

During my walk today, as the nature trail ends, and I get to the paved roads of the city, I saw these trails. Different, mind you, from the main trail, which I guess the city maintains. It criss-crossed and went above the ridge. Nobody had put it there. Unlike the main trail, this trail was formed as people walked on it.

In Death Stranding, as you walk a path, it changes the scenery a little. As more and more players walk that path in their games, it turns into a trail. The first time I saw trails, I did not think much of it. It was part of the scenery. It was only later that I came to know that the trails were dynamically generated.

And today, as I saw that trail, I could not help but think about this. About trails. And how they are formed. In nature. In life. And in this one eccentric game.

The Good People of Finland

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I went to Iso Omena to sell my old iPhone today. I entered the store, took a number and waited. I was hoping the same person who gave me my new phone on Friday will take my phone today. I guess we all crave familiarity. Or at least I do. That must say something about me. Right? Psychologically?

Anyway.

I did get the same person. They took the phone, looked at the sides, then typed somethings on the computer. Then he looked and said,

"Have you been to Swappie?"

"What?" I said.

"Swappie?", he said, "It's to right. You can go ask them how much they will give your for this phone."

Mind you, I was not there to ask for an evaluation. I was there to sell my phone. Whatever price they offered, which was 340 euros , I was fine with that.

I smiled, thanked him and got up. I went to the Swappie store a couple of stores over and talked to the person there. They offered a higher price for the phone. I filled up the form, left the phone there and walked out.

And I thought to myself, this would not happen in India. Which is not to say that the people back home are not good or anything. Everything is so damn competitive. Everything becomes a fight for survival. We forget what makes us humans.

Kindness costs nothing.

Spectacular Solar Punk

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkyla! This is NordLetter #26, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I have changed how I write NordLetter. Instead of writing directly in the Ghost editor, copying things I found over the week from Obsidian. I have moved this to its own note in Obsidian. I add interesting things directly to it now. And come Sunday, I will edit this lightly and hit publish.

I wrote about typography.

I am listening to How I write podcast. It mostly features non-fiction writers. But writers are writers. And it feels good listening to writers talk about writing. Of course, it’s not actual writing.

I watched a couple of videos on video game console makers and the business of video games.

/techStuff

Review for the AirPods 4 - The Verge. They seem like a good purchase. ANC seems to work, not as good as the Pro of course.
PSA - iOS18 was released on Monday with these features. My thoughts on the release here.
I was not there when Jobs was at the helm for Apple. I have seen little videos of Jobs introducing the iPhone and the MacBook Air from the manilla envelope. Hence I would not understand , Gruber’s post about the Glowtime event. But I do understand. The iPhone line and the other products announced last week are mature product lines and there’s not much to do. It is human to expect something new but I feel like the pocketable computer is the ultimate form factor and it will remain for eternity. They just have to make it last a lifetime. Upgrade things as needed. That’s more sci-fi at this point, but one can hope.
Read/watch Austin Mann’s review of the iPhone 16 pro cameras
Gruber’s iPhone 16 review It’s long. But I enjoyed reading it.
The iPhone camera is more confusing than ever About the new photographic styles feature in iPhone. And how that might be the correct approach. Giving people control over how they want their photos to look.
Qualcomm might be acquiring Intel. Intel used to be so dominant while we were growing up. I don’t think this will go through. But the fact that this is even a possibility, just shows that one can not rest on their laurels.

/reading

I finished reading A Psalm for the Wild-Built this week. I was looking for a solarpunk novel to read and this was both highly rated and available in the library. Solarpunk when compared to cyberpunk is a hopeful version of the future, with nature at the centre. When compared against cyberpunk which is more man merged with machine. It is a beautiful book and inspired me to write about the joys of reading.
I have started reading the sequel to this, in A prayer for the Crown-Shy.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Hello From the Puddle

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There is a bridge painted in bright yellow which goes over this body of water. I walk over it every day. Today I took a picture of the water, and the life teeming in it.

It might not be pretty (I found it pretty).

It might not be a well manicured lawn.

It's nature.

Nature is not something that you trim and maintain in the interstices in our cities. Our cities are in the interstices. We have broken nature apart.

The Joy of Reading

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I woke up a bit late today. I was a bit groggy as I went through the early morning rituals. I cooked my lunch, packed it. I went and took a shower. I ate my breakfast. I slipped on my shoes, put on my headphones, and left for work.

I saw the metro leaving the station just as I came down the escalator. I could look at the HSL app to figure out when the next metro is due and leave accordingly, or at least know. But, to be honest, it has never been a big deal. The next metro arrives in 5 to 8 minutes. Today, as well, it wasn't.

All of this to say, I was not super happy as I took my seat on the metro. Nor was I miffed. I was OK.

But then I opened A Psalm for the Wild-Built. And my mood changed. I was transported to that solar-punk world, joining Dex and Mosscap on Panga on their adventures.

There was a particular section of the book that I was reading this morning. It was written beautifully as Dex tries to explain why they are doing what they are doing. Why they decided to come this way, in the wilderness.

And I felt so happy. So fucking happy.

This is something that only books can do. Transport you to places. And man was I transported today.

I finished the book today. It was a short book, but I enjoyed it. On to the next one.

Notes From the New OS Releases

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Apple released the new versions of iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS and MacOS (surprise!) on Monday 20:00 PM EEST. I had set an alarm to be reminded of the same. Yes, I was that excited about it. Of course, not so much excited as to install the beta software. I had done that once, and because you can not go back to the normal version after installing the beta OS on the watch, I did not try it again.
This is not a review. This is just a list of things I noticed, or found useful or just something new that I came across in my very limited time with these OSes.

Revamped Control Center

The first thing I noticed, or tried as soon as the upgrade was done was the revamped Control Center. It has multiple screens (tabs?) now. With the Favourites view being what we had earlier. And new tabs for home, network, music, etc.

See the 5 screen options on the right

Home Screen Customisation

The second thing I did was go into jiggle mode, and check out the app icon tinting. You have a few options here: light, dark, auto or custom tint. I keep my phone on dark mode all the time, so I chose dark. Of course, I also looked up what others were doing with this, and I did not find anything that spoke to me.

The other thing one can do know is leave spaces on the screen. Put icons in a specific place. I tried that. But I am a single home screen person. And I do not have a wallpaper on my home screen. So I personally do not find utility in this at present.

But hey, that might change in the future as well.

Customisation!

Apple Photos redesign

Apple Photos now has a single UI for Photos which combines the library and other tabs which hid things like featured photos, or memories, or people albums. Collections is new. Where using the same ML algorithms which helped surface Memories, each collection gets an autoplay video. Recently Saved is a particularly useful one.

I did not like it at first when I opened it. I know the reasoning for why they made the changes. Most people were not using the great recall features. So, this will help with discoverability. But I was not one of those people. I was using these features. Almost on a daily basis. Heck I had that Featured Photos widget on my home screen!

It was jarring to say the least.

One thing that helped was reordering and customising the collections that the Photos app showed. You basically scroll down to the bottom and there's a customise & reorder button. Click on it and you can remove options that you don't want to show below your library. Drag the ones you want to show earlier. I moved Featured Photos to the top. And removed Wallpaper Suggestions. Just moving the Featured Photos to the top of the stack improved the view for me.

Syncing has moved to your profile icon (button?) on the top right. The UI shows the progress as a small filling circle as it syncs your photos. Which is cool!

Mental Health Questionnaire

Apple Health had a prompt for Mental Health Questionnaire. This was a list of 16 questions about how you're feeling. The default frequency for both (Depression and Anxiety risk) at least for me was 6 months. That might be a dynamic field though.

Health Features

Vitals

Apple Health/Watch got Vitals. I got the prompt for this after upgrading to WatchOS 11. This is a set of measurements taken by Apple Watch overnight. Things like heart rate, breaths/min, temperature, etc. It takes a week for a baseline to be ready. So check back in a week I guess?

iPhone Mirroring on Mac

This is so cool! You can basically control your phone from the Mac. You can arrange your home screen from the Mac! Which is way better than doing it from the phone because the apps still zip around like crazy! You can open any app! This will be so great when you are on the Mac and there's something you need to check on the phone. Maybe an authenticator code or some other SMS thing.

iPhone mirroring. Most screenshots for this post taken using mirroring

Closing thoughts

Apple Intelligence looms like a shadow on this release. Apple Intelligence will come to a really small subset of users. And in any case, I am not sure how useful most of these features will be. But that is a discussion for a different time. The thing that I noticed after the upgrade was unless I knew what to look for, it is very difficult to know just by looking that anything has changed. Which is a mark of a mature platform. And these are all mature platforms. They should not change from one release to the next. You do not want the user to relearn how they use their phones.
The Photos app redesign for sure will be the most jarring change for most people. I am still not sure if I like it. But I think I will. It is more flow-y now, instead of how boxy it used to be. And I think that's a good thing.

Basics of Typography

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

/a brief overview

Good typography does a lot. It conveys emotion, a sense of time and place. It ties into how we design things. For readability, usability and so on. It might not be something that one can specify, and point and say this is why it works. But when it's not there, you know something is off.

Remember those old movie posters? Or any new movie posters? Or the minimalist posters that some artists create? Or the cover of a magazine?

Photo by Martin Péchy / Unsplash

/personal history

I have been interested in learning more about type and design since long, perhaps since college time. Designing my website has been a personal obsession for me over many years. It is not what I want, but at some point I had to prioritise the actual writing. Instead of, feeling productive but not doing any actual writing.
In the current form, this site is hosted on Ghost and was using the default sans-serif. I liked sans-serif, but I did not know why. I did not know what serif meant. Last week I decided to change that.

/typeface vs font

A typeface is what a normal user usually calls font. So, Times New Roman, for example, is a type face and not a font.
A font is a typeface in a certain size, width. So, Times New Roman in 12 and Bold is a different font than Times New Roman in 12 and Regular and so on.

/what are serifs

Serifs are the small lines attached to the ends of letters. There is a historical context to it, as in that's how the romans wrote it. But no one is sure. Times New Roman is a serif typeface.
Sans-serif means without the lines. It gives a type a more modern minimalist look. Helvetica, for example is a sans-serif typeface. As is Inter, which is what this site uses now.

Photo by Declan Sun / Unsplash Serif font, notice the lines at the end of A.

/to summarise

There is a long and interesting history to how types came into being. How they are/were designed. Their origins and how sans-serif types gained popularity after the war. This documentary on typography provides a good overview and history of the same. As I said in the beginning, good type is like good design. It helps you do what needs to be done. If that something is reading a text on a digital screen then the font should improve readability. But there is no harm in the text looking beautiful too. There are lots of types in the world. There is no one type to rule the world. It is just a type. The important thing is what enables you to do.

iPhones and Typography

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from the Iso Omena library! I type this from the silent room in the library. This is NordLetter #25, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I happened upon Austin Kleon’s website somehow. I have known him from reading Steal like an author. Coincidentally I found out that he blogs often. Often daily.
This is something that I have struggled with often. And I keep coming back to it again and again. Should I write daily, or weekly? Should I post something even if I am not happy with it?
Insight is the key thing. If I am not adding anything to something, then you can go to the verge and read it there I guess. Also, quality and quantity both are important. Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can't it be both?
Anyway, that's a roundabout way of saying I will be writing more often.
Writing is not just done for the sake of writing, for the sake of publishing. When we write, we clarify our thought. We give structure to it.

I write to think.

There's no harm in doing more of it. Right?

/techStuff

Apple announced new iPhones, Airpods, and Apple Watches on Monday. I wrote about it here
1. To summarise, the event felt twice as long as it should have been.
2. There was not actually that much new stuff announced.
3. The Airpods 4 have ANC option.
4. The Airpods 2 can work as over the counter hearing-aids.
5. The Apple Watches are larger now!
6. There is a camera control button on the iPhones now.
7. The iPhones are iterative updates but those iterations become substantive over multiple generations. I ordered the 256GB iPhone 16 Pro. I will be upgrading from the 13Pro so I am very excited.
Sony launched the PS5 Pro. At 700USD it is a costly purchased. I do not see why one would upgrade from the base PS5, but if you are getting a new PS5 today, sure a good option to have along with the slim.
Huawei announced/launched a tri-fold phone. Yes, tri-fold. It costs as much as a 16-inc Macbook Pro. I guess this is the week of costly device announcements?

/reading

I finished reading Ed Catmull's Creativity Inc this week. It is an excellent book about creativity and managing people in organisations. I wrote about the ending of the book here.

I have been interested in typography, their history and what the basic vocabulary is about these things. This week, I watched three videos which go over some of the basics:

I know a lot more than when I began. I know what serif and san-serif mean for example. If you are interested in typography and design, you can go through these videos.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Made You Cry

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I finished reading Creativity Inc today. Ed uses many anecdotes from Pixar to talk about multiple things related to managing people and enabling the environments in which they do good work. I have jotted a few notes down and there will be more to say about it in the future.

The thing that I want to talk about today, is the ending of the book.

I was not expecting it.

In the end Ed talks about Steve Jobs. The man that he was, how he was different from how he was portrayed and so on. There were stories about the acquisition, how he would give notes to the directors and so on. And finally about the time at the end, when he was about to leave.

I was moved by those last few paragraphs. I was sitting in the metro and I had to stop myself a couple of times.

This was not fiction. Books such as these are not supposed to make you cry.

This one did!

And I thought to myself, this is what I want in my writing. Not morose descriptions of things. Not info dump. Every chapter has to make you feel something. Joy, despair, anger, fear. Something!

Further Thoughts on Certifications and Trainings

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I am a member of a Reddit sub by the name of r/AzureCertification. This is a sub to discuss all things Azure certs. I joined this sub back in 2023, when I had first thought of getting certified. I lurked in the sub without posting anything. Some people would give tips on how to prepare for the certs. Some would be celebrating their successful attempts. Some were not so well prepared or lucky to crack the exam.

Yesterday I got a notification from Reddit about the following post:

I did not read the post. I had not read it even then. But this got me thinking. So here we are.

I wrote in my post discussing the certification:

None of it would have been possible without Prerna. She pushed me when needed. And boy did I need that push. I guess the thing that I am getting at is marry well. 😁

The first time we discussed certification was in 2023, when we were pregnant. I knew that after February, it would be close to impossible to take any time out to study. So around the end of December, I started studying for this certification. I purchased a course, studied a bit of Entra for a couple of weeks in December and January. I could not continue after that.

Savya was born in February. Prerna and I had become parents. Those first few weeks were a blur of sleeplessness. Every time we felt like we had a handle on things, Savya would surprise us with something new. (I can't help but smile as I type this).

February turned to March. March turned to April.

We got a handle on things. Prerna had started to heal. She could move around the house. Savya had grown.

I don't remember the day, but Prerna and I had a discussion around my career. And the want I had to get certified. She said, I should get certified.

I discovered the Iso Omena library. And started publishing Nordletter.

I could say that it was all me. But it wasn't. And it never will be, from this point on. I was reminded of that as I read the headline for that post.

I was able to prepare for this exam, with a full-time job, being married and with a new born. I was able to do all this because Prerna was willing to stay back and look after Savya for those three odd hours I was in the library. Because even though I did not want she would send me to the library after every office day. Because after a long time in my life I had someone who believed in me and cheered for me.

I guess the thing that I am getting at it is this:

A partner can make or break your life. They can build you up or break you down. So, marry well.

Original Art

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

No art is original. Everything we make is a remix of things that have come earlier.
We combine things from disparate domains and create something.
We stand on shoulders of giants.
Great artists steal.

A few examples of this:

Apple copying the GUI from Xerox
Van Gogh copying the Japanese painter Hiroshige.

I used to do this as a child. We all do! Drawing (copying?) Pokémon. That’s how a lot of us learn to draw. Right? Use tracing paper to draw something complex. Something we don’t know how to make yet. And then you do.

Thoughts on iPhone Day

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Apple announced new iPhones, new Apple Watches and new AirPods today.

Some thoughts.

/Watches

Series 10 !!
New sizes - 42 and 46 mm. These were rumoured to go much larger in size. They did not. I have a Series 8 45mm. I wanted to live in a world where this was the smaller size. 😆
New titanium finish.
New finish for the Ultra.

/AirPods

New Series 4 with two models one with and one without ANC. Till they do something about the battery situation on the AirPods, I don't think I will buy one. But these strike a good balance for those who do not want the in-ear nature of the Pros.
AirPods Pro will function as hearing aids.
AirPods Max in new colour.
Everything charges via USB-C.

iPhones

The colours on the base model look so damn good! Give the Pros some colour Apple!
This iPhone 16 ad was so fun. The best part about the event for me.
Camera/Apple Intelligence button. Some neat tricks there.
- The capacitive nature of the button might allow other apps to use it in interesting ways. I am not sure if it is allowed though.
- Using the same button for Apple Intelligence even in the ad looked a little weird. If it were at the power button level, sure. But in portrait down below, I am not sure how comfortable it would be.
iPhone 16 Pro gets the 5x tetraprism camera. Also new 48mp ultra-wide lens. Yay for both.
That desert colour looks good.
Apple really wants you to use iPhones to shoot movies. Some people are already doing it. As Apple keeps reminding with each new Pro model. Is this why we can't have fun colours on the Pro line?

event+summary

Not much new stuff was announced. They spent a lot of time talking about AirPods but the only new thing that was announced was the AirPods 4.
This format felt a bit boring and long.
iPhones really are like cars. Just get the one released for the year you need to get one.

Certified and It Feels so Good

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkyla! This is NordLetter #24, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

One of my goals for this year was to get the Azure Administrator Associate certificate. On the 3rd September, I sat for the exam and passed.

It was a tough exam. And it felt so good to have this under my belt.

This weekend, I did not have to go to the library to study. I did go to the library on Sunday, but I did not have to.

Autumn. Fallen leaves on the road.

/techStuff

John wrote a long post about the new changes Apple made to iOS to better comply with the DMA. I have thoughts. Two branches of thoughts primarily.

About default apps and browser choice screens.

About the actual changes that Apple is having to make. As an example, asking the user again and again, if they chose Safari to confirm their choice, whenever they change they get a new device, for example. I do not think it is a big deal. Sure, it's not ideal. But how often do you change your device? So that's OK.
These things are about choices, right. The user has a choice now. Sure they might pick something else. Or they might decide to stick with Safari.

The other thing is cultural. The difference between how Americans and Europeans look at their governments and their corporations. Europeans and Indians, and Japanese and the rest of the governments. Everybody is coming up with legislations. And I feel all of this could have been avoided. I feel the major thing here was people were unhappy paying the App Store commissions (taxes?).

One final thing about this is maybe Apple knew legislations will come. And they will have to run the App Store based on different geo-political boundaries. They had different rules for China. So they felt the optimal choice was to run it as they could for as long as they could and then fight all the legislation that came up around the world.

I added the wirecutter show to my podcast rotation recently. I have referred to Wirecutter for a lot of my purchases since long. The episode this week was about how and when to get your children phones. It was a fun episode. The hosts are nice.

If you're into podcasts, give them a listen.

/reading

What a 160-year-old theory about coal predicts about our self-driving future
As things get better, we start using more of it, therefore any efficiency improvements are not realised.

How Teacups and Demons Help Demystify Physics

In Literature Class , the book distilled from his Berkeley lectures, he noted—according to my translation of his Spanish text—that, “it has seemed to us that literature is a kind of combinatorial art in which fantasy, imagination, truth, lies, any postulate, any theory” are welcome. Scientists, on the other hand, he said, it has often seemed, occupied a very different world—one of certainty, confidence. “But when I read about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, I said ‘damn, they’re like us.’ ”

With time, I can see how the rigidity of science can be a problem at times. This post further feeds into that belief of mine. I am not saying fuck science and all that. Science helps us in understanding the world. But there is just so much that we don’t know.

Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Azure Admin Associate

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

One of my goals for this year was to get the Azure Administrator Associate certificate. On the 3rd September, I sat for the exam and passed. 😀

On my back from the exam centre, all I did was laugh. I felt relieved. I felt joyous. This was a long time coming. I had started preparing for this exam back in April. It took spending three to four hours each weekend at the library and an hour the rest of the days. It took doing that consistently for the last three or so months, with a couple of breaks in between owing to bad health. We had a bout of cough-cold-fever in the house around May.

None of it would have been possible without Prerna. She pushed me when needed. And boy did I need that push. I guess the thing that I am getting at is marry well. 😁

/prep+resources

The curriculum for this cert can broadly be divided into five parts:

Identity and Governance
Networking
Storage
Compute
Monitoring and Backup

I started with John's AZ-104 course on Youtube. I took copious notes.

Then I started the MS Learn path for AZ-104. I was struggling a bit at this point. I was not feeling excited about the course. It clicked for me one day, while doing one of the labs in the course that I will do all the things they showed on Azure using PowerShell. Eventually, I decided to create basic lab setup using Bicep.

After I was done with the learning path, I did the Azure Labs.

/testing

I used Tutorial Dojo's AZ 104 practice exams for preparing for the exam. The important thing here is to go through all the solutions so that you are sure the reasoning is correct.

A week before the scheduled exam, I started going through Tech with Jaspal's AZ 104 playlist during commute. There are three long videos in the playlist. I used them.

/exam experience

I got 55 questions. The first section was the case study. You can not come back to this section. It was tough. I had originally planned to mark things for review and use MS Learn at the end. I had sort of memorised how the URLs for the Learn reference sections. But the Learn we get during the exam is mostly search based. So it was slightly trickier to manage. Like you can not browse to different sections on a Storage page for example. You have to search to find an appropriate section.

I felt like I spent longer on the case study. For the rest of the exam I had to be on top of how many minutes I had left. I had imagined 1 question per minute would be enough. And so I had to keep that calculation going on in my head.

After submitting the exam, during the time it takes for the result to load I was not sure if I would pass. But then the fireworks started on the page. And I could not stop laughing.

Glowtime

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkyla! This is NordLetter #23, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I finally watched Maharaja this week on Netflix. I also watched 3 body problem. I had been meaning to watch both since long. Both of them did not disappoint in the least bit.

On my walk Tuesday, I spotted a buck on my trail.

Also, a beautiful sunset over the beach.

/techStuff

Apple will be holding the iPhone event on September 9. Every year it feels like you already know what to expect in the event. Everything is already leaked. There are more interesting things in the next year event perhaps (hello iPhone 17 slim).

But still Apple manages to surprise in a way or two.

This year's focus would be on the new Apple Intelligence Siri. They will also be adding a Capture button on the side of the phone. As if we needed any more proof that the phones we carry in our pockets are more cameras than phones!

It would be fun if they announce a new iPad mini. But don't think they will.

There will be the new watches and maybe new AirPods.

Hello, you’re here because you compared AI image editing to Photoshop

I talked about the what is a photo apocalypse last time around. This post talks about the same stuff.

/reading

Hope and disparity: a colorful new way to visualize air quality around the world

The unfortunate reality is that 99 percent of the world’s population live in places with air quality that’s worse than the World Health Organization’s guideline for PM2.5. Cities in low and middle-income countries in parts of South Asia and Africa are particularly hard-hit, the Air Quality Stripes researchers find. Air quality in Delhi, India, and Abuja, Nigeria, has climbed toward “extremely poor” and “very poor,” respectively, since the 1970s, for example

Just go and look at New Delhi's graph. It's just so sad.

And then read: Can Trees Heal You?

Nature shouldn’t be a privilege, it should be accessible to everyone.

So many things that the western world takes for granted are a dream for the developing world.

Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

It is important to scope our work properly. Sometimes it's better to cut things to make things better.

A Hermit’s Reality

A beautiful piece on a hermit’s life.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Ready or Not

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkyla! This is NordLetter #22, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

I had scheduled an exam on 27th, but caught cold on Friday so had to postpone the exam.

I had gone out for a walk on Wednesday, and it was windy. You could feel it in the way the water sounded. Angry. I stopped and clicked a few pictures.

On Thursday we had clear skies. Oh how I love the sky here. You don't get this often in Delhi. Maybe one day out of the blue you would get clear skies. But not often. Often it's a grey mess.

/techStuff

The first reviews for the Pixel 9 phones are out. They all say the same thing: these are great phones, with polished hardware, but the AI sprinkling is hit and miss.

This leads me into talking about the whole what is a photo apocalypse. The Pixel phones have photo-altering tools in the camera app. Photoshop has existed for a while now. You could do things like putting things in a picture, changing the colour of the sky, removing people from the background, etc. earlier as well. The difference is that it is way more accessible now. Anyone can do it, quickly too. And that causes a problem.

You can't trust a photo.

You can't be sure that the thing you're looking at, did it happen.

Some of it happens now as well. You can't trust stuff you see on social for example. But the question is about a threshold. I feel like a threshold would get breached soon. First with this release of the Pixel phones. But they don't sell in such large numbers. Soon after, in September, Apple will release the latest iPhones. They will be coming with similar Apple Intelligence features.

I guess the thing that I am saying is, just because we can do something, does not mean we should.

Apple Podcasts now has a web app

You can now use this to listen to Podcasts on the Boox Palma. Which I was tempted to get earlier in the summer. But did not.

Integration and Android

A slightly longer read this. But a good read nonetheless around Google's need for integration.

Your new AI Friend is almost ready to meet you

This device is an orb like thing with a speaker you put around your neck or tie it to your hand. It processes things it hears, and then sends texts to you. This is one of those things which feel like they are tailor-made for an LLM.

The only thing it has to do is be nice to you. Right?

It feels comparatively low stakes. It is not telling you to replace your friends. It is not a life partner. It will not make you productive. Just an extra thing.

It might be good. If the platforms some day decide to add it, maybe as part of the existing health capabilities. Something affirming sent to you once a day. It might be good.

/reading

Confessions of a Theoretical Physicist

This physicist happens to be an Indian. And so the interplay between the philosophies is something I found interesting.

This is one of my beliefs. To create something great, you do have to get thoughts from different areas of life. Mix and mash them. And voila.

On Writing Well | nikhil.bafna

Some good points there. The importance of writing things in a simpler way. The importance of adding structure to things.

Bug squash: An underrated interview question – Jake Zimmerman

I don't like how interviews are conducted usually. This seems like a good way to do things in a particular niche at least.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

India Day

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #21, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

We celebrated the 8th India Day in Helsinki this Sunday. The event was hosted in Meripuisto this year. I took the metro from home till Kampi, and then #20 to Meripuisto park. I could see the steel grids set around the venue as soon as I got down. I could hear the music as well.

The performer's stage was set on one side of the park with the sponsor tents set a little distance further, followed by food stalls. It was a beautiful sunny day to be out and about.

I had litti-chokha from the BJPRF stand and a vada pav from elsewhere.

I preferred the arrangement from last year, when it was possible to take something to eat and still be able to look at the stage and enjoy the performance. Last year's venue was a bit of a square, compared to this year where it felt like a long rectangle. With all the food stalls stretched out toward the end.

/techStuff

Apple is finally going to open up iPhone tap-to-pay
Not sure how useful this will be. From a user perspective. All the banks would want me to use their app. Sure. But I want to use a single app to do the payment.

/reading

The Days Are Long but the Years Are Short

What stops us from doing new things? There seems to be a million reasons and two opposing forces keeping us in inaction: fear and vanity.
When you do the thing, most likely you’ll have to kill it. New things tend to not work, or you have to change them drastically.

Mediocrity and perfectionism
It is important to ship. Not ship junk. But ship things which are good enough.

Repair and Remain

Repair and remain sounds simple because it is. But simple is not the same as easy.

We all need someone to talk to. We all need to be patient. New isn’t always better. It is easy to say I quit, I’m done. And difficult to stay and fix things - both small and large. But most worthwhile things in life are difficult.

How to avoid losing items? Holding pens. | Alex W.'s Blog
A place in your home to place items when your attention is being called to something else.

The Egg
Started (and finished) reading And Weir's Project Hail Mary this week. Read the author jacket and found out that Mr Weir was a software developer for 20 years, then became a writer.

I had decided then that I would google him. I did google him a day later. Upon reading, found out that he had written and published a few short story's on his website, the most famous of them being - the egg. Read it. You should read it too.

/watching

Excellent video on buying vs renting by Ramit.
For me, buying a house is not a a financial decision. Whenever I buy a house, it will be because I want to. Of course, affordability is a thing. But it will be an emotional decision. Not for investment.

About how sci-fi has changed over the years. Very interesting. I have enjoyed sci-fi the most. From Asimov to Andy Weir recently.

I pay for the premium subscription for Duolingo. But this is such an interesting view. The modern capitalist notion of growth at all costs has this issue of there being a cap to the number of humans we have on the planet. You can not grow infinitely. There will come a point where growth stops. It feels like all the investors have short term views.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.

Missing Home

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #20, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

Prerna went home today.

Home. A funny word that. Home.

What is home? Can there be different homes?

I still think of India, Noida as home. This? Here? This is also home. I guess that is one of the tragedies of being an expat.

Can home be a person? I think so.

What is home?

It's where you feel safe. Where you can be yourself. Where you don't have to pretend. Where you feel loved. Where you can just be.

Prerna is my home.

And now, I don't have that to come back to after work.

/techStuff

Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case

A US judge ruled that Google is a monopoly in search and ads. This feels like it was a long time coming. It is also about defaults and how most of us don't change them. It is true that Google is the best at search. It is also true that it pays other companies lots of money to be the default option.

It is yet to be decided what Google will need to do or forced to do.

Google is discontinuing the Chromecast line.

I had bought a Chromecast. It was cheap. It brought Android TV to my dumb TV. It was just perfect. End of an era. Now most TVs are smart. So a cheap plug is not needed any more.

Existential thoughts about Apple’s reliance on Services revenue

/reading

A Swiss Town Banned Billboards. Zurich, Bern May Soon Follow

Advertising is intended to create needs that people did not know they had before.

“No Salt”

About loss.

How not to say the wrong thing
A similar concept to how I think about the world in general. In circle. Who are the people I care about the most? And then it expands from there. Friends, family, colleagues. In circles expanding from myself. To whom and in what order will I give my mind-space and time to.
Everybody can text you. It’s up to you to decide who are you giving the permission to.
This expands it or talks about it in the context of being in a hospital.

Until next week.

A Day Trip to Tampere

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #19, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

If you enjoyed this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

This was a busy week. We were invited to four of our friends' houses on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. So of course, on Saturday we visited Tampere. This is also Prerna's last week in Finland before her trip to India. I am a little sad and a little excited, both at the same time. Excited for Savya to meet his grandparents. And sad to be away from the both of them.

/tampere

There are many inter-city trains to Tampere. We took IC-43 from Helsinki Central to Tampere. There were 2 stops on the way. One in Pasila and the other a little further along in Tikkurila. We started at 09:19 and had reached Tampere by 10:58.

The train ride was very comfortable and a joy. We had booked a private cabin which was basically two window seats and a partition which reduced the noise to a bare minimum.

Tampere is the second oldest town in Finland. It does not have an 'old __town ' though. What it is famous for is the observation tower in Sarkanniemi. And so that's where we were headed as soon as we had left the train station.

/to Näsinneula

We took the scenic route as it took us across the Tammerkoski rapids and the Central Square.

The Tammerkoski waterfall in the backgroundThe Central Square

We stopped at the Alexander Church. There is a beautiful spring/sculpture at the same place. I saw an old couple sitting there and I told Prerna this is what I want in life. And she said, no I don't want to use a cane to walk.

We do look at life differently, she and I.

Just as we crossed the road we came across a beautiful black building, with a striking rounded design.

Prerna asked me what this was. I looked at the board. This was a library. The central library in Tampere, like Oodi in Helsinki. Man do the Finns know how to build libraries. Beautiful inviting spaces.

The library's backyard. That's a chessboard etched there.

As we continued toward Sakranniemi, Prerna found someone to talk to.

And I found the Näsikallio Water Fountain.

A little further up, and we saw it. The observation tower.

Näsinneula/Särkänniemi

Sakranniemi is an amusement park with rides, plus an aquarium and a planetarium. We were here for the observation tower though. I took our tickets and we were in.

Näsinneula is the tallest free-standing structure in Finland and at present the tallest observation tower in the Nordics. There is a revolving restaurant at 124 metres.

We took the elevator to the top (120 metres). We could feel the pressure difference as we were going up. The elevator is fast and there's music and lights while you go up.

The tower provides an excellent bird's eye view of Tampere.

The ticket includes juice/coffee/tea at the Neula Sky Cafe. We took a croissant and a pastry additionally.

It started raining as we got down from the tower. We were stuck in the building for a bit and then eventually decided to buy 'rain coats '.

The city looked beautiful drenched in rain. I guess rain does do that. It freshens everything up a bit.

We took a break and had lunch.

Tampere Cathedral

The cathedral is a Lutheran church, built with granite and has a red roof. It was built between 1902 and 1907. There was organ music playing when we entered the church. It crescendoed while we were sitting in the church. There are beautiful frescoes painted by Hugo Simberg, including a winged serpent on a red background at the highest point in the church. This was all the rage when it was first painted, with people considering it a symbol of sin.

I did not feel it was particularly sinful. But that's just me. A century later.

Lenin museum

For the final stopover on the trip Prerna wanted to see a museum. The Lenin museum was the only one open till six (the others closed at five, so plan in advance!).

I did not have too many hopes but it surprised me. We spent the next hour at the museum. Just reading and looking at things. The museum is not as much about Lenin as it is about Finland and Russia's shared histories. It was compelling.

Moro Sky Bar/Torni

Moro Sky Bar is an astonishing sky bar with a tremendous view over the city of Tampere. The Sky Bar is located in the 25th floor of Solo Sokos Hotel Torni. We ordered a long drink and a mojito along with some French toast with berries and ice cream. It was great.

We walked a lot in Tampere. Around 12 kms per my watch. You could buy a day ticket and use the trams or buses. We decided to walk.

I loved the colour of the trams. They seemed better than the green we have in Helsinki. I did not like the colour of the buses. It seemed an old design. I much prefer how buses look here in Helsinki.

That's it. Those are my two tid-bits from the trip.

/techStuff

Instagram starts letting people create AI versions of themselves

A weird bit of news. Turns out IG was doing celebrity AI bots earlier.

How would this be useful? I don't know.

Is it weird and a bit creepy? Yes to both.

The Apple Watch has reached the limits of its potential
The hope for an apple ring. My view about this has changed from an Apple ring to replace the watch, to Apple Watch + Ring. Remove the Apple Watch at night sort of thing. Or wear Apple Watch at watch appropriate times. Going to office. Doing a workout and so on.

The consequences of generative AI for online knowledge communities - Scientific Reports
Stack overflow traffic decreased. Younger devs who were asking basic questions stopped coming. Complex questions were asked now. Reddit dev communities did not see any impact.

/reading

The Universal Foundations for a Good Life - Scott H Young

This is the thing about good ideas - they seem simple and obvious. And yet, no one has written it down in the same way. That's how I felt while I was reading this.

If We Want a Shift to Walking, We Need To Prioritize Dignity
All of these things are there when walking here in Finland. 🙂

Publishing your work increases your luck

Motion begets motion, progress begets progress. Pick the smallest thing you can do and get started.
Most of us really enjoy the building aspect but start to get a little shy when it comes to telling people about the stuff we’ve built.

And that is all we have for this week. See you next time.

Nature Trails - Nuuksio and Pihlajasaari

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #18, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

/Nuuksio National Park

There are 41 national parks in Finland. When I had first come here back in 2021, I had made a list of them, and decided this would be my bucket list. The places I wanted to visit in Finland. All of them.

I visited Sipoonkorpi in June, 2021.

I visited Nuuksio this past Saturday (July, 2024).

I do hope the remaining thirty nine come at a faster pace. 😆

We were looking for a beginner friendly trail in Nuuksio. The following three seemed promising enough:

Punarinnankierros Trail, 2.7 km circle trail
Punarinnankierros Trail, 2 km circle trail
Maahisenkierros Trail, 2km circle trail

Just a note, but the directions page goes in great detail over the bus routes one can take. We decided eventually to go to Haltia which also has the Finnish Nature Centre. We took 530 from home and then 245A from Espoo centre. It took around 50 minutes to get there.

The sparkling Lake Pitkäjärvi comes up on the left as the bus rolls through the beautiful scenery. Then hides behind the tree cover, before finally showing up again next to the Finnish Nature Centre, Haltia. Which is also where the bus stops, just before the nature centre, near the parking areas.

The Nature Centre has a shop, an exhibition and some restaurants. We had gone there a bit late, so the only place we could see was the shop.

We left the centre, and made our way across the road to the start of the trail. The Maahisenkierros trail (marked in blue) is a circular 2km trail. The trail is wheelchair/pram friendly. If we had known that in advance, we would have carried Savya in the pram. There is also the 1.4 km Paivattarenpolku trail (marked in pink) which starts at the parking.

What we ended up doing was combining the two. We started in the middle of the pink trail. It went and merged with the blue trail. We continued and completed the blue trail and then after returning, as it merged back with the pink trail we continued on that.

Anyway, here's some pictures from the trail. Nuuksio was beautiful. The air is different in places like these. It refreshes the mind, the body and the soul. The Finns really do love nature. The parks are well preserved and everything is clean and well-kept.

/Pihlajasaari Island

On Sunday, post lunch we decided on an impromptu trip to Pihlajasaari island. We took the M1 to Ruoholahti and then the water bus to the island. The water bus takes around 15 mins to get to the island.

Pihlajasaari is a former villa island. It has beaches, villas, rocks, trees and a sandy trail that goes through it all. There are plenty of benches around the island, where one could sit and eat. We were hungry when we got there, so ate at the first bench we could find. Which was not a great decision in hindsight. There are just so many benches at so many beautiful locations.

We walked around the island and eventually settled at the beach. Lying down in the sand for a good hour and a half. Finally, taking the last water bus off the island.

/techStuff

Apple is rumoured to be working on a foldable. It is supposed to be a flip phone. What I want is something that transforms into a mini iPad. That would be a great device to read on.

MKBHD reviewed the Galaxy ring. I was minded to like it. But as Marques said, for a lot of exercises you might have to remove the ring. And then what’s the purpose.

Open AI announced its Google competitor. Search as we know it might be ending, because the internet is filled with SEO crap.

Also, Meta announced the release of its latest model. All these competing models seem similar in functionality and there is nothing unique. So it makes sense to open source it I guess.

/reading

3 Tactics to Beat Procrastination Without Overhauling Your Life - Sunsama Blog

Break a large task into smaller chunks. Or when you don’t feel like doing something, tell yourself I will do it for 5 minutes.
Align the task with your long term goal.
Practice good-procrastination. Basically prioritise stuff. What is important. You don’t have to tackle every small task. Create time blocks to take care of things that matter (training/spending time with family, etc.)

Timeshielding: How to Do the Things you Actually Want to Do
Interesting read. The idea is be a little fluid with how you manage team. Make space for things that matter: creativity, rest, sleep, attention.

A few interesting reads from Seth.

This last one talks to the importance of systems. Having systems makes it easier to do things without thinking too much about it. Helps to beat procrastination.

Until next week.

How to Handle Dependencies in Bicep

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Bicep deploys resources in parallel. Which is what you might want as that is faster. However, there might be dependencies. I came across this while creating the environment needed for this exercise. It was basically a lab on vnet-peering.
What I needed to create was this:

In 2 regions,

 1. 3 VNets
 2. 3 VMs in these 3 VNets

In this scenario, there are dependencies. To create the VM you need the VNet, and the VNIC which would be attached to the VM, among other things.
When I started deploying it initially without defining dependencies, it failed to create the VNIC as the VNET was not deployed yet.

There are two ways to handle dependencies in bicep:

Implicit
Explicit

An implicit dependency is created when a resource declaration references another resource in its definition.
To specify an explicit dependency you use the dependsOn keyword.
PowerShell is a faster and simpler (at least to me) way to create these resources. But it is a better way in case of one-off things. If you want to deploy resources again and again IaC tools (bicep) are a better option. Using bicep would ensure that I could deploy the same resources with certainty. There would be no drift. Plus, I would get to learn Bicep.

So, I built the template from scratch. The code is kept here.

Celebrating Annaprashan

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #17, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

We celebrated Savya's Annaprashan today. This celebrates the first meal other than mother's milk that a child has. After this day, Savya can start eating. Usually this happens after six months.

I put a single grain of rice in his mouth. He spat it out. 😄

We had invited a few of our friends. It was the most number of people we had hosted till now. The preparations had started on Saturday in earnest. However, we had been shopping, cleaning since earlier.

From early morning, we had begun cooking. Aloo sabzi + Seeta fal sabzi + Poori for the main course. And vada pav for the starters. Our friends had helped us out and prepared Dahi Vada and Pulao.

The food was delicious. We had a great time.

We are getting better at hosting. When you start, and even now, to be honest, we are just about making it. We had asked for people to arrive at 1. I finished with the vadas by 12:30. There are nerves. How will things work out? How will we host 20 odd people in our small apartment? Where will they sit? Will the food be good?

Eventually, and every time, it does sort itself out.

We have a great time. We sit, eat and drink with our friends. While preparing, I always feel why are we doing this. After everyone has left we sit down on the sofa and think, let's do this again.

On Friday, as I logged into work, I was bombarded with messages around laptops rebooting and going into BSOD.

Major Windows BSOD issue hits banks, airlines, and TV broadcasters

Crowdstrike had pushed a patch which messed up Windows systems worldwide. More than half of my team could not work because of this. Eventually we got workarounds and were able to get them working. But what a mess. I do not remember anything similar happening over the last decade.

And the funny thing is, Crowdstrike caused it, but it was reported as a Microsoft issue in almost all the reports.

Microsoft did eventually release a recovery tool.

/techStuff

Meta won’t release its multimodal Llama AI model in the EU

Sad stuff. First Apple not releasing its Apple Intelligence features. Now Meta piling on.

/reading

I started reading this because I wanted to get free wifi on the plane. Technically you can using this method, but, you shouldn't.

Here’s the basic idea: suppose that I logged into my airmiles account and updated my name. If you were also logged in to my account then you could read my new name, from the ground. You could update it again, and I could read your new value. If we kept doing this then the name field of my airmiles account could serve as a tunnel through the airplane’s wi-fi firewall to the real world.

This is a fun read, if you enjoy reading these sorts of things.

Big, beautiful goals – but can’t be bothered? 11 great productivity tips for lazy people

Some things I use already. Like putting everything you need to do or remember in a list. That takes 2 forms.

Things that I need to do everyday are added as checkboxes in my obsidian template.
At work I have a to do template. Nothing remains in my outlook or teams conversation. Everything goes in the list.
For the things like book recommendations, I use reminders. For other things (shared items with Prerna) apple notes.
It is a slightly fractured system, but it works for me.
Putting an elastic band around your phone sounds fun. Also the idea about saying I get to instead of I have to.

Until next week.

What Now?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #16, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

It has been a quieter week this. Summer is in full swing here in Finland, so of course, it has rained four out of the past seven days here. We had planned to visit Nuuksio National Park this week, but that had to be postponed.

On Friday, while doing yoga, it felt like I had passed through something, a barrier. I had levelled up or something. It did not feel like I was doing anything. My body just seemed to do whatever I told it to do. I knew everything it was doing. I felt in control. I did not feel any stiffness in lower back or anything while doing the surya-namaskar. There was no pain. My body was stretching where it should.

I was reading about kutastha citta and parinama citta in Core of the Yoga sutras just a day before.

Kutastha citta is pure consciousness, whereas parinama citta is the tainted consciousness.

About how yogic practices, and pranayama help a sadhak go through these cittas. Maybe this triggered the feeling.

I tried to recapture that feeling today, but couldn't. Yesterday was magic. But I have progressed in my journey. I can touch the ground with my fingers during the forward bend. Not as regularly, or as easily I would want. But, it's progress. And that's all I could want or hope for.

Anyway, I updated my now page.

/techStuff

Nothing launched CMF Phone 1, smartwatch and earbuds. These are budget devices but they look so cool and fresh. They are customisable. You can swap out the back. There is also a round accessory port in a corner. You can attach a kickstand there! So fun! And it all comes in orange.

Samsung announced their latest foldables: the fold and the flip. Plus their watches and earbuds. Which look and function, similar to some existing Apple products (AirPods and Watch Ultra). Why? Your gsuess is as good as mine.

The thing that interests me is the Galaxy Ring.

I do not use my Apple Watch as a give me notifications computer. I mostly use it to track my workouts. The data that I get in aggregate, I view it on the iPhone. If I can get similar features from something which is lighter and less obtrusive. Sure, sign me up. Plus it lasts for seven days or so on a charge. Which would be another win for sure.

I get these are different devices. I am not expecting the ring to be a watch. I'm saying I would prefer to wear a ring, than a watch. But for now, there is not one that Apple makes.

A new dynamic colour-shifting wallpaper in iOS 18. That's it. 😄

/reading

An interesting read on how or why Japanese video game firms have avoided layoffs till now. It boils down to the protection offered by Japanese labour laws. And culture.

From Book Freak #164, which is about A Life of One's Own by Marion Milner . There was an interesting advice there: Observing your daily experience helps you discover true happiness. I have come across this sentiment, or hack many times. Journaling has its proponents.

How I use my Daily Notes at this point is as a repository to log down all the things I find interesting. Any initial thoughts I have on anything I come across which I find interesting. That either leads to a note or is discarded.

By noting down her experiences at the end of the day, Milner was able to find out what brought her happiness. This was often not what you would expect, what society sort of expects out of you. They were different things.

And I guess that brings the sort of clarity that might make one happier.

It's Euro Final today. Spain leads 1-0. Let's see how this ends.

Until next week.

A Case for Being Kinder to Others

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I came across this concept of fundamental attribution error (FAE) while reading Ode to a world-saving idea.

/what is it

FAE is a psychological bias. Lee Ross coined the term “fundamental attribution error” in 1977, in a paper.

When explaining other's behaviour, we give too much emphasis on their character and too less importance to their situation. Basically, we tend to be kinder to ourselves, but when it comes to others it is a 100% their fault.

This seems similar to confirmation bias, a concept I first came across while reading M. Scott Peck's The Road less travelled. He talked about people having specific world-views. And then finding material that aligns with our world-view and discarding those that do not. But it is not.

This can show up in the world in a few different ways.

If your colleague arrives late to the office, they are lazy. But if you arrive late, there was a reason. Something happened.
It reinforces allegiances within tribes and antagonism between tribes.
Once a nation gets polarised, it is difficult to go back.

/exceptions

If you or your friend does something bad, it is because of a bad situation.
If your enemy or rival does something good, it is because of a situation.

/how to overcome it

Since it is a psychological factor, it is difficult to overcome it. Something that might help is gratitude, whenever we feel this way about anyone else. We have to be aware, and be empathetic to others. We have to look at their situation. What their POV is.

This is cognitive empathy, which is different from emotional empathy (i.e. feel their pain).

Visit Porvoo

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #15, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

Porvoo is a quaint little town to the east of Helsinki. It is one of the oldest cities in Finland. We planned a day trip to Porvoo this Saturday. It was supposed to rain till 11. Then cloudy till 2. Then sunny afterward.

We took the metro to Kamppi and then the M7. The M7 was the fastest bus to get to Porvoo. We started from Kamppi at 2:05 and were in Porvoo at 2:55.

linja-autoasema - Platform area

While crossing the Porvoonjoki to get to the bus stop, we had seen both the many restaurants to our right and old town to the left. Even before we had gotten down, our minds were made up.

Old town is a charming little place with cobbled streets and quaint buildings, most painted in beautiful colours. There are quirky sign posts and beautiful flowers in front of almost every eatery and shop. We roamed around the streets at a casual pace, taking in the sights.

Further up was the old bridge (vanha silta). It is a wooden bridge which goes from the old town to the new town 😄.

We were slowly making our way to the picture point opposite the red wooden houses. This is one of the most photographed places in Finland.

This concluded our trip for the day 😄.

Not really.

Next up was walking at one of the cafe's on the river's shore. There was a pedestrian bridge further up ahead. So we walked.

We thought Thai food would be awesome and the restaurant was well-rated as well. And so we walked along the harbour, past quite a few restaurants on our way to this Thai restaurant. Which was a let down. I wanted to sit on the side of the river, eating something, drinking a long drink. This restaurant did not have any place to sit. So we walked back to Cafe Kiva.

We sat there for an hour or so. Eating, drinking, talking, laughing. The food was great. We had ordered Kiva fries and Kiva wings. Both were spicy and the mayo was flavourful.

It was around 6:30 when we left Kiva. We were scheduled to return on the 8:05 bus so we proceeded for another jaunt across old town. This time through a different street.

Prerna stopped at Nelly's art and cafe. We needed a fridge magnet after all. The owner told us that all the art is hand-crafted by around 50 local women.

This time we walked past the old bridge and found another small bridge. We asked a passing Finn to take a few pictures. Which was perhaps super uncomfortable for her. But the result was quite good.

By then it had gotten late and the Iso Linnamäki Castle Hill seemed on too steep a hill! So we went back to bus stop. Took the M7 back to Kamppi and then the metro back home. The Matinkyla metro station on the Iso Omena side was under renovation so we had to walk a bit extra.

/reading

Khan Academy - Why We’re Deeply Invested in Making AI Better at Math Tutoring (and What We’ve Been Up to Lately)
This is an interesting application of AI in learning and teaching. Something that seems ethical and better for the students. And teachers. I mean that's the pitch right? Everyone is overworked and these AI agents will be able to help. Take care of the mundane stuff. But if mundane stuff is all you do, then, good luck!

This about the world’s first public housing.

I finished reading Little Brother this week. It is an excellent piece of fiction. It shows how fragile society is, and how it can change so quickly. It teaches about some technical stuff too, but in an easy to understand fun way. These things are fun. So so fun.

In sci-fi media, there are things that sometimes need to happen to move the plot. How those things happen are not really explained. They might be presented as fact. That this thing that is magic, well it just happens here.

One of those things that I used to keep imagining is local grids. Like a black box which has some sort of fusion energy. Which is clean. And free.

Well, that might not just be sci-fi. Batteries are getting cheaper. The dream of local grids might just be around the corner.

Batteries: how cheap can they get?

The other aspect of this that I thought of when thinking of these local micro grids: nuclear fusion. It always seems like it is 20 years away.

Will We Ever Get Fusion Power? sums up everything about fusion succinctly.

The paradox of lessonsThe people most likely to sign up for coaching or additional learning are the folks who are already good at their craft. “I’m terrible at this,” can lead to, “and I don&#821…Seth's Blog

When it’s possible to get better, embracing mediocrity isn’t a useful strategy.

Until next week.

We Won!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #14, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

India won the World Cup yesterday. For some reason, I was not that much into this edition. I started watching matches from the semi-final onward. For Saturday, in preparation for the match we made some samosa and samosa chat. Thankfully, India won so we could savour it as well.

/techStuff

EU's competition chief is not happy with Apple's decision to skip Apple Intelligence features in EU. I wrote a bit about it the last time around. It was expected. But well, what can you do.

The reviews for the new arm powered Surface laptop came out. It seems they are great machines which is good news for everyone. Let's get more games on Arm!

/reading

I started this week reading about the manager’s unbearable lack of endorphins. This is something that I feel too, with my transition to managing a team. Managing people seldom gives any satisfaction. Nothing close to feeling like I’ve accomplished something. The joy that I get out of fixing a bug, finding root cause or writing a script. The feeling of a day spent well.

Next up, something about Local, first, forever. Oh how I would love it if all apps were like that. If I owned the data. I could take it wherever I wanted. Obsidian works like that. That’s why even with improvements to Apple Notes, I continue to do most of my writing in Obsidian.

David Pierce wrote about the Boox Palma. Which I am very tempted to get. I love the idea of having different devices for different things. Of knowing what you were doing based on what device you picked. No social on phones, for example. Anyway, I read a few negative reviews about the Palma. Mostly related to the screen not working. Maybe if someone else created this device, a Kindle mini or a Nook pocket or something. Craig Mod wrote about this back in Roden #90 as well.

Inside Netflix’s bet on advanced video encoding and a fun read on the history of markdown.

Finally, the case for not sanitising fairytales. Old fairy tales were truer to life. Good and bad things happened to people. But ultimately good winning over bad. That has changed now. And not for the better.

Until next week.

Trek to Tallinn

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #13, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

There’s a calm, in sitting still, doing nothing. Seeing, but not saying anything. About it. Or anything else.

There’s a bench on a little hill overlooking the sea. We sat on that bench today. Not talking. Watching the birds diving into the water. The four ducks traversing on the water, in perfect symphony.

It was windy even before the ship set sail. On one side of the sun-deck on the top floor of the cruise, the sun shone bright. Before the ship set sail, it felt too warm. On the other side, there were benches in the shade. It felt like it was a good seat to get. So we did, while we waited for our friends to join us.

We were aboard the M/s Finlandia of the Eckero line. We were going to Tallinn to visit Old town and get a fridge magnet. Tallinn is a cruise ride away from Helsinki. We would catch the 9AM cruise to Tallinn and be back on the 6:30 PM one from Tallinn. We left home around 7:30 to get to Kamppi and then the #7 tram to West Harbour Terminal T2.

It was a warm sunny morning. Like mornings here are in summer. The sun had been out since 4. And hence the warmth we felt on the top of the ship. At 9 the ship set sail. And then it got cold!

We walked some 500 meters or so to reach old town. It felt like the whole of Tallinn port was being built up with new building under construction almost everywhere. We started seeing the red roofs of old town as we got closer.

Tallinn feels like walking inside a museum. Old buildings, with beautiful doors, wonderfully preserved in time. Old town is beautiful, clean. The roads are paved in stone, which makes it difficult to walk on, but would have been wonderful for the horse-drawn carriages back in the day! There were sidewalks which were better for pushing the baby's pram on.

We walked to the town square, stopping at a couple of churches on the way.

We ate lunch at Chakra, a restaurant that came well-reviewed and suggested by a friend who had been here earlier. It did not disappoint. Post lunch, we went back to Old town. This time toward the Kohtuotsa viewing platform. The views from the top of the red roofs and the ocean and the port in the distance was amazing.

We were nearing the end of the time we had for the trip. And so we walked back down through the streets of the old town. And in case you were wondering still, we did get that fridge magnet. Three of them in fact!

/techStuff

EU Users Won’t Get Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring, or the New SharePlay Screen Sharing Features This Year, Thanks to the DMALink to: https://www.ft.com/content/360751cb-7a22-48e0-9b00-6a30ff41dcfeDaring Fireball

Makes some sense, given that DMA means Apple is a gate-keeper and has to think about how it brings new services. iPhone mirroring on the Mac can also be about Apple keeping Android out, in a way.

How Apple usually develops these features is like this:

They create an internal API which only their internal app or setting can use it.
They fix bugs and streamline the API.
They create a public API which third parties can use.

An example of this is the new AirPods-like pairing experience for third parties.

Of course, there are people who think Apple is being spiteful. To me, it feels like something they have to do.

/reading

A small post about what programming is and how it evolves into software engineering.

research!rsc: What is Software Engineering? (Go & Versioning, Part 9)Russ Cox

Few posts around how teams can be organised in the distributed/hybrid workplace that we have today. Wondering if this makes sense in a services company. A personal user manual is where each member of the team can tell about a few things that are personal to them. What makes them tick. What makes them angry. How to give feedback, etc.

What is a Personal User Manual?Personal User Manuals can help distributed teams gel and build trust. Here’s how to make one, including a free template to get you started.Future ForumAnna Brown

How to Rands is a practical example of a Personal User Manual.

How to RandsHi, welcome to the team. I’m so glad you are here at $COMPANY. It’s going to take a solid quarter to figure this place out. I understand the importance of first impressions, and I know you want to get a check in the win column, but this is a complex place full of equally complex humans. Take your tRands in ReposeName *What are team-level agreements?Team-level agreements establish expectations and norms for how teams work together. Download our free template to get started.Future ForumHelen Kupp

I also started reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother this week. I am enjoying it so far.

Until next week.

Yoga on Father's Day

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Yoga on Father's Day

Hello from the Senate Square in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #12, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

The International Day of Yoga is celebrated on 21st June every year. This year marks or will mark the 10th edition of this celebration. The Indian Embassy in Finland celebrated the same at Senate Square this year.

We had to get up a bit earlier, at six, on a Sunday! We left home and took a bus to Kamppi. We got down at Ruoholahti and took the #7 tram to Senate Square. We registered ourselves and got the yoga day t-shirt. Then moved to a good spot and spread the mat on the ground.

The event started at 8:50 with a short address by the Ambassador of India to Finland. At 9:00 the instructors started us with a breathing exercise. The whole session lasted for around an hour, where we did a bit of everything including surya namaskar, downward dog, some stability asanas and some more breathing exercises.

We ended the session with paying gratitude to ourselves, the Mother Earth and to each other.

Yoga allows you to be at one with your body. You recognise how it feels. You feel every stretch. You notice every breath.

For this one hour here, I felt all of that.

/techStuff

WWDC happened this Monday. Apple announced a bunch of stuff. Here's some of the things that I found interesting.

You can arrange icons on your home screens in iOS/iPadOS.
Apple Passwords app for all platforms (including Windows).
Two fun demos: the Maths Notes one and the MacOS phone-mirroring one. The phone mirroring thing will be useful. There are many times when I am sitting with my Mac and I don't have the phone nearby. Being able to just run the phone from the Mac will be useful.
Apple Intelligence/Smarter Siri: will have the context and the data to actually be useful. But it will be limited on the phone side at least to iPhone 15 Pro or higher. There are other generative AI features coming (custom emoji, autocomplete, etc.) but none of that is exciting to me.
Mail app is getting updated. I wish I could add the smart filters I have on the Mac to the iPhone. But it will have filters similar to what Gmail has. Not sure if it will be any useful.

/reading

Being kind is an important quality, perhaps the greatest one. We should all strive to be a little kinder. The world would be a better place for it. This article talks about being kinder in the context of a meeting. But whatever. Be kind.

Do not try to be the smartest in the room; try to be the kindest. | Jorge Galindo’s blogIn business, being a nice person in the room can be more impactful than being the smartest. I share my insights on empathy, respect, and active listening as key skills for successful meetings and creating a positive team environment.JorgeGalindo

This Sunday was also Father's Day.

I became a father this year. There are things you understand only after you became a parent. Everything before you are a parent, is just stuff people say. It's stuff that's on paper. Theoretical.

There are so many things I understand now. About my father. And how a father feels, in general. And so, here's to my father. Whoever I am today, is mostly because of you. I love you.

Until next week.

Postcard From Oitta

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #11, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

We visited Oitta beach this Saturday. BJPRF had organised a picnic at the beach.

Oitta beach is located on the shores of Lake Bodom. From Matinkylä we took the 520 till Lommila and then 246 to Oitta. It was a short 5 min walk from the bus stop to the beach.

Here's the parking space that greets you on the way.

Parking space

And the angry bird park, also on the way.

And finally, the beach.

Beach+Swimming pools

The beach is suitable for families, as the water deepens gradually. There were separate pools with varying depths created by the walkway.

The water like any where else in Finland was clean and pristine.

We had delicious Indian Food (kachori + aloo sabzi + dal makhani + pulao + gulab jamun).

We played games.

And we got our pictures clicked.

There is also a manor/barn there, which is now a recreation centre. But we did not use it. It looked closed. Maybe because of the weather as it was supposed to be a rainy weekend. And it was in spots! But mostly it was sunny.

To be fair, I had not expected much out of this trip. But Oitta is a beautiful place. The beach is clean and beautiful and there is plenty to do. It was a bit nippy so we did not swim. Next time we will.

/techStuff

Most of this week feels like a prelude to WWDC, which is on June 10th. So I guess we will have more to discuss about then.

/reading + thinking

The Intellectual Obesity CrisisInformation addiction is rotting our brainsThe PrismGurwinder

We must realise what we are consuming. Once we do, we ought to strive to feed our brains better stuff.

Exceed or maintain?In just about every group, people decide in advance how they’ll show up when it comes to learning, to winning and to responding to opportunities. They’re wearing a hat with a label, and…Seth's Blog

Especially love the four quadrant graph (Is it a graph? Image?) at the end.

The T-Shaped EngineerThe choice between being a specialist or a generalist is debated by many engineers. Nowadays, the industry may need something in between. Generalist As the…Software Engineer

Not a new article or topic. There was a time in the beginning of my career when I struggled with this a bit. I did not want to be a generalist. I wanted to dig deep into the OS, how processes behaved and so on. Eventually, came around to looking at myself as being a generalist. Getting better understanding of systems.

How Online Privacy Is Like Fishing

Talks about the shifting baselines in our expectations from online services. We owned our data. And now with online everywhere services, we do not own anything. Companies control everything. And they have to see what we are doing, to ensure we are not doing anything sinister.
There needs to be a balance. A balance where companies can make money and people's privacy is respected.

We finally got ourselves carpet for our balcony from K-Rauta. We set everything up and it feels as if we have moved to a bigger house.

Balcony

Until next week.

A Trip to IKEA

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from the Iso Omena Library! This is the tenth edition of NordLetter, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

After a gap of nearly three weeks, I'm back in the library. And it feels so good to be back. For a couple weeks I was sick, and then it took another week to sort of get back to it. Anyway.

We visited IKEA this Saturday. We had planned on going to Central Park this week, but the little one needed a few things. And so we changed our plans.

Visiting IKEA can be like a pilgrimage in itself. You come, you roam around. You don't have to buy anything. But you do. It might not be what you came to buy in the first place. But buy you do. As did we.

Bus ride to IKEA

We took a bus from Matinkyla. And got down at the Lommila station. From there, you walk back a bit and there's a quaint little passage which takes you to IKEA. There's a sign post a little way in which points the way to IKEA.

Sign post. IKEA this way.

And then you're there.

We had planned to get mostly the rug, so that my child can play on it. On the floor, and we can worry a little less about whether he jumps off the sofa. Or bed. Or his diaper changing station.

But we did not find anything good. The rugs were either too small, too costly or not good for a kid. What we got instead was a vase and some things to decorate the home.

Inside the store.

Plus, we visited the restaurant and had Swedish meatballs (served with fries + Lingonberry jam) and Vadelmaviineri.

Dinner!

/techStuff

Lots of rumours around how Apple will add AI sauce to iOS.

Smarter Siri
Remove people or things from Photos like the Google feature
Smart replies in Email like Gmail/Outlook have been doing for years.
A way to summarise notifications

We are around eight days from WWDC. So we shall know more soon.

/thinking

I have been thinking about AI and LLMs and neural networks a lot these past couple of weeks, which culminated into me writing an essay on the topic. You can read it here.

/reading

Richard Feynman's letter to his wife
Parable of the sofa - talks about single-location family-owned business that capitalism does not like. But is actually great.
Michele Giorgi bought and restored an original 128K Macintosh, and documented the entire project here. Visit on your computer, not your phone.

I had requested the library for two books which were not available either in the language I wanted or were just not available. And today, I searched for those and found out the library had actually ordered those books. Incredible!

So what did I do next? I put a hold on those books.

Until next week.

Thoughts on AI

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I have been thinking about AIs and how they would or already are affecting how I work since quite a long time now. These past couple of weeks there have been a few announcements that put it more in the foreground. I wrote about in the past two NordLetters:

#8 about OpenAI and Gemini's models, and
#9 about Microsoft launching Copilot + PCs

Additionally,

I had come across this excellent podcast in Recommendo #411. It is a must listen. I had some thoughts after this.
Then, I read this post after coming across it on HN. This essay is again an excellent read. It solidified some of the thoughts, and experiences I've had with ChatGPT and others.

And so, here we are.

A little disclaimer before we begin. I have simplified things a lot here. That is by choice. You can and should first read/listen to the articles/podcasts for more context and nuance.

And now that is out of the way, let's begin.

/what are LLMs

LLMs are Large Language Models. Think ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot (which uses ChatGPT), Anthropic, etc.

They are AI models trained on the vast dataset of the internet. This allows them to predict, based on the earlier word, what is the likeliest next word. This might seem like intelligence. It might seem like you are having an intelligent conversation with the agent. But it is not.

Based on what was said earlier, they guess what should come next.

Most of the time they guess wrong.

/how does training work

You take the entire corpus of knowledge available to you. You scrape the web. You scan the books, newspaper, whatever. You caption the videos. You take vast amounts of compute and then you train your models on that. This allows the model to form relationships between the words. Finally you put this model out into the world.

/how training does not work

LLMs have something called a context window. GPT 4 can handle 25000 words of context for example. This also limits how much stuff you can put in a LLM to summarise.

Whenever you are talking to an LLM, the entire history of the chat becomes what is being sent to the LLM. And the LLM responds based on that history. This context window defines how long you can hold this conversation for. Once you reach this limit, you need to start a new conversation.

LLMs are stateless. They don't remember anything. So once an LLM is released into the world, it cannot learn anything new.

/a bit of philosophy

These current generation of AIs/LLMs are based on neural networks. Neural networks mimic in a simplified way how the human brain works. You train it based on some data.

Either you teach it the relationship between the data.

Or, it figures out the relationship between the data itself.

Then, when you ask it something, it predicts the outcome based on the model it has (is?).

This has worked brilliantly in case of languages.

Language is a patently human construct. We created language. All language. So, these AI models can solve for human language.

But it turns out the same principles cannot be applied to systems which are not designed by the human mind. So it cannot figure out how physical systems work, for example.

/how has it affected my work

I use Copilot at work. I use it mostly as how I was using Google/StackOverflow earlier. As a thing I can reference. Copilot, handily, shows a list of links from which it generated the output. Seldom has it given me anything I can use directly. You know copy-paste. Most of the times I click on the link and read further from the source.

It feels better to use than Googling. Because it understands complex queries. It can generate a first draft of a query.

Additionally, it is very good at generating first drafts for emails.

But again, just the first drafts. The scaffoldings. And then you have to read and edit and do the work.

/to summarise

The dream is to have an assistant, which knows everything but is customised for you.

I am not sure if the Transformer based models that are in use today will go all the way to AGI. The models have improved a lot since ChatGPT came out and took the industry by storm. But maybe there's a limit to how good these models can be. Maybe someone will invent something new. Or there will be a breakthrough somewhere.

At present, these models hallucinate a lot, and lie with confidence. There needs to be a human present. Someone with experience and know-how. To guide the AI. To filter the output. To know what is right.

Let's see how long it takes to get to her.

Oodi for All

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from Matinkylä! This is the ninth edition of NordLetter, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

a visit to Oodi

We visited Oodi (Helsinki Central Library) this Saturday. It is a striking building built with steel and glass and wooden facades.

We got down at the Central Railway Station, Oodi is a short five or so minute walk from there. The weather was pleasant. As we got out from the station, I could see a mass of people in lemon green tops coming from the direction of the library. Clearly there was a run of some sort which had finished a little while ago. There was a gentleman playing violin on the side of the road. As we walked a bit, there was some sort of promotion going on where they were giving away lemon flavoured pilsners. We took two.

Finally, we reached Oodi.

Oodi! There was a band performing under Oodi's balcony

You can read more about Oodi's design and architecture here. It has three levels/functions/atmospheres.

/level one

We entered through one of the man entrances to the ground floor. Next to the glass wall, were arranged a few chess tables. On the opposite wall was the book return station. Further up ahead was the information counter.

On the other side was a cafe and an old projector used in the '60s.

/level two

The second floor is dedicated to work and play. There are rooms to hold meetings in. There are rooms to play games in. There are 3D printers. There are work stations.

/level three

The third floor is where the books are.

Books!

There are also plenty of spaces to sit and read the books. Sofas with artsy rugs. Chairs in all shapes and form. There is also the Oodi cafe, where you can pick something to eat and drink. This meal can be enjoyed in the balcony which overlooks the Toolo area: the Parliament building and Helsinki Music centre.

Left: Parliament Building. Right: Helsinki Music CentreSee that tunnel? That goes to Kamppi.

We had brought sandwiches, so that's what we had.

The third floor also has the children's section. This has, in-addition to the books, a place for the kids to play. There is a section where you park the strollers. A place where you take off your shoes. And then, off we go!

day continues around Toolo lake

I used to walk here. Daily. Back when I used to live in Merihaka.

It is beautiful. Especially now, with flowers on almost every other tree.

We sat under a tree and I thought you're alive.

So relaxing.

We came around and stood for a bit on the wooden bridge. Looking out into the lake.

The breeze was cool and comforting. But then it got too cool. And so we moved. Back to Central. Back home.

/techStuff

Microsoft announces Copilot + PCs

A day before MS Build, Microsoft announced a new line of ARM powered PCs. These were rumoured for a while, so no surprises anywhere. Still, competition is good. Apple had a lead in performance per watt since announcing the M1 Macs. So this is good.

There were a lot of system level AI integrations announced, chief among them a service called recall. Recall would take screenshots periodically, which will be searchable. So you could at a future point in time search for something you did on your computer. This could both be a privacy nightmare or a useful feature. But that is dependent on how you, dear reader, think about these things.

/reading

I have started reading BKS Iyengar's Core of the Yoga Sutras. I was trying to find a book on yoga for a while now. Found this at the library. Reserved it. And now it's here.

Until next week.

Found a man fishing on my walk today.

Cherries All Around

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from Helsinki! This is NordLetter #8. Previous editions can be found here.

Spring/summer is in full swing here. As evidenced by the fact that we were out on both Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday, we were at the Folklore 2024 organised by Suomi-Intia-Seura. On Sunday, we visited the Roihuvuori Cherry Park in Helsinki.

Folklore'24

The Folklore event was about Indian culture and the things we do around marriages. We had people representing different states' culture. How brides and grooms look on their wedding days. The things we do before marriage. The rituals we perform after marriage, and so on. There was also food.

At the Folklore 2024 event

Later in the evening I went on my walk. You know how I miss my walks.

Walking route around Matinkyla

Cherry Park

Last Sunday, the cherry trees had not really bloomed. Somewhere during the week they did bloom, and we got the reels. Today, when we visited, it felt like the bloom had come and gone.

The Roihuvuori Cherry Park is in Helsinki closest to the Herttoniemi metro station. From there it's a 1.2 kms walk to the Roihuvuori Cherry Park. The entrance to the park has a Torii style gate along with beautiful tulip garden.

Entrance to the park

As we walked inside, we walked across a wooden bridge over a beautiful pond.

Pond + Sun

Waking a bit more we reached a parking space where all the food trucks are parked. Beyond which you can just see all the cherry trees lined up against the water tank. Then we finally reached the cherry trees, which to be fair did not look that pink. But that could most probably be because we were a bit late.

Cherry trees at the park

We finally found a place in the lawns, spread our sheet on the lawn and chilled for a bit. We had sweet bubble waffle from a vendor and fries and nuggets from a falafel place.

Food and rest at the park

AI season

Both Google and OpenAI announced new versions of their products/updates.

OpenAI came out with ChatGPT 4 o on Monday. The new model is faster, sounds more natural, laughs, flirts a bit (think the movie Her).

Google announced updates to Gemini as part of IO on Tuesday.

Both models are touting multi-modal capabilities. Which means that the model can understand images, video, audio and respond accordingly.

I mostly use Copilot for coding help and occasionally create images. My experience thus far has been the same. The assistants can be used to provide an initial starting point. But they can not be deployed to production. Will they get any better? Maybe. Or maybe this is the best these models can go. They will continue to hallucinate. They will continue to confidently lie.

AI generated summaries

Google also announced that AI generated summaries will come to search. Also a separate web search filter. This mode would remove the shopping bar, the AI overviews, etc. How search used to work in the old days.

The assumption here is that we are looking for things faster. Summarise the book to a paragraph. Summarise the news article. Summarise. Summarise. Summarise.

For some things, sure, I would love to get a one word or paragraph answer. Mostly these are factual queries.

But for other things, you want to read the full thing.

I don't know, I am old school about these things. I believe in the power of the open web and open systems.

I am reading

We Need To Rewild The Internet

This article draws parallels between the practices of rewilding ecological systems and the web. Most of the web is dependent on two or more large companies to keep it running. Think an outage in AWS causes a lot of apps to go down.

It advocates increasing diversity.

I am thinking about

Diversity is as important in ecology as it is in the infrastructure that underpins the internet. We cannot let one or two companies control parts of the internet. The web is far too important. The web will wither and die.

I was talking to a friend here, and they mentioned a similar thing around multi-use apartments. They mentioned that the previous apartment they were renting out had only 1/2 hall apartments. Those apartments would attract a certain type of renter: mostly immigrants, or people just starting out in life. They will not attract families. You want diversity in apartments. As you do in other things.

Diversity is good.

That's all folks! See you next week.

Life Happens + iPads Galore

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from Helsinki! This is Nord Letter #7. Previous editions can be found here.

Seven editions in, it feels like a good time to define this. What this is and isn't.

This is not edited thought. There is some consideration, of course. But I send this mostly as it is written, barring correcting a few typos. Rearranging a few sentences. Making things simpler. This is not an essay or a story. Those things go through multiple rounds of better-ness, of killing darlings.

This is mostly me pointing at the week that was and saying - 'look, cool stuff! '

Anyway.

Life happens

Or alternatively, some things are in our control; some things aren't.

On Thursday, we had gone out to meet a couple of people who had reached out to Prerna on Facebook. They were new here in Espoo and wanted to make friends. They were volunteers for a church.

We met them at the library. We sat and chatted in the library. Time just went by! We sat there for a couple of hours. It did not feel like it had been two hours.

While returning, I held the door for a woman who entered just after us. She was going to the same floor as us. After living here for more than a year, I was talking to a neighbour!

See there's this joke, that people in Finland live their entire lives without knowing who their neighbour is! I thought this to be true. On Reddit and elsewhere, the general advice is this: find something you enjoy, sport or something. Join a group that does this. Then,maybe , you make some friends.

I was talking to my neighbour and it turned out that she used to work for my employer earlier. Prerna invited her for tea and she said she could never say no to Indian tea.

She joined us. We talked some more. And we made friends with our neighbour!

What is the point of this story?

When the day had started, I had some ideas about how things would go. How the meeting would go with the two women who had reached out to Prerna on Facebook. I was a little apprehensive. I was not sure why they wanted to meet us. We did meet them. And it was a fun conversation.

By the time the day had ended, we had made friends with our neighbour.

There was no plan here. It was out of the blue.

And that is the point. One might want for certain things to happen. In my head, I had formulated how that first conversation with a neighbour would go. But it never went past a moi. Until it did.

Life, happens. Some things we do control. Others we don't.

It's important to recognise which is which and worry accordingly.

Thoughts on the new iPads

Apple event on Samsung TV + Plants!

On Tuesday, Apple announced new iPads. New iPad Pros with OLED screens and M4 chips. New iPad Airs with M2 chips and a new 13-inch screen size.

I am interested in the iPad Air. There was nothing exciting announced about it. It did not need to be. iPad Air is the better product in the iPad lineup.

How I use the iPad

I wanted to read a certain book. It was very costly on Kindle. It was available for free via a subscription my company provides access to. The problem was there was no way to read this book on Kindle.

So, I booted up the iPad to read this book.

This is my use case. Read books. Look at photographs. (Looking at photographs is perhaps the best use case for an iPad. Phone screens are a little too small. Airplay on TV is OK, but not ideal. iPad is just perfect.)

Potentially ,

Watch video on the iPad and take Notes on the Mac.
1. Or, read on the iPad, take Notes on the Mac.
Draw on the iPad.

Anyway, I will be getting the iPad Air at some time in the near future. The 11 inch WiFi only, base version. It is more than enough power for what I need it to be. For anything more, there's the Mac.

On Saturday, Indian Women in Finland had organised a food festival. Here are some pictures.

At the Indian Women in Finland food fest

We roamed around a bit after that. Then finally ended the day with a dinner at Swad a new restaurant that had opened up a couple of months back and was rated a very high 4.8 on Google. We were a bit skeptical. Our apprehension was unfounded. The food was glorious. Perhaps the best food I've had since I've arrived here. It is not even close. It did not feel like they had just added stuff to pre-prepared bland gravies. It felt fresh. The spices were just perfect. A great end to a wonderful day.

Later part of the day. Around Central (Helsinki).

I am thinking about

There should be different devices for different things, different contexts. So that you know, what you're doing sub-consciously.

If I get on the Mac, I will be working.

If I get on the iPad, I will be reading, or watching video.

If I get on my Phone, I am wasting my time.

I am watching

We watched the Gut documentary on Netflix this past week.

Highly recommended. Beautiful animations to go with it. Simplifies a ton of stuff. Makes it watchable for the kids as well.
Gut health is very important. It impacts both our physical and mental well-being.
One must consume lots of fibre (around 50g per day)
A varied diet is important as that increases the microbiome health.

That's all for this week. Still sick. See you next week.

Oh and I wrote this poem. Do check it out.

Was I a Good Brother to You

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Was I a good brother to you?
You needed me,
But was I there?
I don’t know now,
if I can answer that.
Correctly. Truthfully?

See I was young.
As were you.
But I was younger still.
I was dealing in my own way;
With the fact.
The fact that our mother had died.

I was dealing in my own way.
And I did not stop and think,
How were you dealing with it.
You had lost someone too,
After all.
And maybe, just maybe,
You needed her more than I did?

I’ve been quiet, through life.
I made friends.
Boys are not meant to be emotional.
I don’t know.
I don’t know how I dealt with it.
I don’t remember.
It’s something I don’t think about.

But, you and I,
You and I are all that’s left of her.
And I read somewhere,
Dead people die twice.
Once when they die.
And second when people stop talking about them.
It feels like I left her that way for a long time.
I don’t want to anymore.
I want to print a picture
put it on my wall. I will.

But you needed her,
In a way I didn’t.
And I could have been better.
We could have talked more.
We could talk more now.
I want to sit with you,
In a place where you don’t have to worry,
About who is there or not.
And we can talk. And cry.
I want to. And we will.
I want to be better for you.

You and I are the only things
Left of her.
After all.

Hyvä Vappu

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from my home in Matinkyla! This is Nord Letter #6. Previous editions can be found here.

Every year, Finns celebrate April 30th and 1st May as Vappu in Finland. This is an occasion to celebrate everything from Labour Day, to the arrival of spring in Finland. It also has a bunch of Finnish student traditions as well, including putting a graduation cap on the head of Havis Amanda, a statute in Helsinki.

The first time I had witnessed Vappu was in 2022. I had gone out for my walk around Toolo lake, totally unaware of the festival. When I reached the lake I found almost a carnival like atmosphere. Finns were out in their white hats and customised overalls. They were out partying. Some were using a cut tree's trunk as a table. Most were drinking, eating, dancing and having fun. Which if you know Finns, is not how they are viewed (silent, introverted, etc.).

I knew there was some festival today. But I did not know what. Neither was I inclined, at that time, to find out what it was.

This Wednesday, we went out a little late. We had planned to go out earlier. But life happened. And so, by the time we reached the lake, there were hardly any people left. We saw a few, on their picnic blankets, drinking and eating. But that is par for the course during the summers here.

Here's some pictures.

In and around at Töölö lake.

I am thinking about

I saw this video this week and have been thinking about this a bit since then.

My earlier thoughts on this have been around how all that corporations are judged on is how much money they are making. What is the YoY growth, etc. No one cares about the people: neither the employees, nor the society at large.

I am reading

Still Blade Runner by Philip K. Dick.
The walls of Apple’s garden are tumbling down. Maybe Apple should have made these changes earlier. They would have been more in control. Now it's upto the governments. I don't think adding additional app stores etc is an issue. Most people would not care for them. They would continue using the App Store. But the whole thing is nuanced, to say the least.
They turned cattle ranches into tropical forest — then climate change hit. Maybe there's some hope left for us.

It will be a short one this week. Flu season seems to be in full swing.

See you next week.

Federating Again

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello 👋 from the Iso Omena Library.

I'm here again. It continues to be a beautiful inspiring place to sit in. And so I am.

Finland's tryst with spring continues. It had snowed here this past Tuesday. I had gotten out of bed, finished cleaning up and was about to start my yoga routine.

Then I looked out the window.

My backyard was covered in snow. If it had been just that, I would have continued. And not felt compelled to wake Prerna up. But it was not just that. It was still snowing. It was then that I woke Prerna up and said, look, spring!

Then I decided not to go to office in this weather. I had gone through the entire winter without falling, and did not want to start now. When the season was officially over.

And so I did not. As did many other Finns. By this time many have already swapped their winter tyres with the summer ones. And hence, can not take their cars out.

Here's a picture from Tuesday.

Let it snow!

And one from today.

See? No snow!

One of the big news of the week was that Ghost will be federating. Let's unpack this a bit. Because this is important.

How it used to work

You would spin up a server, have your website and publish there. You would usually get other people to join you and become a publication.

Then came the social networks

Well you know, Orkut (Oh Orkut!) and then the big blue Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X now) and so on.

You log in to a platform. You create your account there. And then you post. But none of it belongs to you. If you don't like where you are, you can't do anything. You are stuck! Or, you can delete everything you've created and that's that.

That's oversimplifying it a bit. And also there's the issue of the algorithms. But that's a good summary of it.

Ok, so what is this about?

ActivityPub is a protocol, like HTML for social media. It allows you to be in control of your stuff. It allows people to follow you across platforms. It allows you to leave, if you're unhappy and take your content with you. It is open. 😄

Threads would someday support this. They are testing integration with Mastodon.

Why am I excited about his?

Because, this is hosted on Ghost.

And I would love to make this the centre of my online existence. I would love to create my identity here. An identity I own. An identity I can control.

I would love to post here once, and have it show at different places.

I would love for this to be the place from where I can interact with people.

Also, this is open! 😄

The other thing this week is that Apple is holding the iPad event on May 7th.

I am looking forward to it, as I am looking forward to getting an iPad Air.

I am thinking about

How does information flow?

Information and knowledge are different things.

Information is just information. It's there. Out on a webpage, a quote in a book somewhere.

Information becomes knowledge after it has been processed. After you have digested it, thought about it, added context to it. Then it becomes knowledge, your knowledge.

I am reading

I finished reading Redshirts on Thursday. Now reading Blade Runner by Philip K. Dick. There's no story here. I just picked this from the sci-fi section at the library. I was figuring out how the borrow system works.

Blade Runner by Philip K. Dick

And that is all folks! See you next week.

Spring Is Here

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hello from the Iso Omena Library! It's a beautiful library with plenty of books and places to sit. It inspires, this place.

Iso Omena Library

Spring is finally here, which means it's only -1 degrees here, with a little bit of snow. This time we had thought we could pack our winter clothes away. But alas, the Finnish weather gods came with a snowy middle finger to our faces.

Spring in Finland! ☀️

I have started coming to the library for the past couple of weeks now. It has mostly been about having a place to sit, learn and think. At home, there is always something or the other that needs your attention. You should have specific places for specific things you do. You should write at a specific place each day. You should not sleep where you write. And so on.

The library then has been the place where I study (which is for AZ104 now).

But that has made me think about libraries and communal spaces.

Growing up I did not have access to a library. The one library I did know was in my school and that remained locked all throughout the year. In all my twelve years at the school, I visited the library once, and that was during the library period. We took books out of the racks, sat goofing around for around half an hour and then left.

The Iso Omena library is not only a library. In this shared space, you also have Neuvola, Kela and the health centre. The library itself has makerspace (think 3D printers), music rooms and meeting rooms. The Oodi library has gaming rooms as well. Iso Omena library does not however!

I visited the Ranganathaswamy Temple some time back with Prerna. I do not enjoy visiting most of the temples we have in India. But this temple was different. It felt old. It felt massive. There were huge stone pillars. There was a large hall and a courtyard where we sat for a bit. And then we talked. About how this place was not only a place of worship. About how it was also the centre for all activities in town. A place of learning, a place for functions of all sort, a place for entertainment. That is something that we are missing these days.

Ranganathaswamy Temple courtyard

As a child, I did not have access to a library. A place where I could go to study, sit and think. A place I could have had some chance meet with new friends. Talk to someone outside of the people I knew already.

Communal spaces are important. They allow for serendipity. They allow for people of varying view points to sit and debate, without you know shouting. They limit isolation. And that is important. Designers and planners should think about that. Many are. Clearly. But a place does not have to be only one thing. A library can be more than one thing. It can be a cafe, a play ground, a community centre!

Let's make more libraries!

What am I thinking about?

Virtual machines, containers, and all things compute.
Note taking, knowledge management and what makes a note evergreen?
- And constantly reminding myself, note taking is about thinking. Not note taking.

What am I reading?

Ever since I've known about John Scalzi, I've known him as the 'Hugo award winning novelist forRedshirts '. For one area reason or the other I could never get around to reading the said novel. Well, I am reading it now. And it is so much fun!

Redshirts by John Scalzi

And that is all folks! See you next week.

Year One

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

This here, is year one. A year to the day we got married.

I love you Prerna.

I love your positivity, your smile,
the mischief in your eye!
I love your lips, your smile,
the litheness in your hips.

We have done so much this year. And yet, it feels like it was only yesterday that we sat around the holy fire, and took our vows.

That's relativity in action! When you're having so much fun that you don't know where the time went.

A full year!

I Miss Walking

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I love walking.

Used to be that I would put on my headphones and call a friend. We would walk and talk. When that friend was not available, I would call a different friend, and so on. I did not have that many friends though. So if there was no one to talk to I would put some songs on. At almost all times, I've had a "workout " playlist. And so, I walked, and walked, and walked, and walked some more.

It did not matter when.

I remember walking at twelve to one at night, trying to get the steps in.

Look, I know! Walking is not the most efficient form of working out. I could for example burn far more calories skipping a rope. And I have.

But walking is not just walking. There's more to it.

It allows me to think. It allows me to process the things that have happened, plan for the things that I must do.

It allows me to be me. To meditate. To be at one with myself.

It allows me to breathe.

It is one of the reasons why I love Finland so much. Back home most of the days I would walk in my apartment complex. Seem the same things again, and again, and again. But here in Finland, I could go out for a walk out in nature. All that I needed to do was go out and walk.

In Helsinki, I lived in Merihaka. I would walk around the Toolo lake area. It felt fresh. Whether I was walking during the summer, the fall or the winter. The winters were trickier for sure. I fell one time and had to visit the ER. But, whatever. It was so much fun.

Now, I live in Matinkyla. And one of the biggest worries I had while moving was whether I would have the same access to water. I was not worried about nature because in Finland, nature is accessible. But I was not sure if I would get to see water. Somehow I felt it was important. Green and flowing water, calms us. It is part of our evolution. The reason why so many of the earliest civilisations were settled next to great rivers.

My worry was unfounded. Soon after moving here I found my new walking route. This route took me through natural trails and across the Matinkyla beach. It is one of the best things about my life here.

And so after four hundred words, we arrive here. To the headline.

I miss walking. I miss walking my wonderful route. I miss it so much. Even though I've lost a ton of weight doing yoga. Even though I've never been healthier than I am now.

I miss going out, walking near those trees, down that bridge, on that beach. I miss breathing in that chilly air.

It is cold here in Finland now. It was colder earlier. But the snow that fell earlier is still there. And it snowed last night as well.

The snow is not that big of an issue. But even with spikes for the boots, it still gets slippery at times. And I can not risk that this season. So I am at home, reminiscing.

Now, some pictures.

Helsinki: walking through the seasons

Matinkyla: Walking through the seasons

Celebrating Sakraat in Finland

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Sometimes I wonder if anyone would find this useful. Does it server any purpose? Does it help anyone?

Then I remind myself, I write for two people: me and you.

I have lived in Finland for a good three years now. For most of the time that I have been here, I have been happy, content, walking the trails, listening to podcasts, cooking, cleaning, grocery-shopping.

During winters, I have walked over the frozen Toolo lake. During Christmas I have roamed the streets of Helsinki. On New Years' eve I have danced in the rain, and welcomed the new year with thousands of other people.

This is the first year I celebrated Makar Sankranti in Finland. Makar Sankranti/Sakrat is a Hindu festival which celebrates among other things, movement, change, and in our part of India it is associated with crop harvesting. In India it falls around the time when the winter is getting over and it is getting a bit warmer.

What it means to me, like almost all festivals, is mostly around what we get to eat.

What I remember are these three things:

Naha-kha: Bathe then eat. Literally.
Touching rice and til kept in a plate. There would be heaps of rice and til kept in the plate, equaling the number of members in the family. And each member would touch/break the heap and combine it with the rest of already touched/broken rice.
Tilkut
Dahi-chura. Yogurt and flattened rice with jaggery or sugar.

BJPRF organised this celebration in Vanta, Finland. Prerna and I took the 520 and then the 571 to reach the venue. The venue was an atmospheric, traditional, cozy, Finnish cottage with wooden floors and a nice open hall. Attached to the hall was a little space where we had arranged for snacks, and drinks. Attached to that was the kitchen which we did not really use, as association members had prepared and brought the food to be served with them.

From L to R: 1. Me standing at the door 2. Prerna sitting on a sofa 3. The central hall

As with my childhood memories, the highlight of the event was the food: dahi-chura, khichdi, achar, tilkut, and on and on and on.

From top-left-anti-clockwise: 1. Me eating khichdi 2. Dahi-chura-chatni-tilkut and aloo-sabzi 3. Prerna with a finished plate 4. Khichdi platter

Some more pictures

I Wish I Could Fucking Hibernate!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

An ice age is triggered when summer temperatures in the northern hemisphere fails to rise above freezing for a number of years. That means that the winter ice fails to melt, but instead builds up, compresses and over time starts to compact into ice sheets.

But that is not how this story begins.

For the past couple of decades, every year had been the warmest recorded year in history. The scientists had been warning that this would occur since at least a couple of decades more. There was no coming back from this.

Scientists around the world came up with alternatives, a way to reverse the clock. Go back to pre-industrial levels of carbon in the air and temperatures around the world. Transitioning to renewables was no longer viable. The world has a funny habit of arguing, but eventually coming around, when lots of people die.

A deadly heat wave struck many states in the norther parts of India around the same time. The electrical grid could not cope with the increased demand. The lack of power, meant lack of cooling. Many, many people could not cope with it. A lot of people died. A lot more ended up scarred for life.

And so, as these things go, India became the most vocal proponent of the latest in geo-engineering technologies. The world’s first Strategic Sulphur Release facility came up in Bhopal. It started the world onto a path which led to the first time in decades of lower temperatures, all around year, all around the world.

The world congratulated itself. The world rejoiced. It saw lower average temperatures for the first time in decades. Temperatures three to four degrees lower than what had been the norm.

Then came the November of 2069.

We still don’t know what caused it for sure. The temperatures started dropping further than expected. Another tragedy occurred. And this time the people in the Scandinavia suffered.

The earth could not recover in time. It went from a period of extreme temperatures on one end to the other. Within five years, the planet had entered into the sixth major ice age.

The northern hemisphere became inhabitable. Multiple feet of ice sheets deposited over subsequent winters. The equatorial region remained habitable, but barely so.

Humanity moved underground in insulated caves. We were never going to meet the energy required to keep the world warm all year round. We had to hibernate for half of the year. Many corporations had already been working on similar life-supporting systems. The original purpose of these systems was to support life during long voyages in space. We retrofitted these systems so that they could work on earth, underground.

And so, we entered into a cycle of hibernation. For six months, all humanity rested, in their hibernation chambers. For the next six months, we woke up, performing maintenance on all the systems that kept us alive for the next six months.

Gaia managed the systems that kept us alive. Gaia was another one of the systems borrowed from the space program. It was an advanced AI system designed to operate the space ship and all its systems. It required minimal intervention from humans. It made a note of the things that needed maintenance. It made recommendations. It set the the priority order for the tasks that required human intervention. Most tasks didn't. However, we had designed Gaia with fail-safes in mind. Major tasks and decisions required authorisation from us humans. Tasks like closure of power plants, maintenance schedule for hibernation pods.

There was a hierarchy, a way for these things to work. Rooted in the corporate culture championed the world over. It worked like this.

The admins would collect and coagulate the data. The analysts would analyse the data and share a summary of actions to be taken. These summaries would then be compared against the recommendations made by Gaia. The section chief would then forward the approved actions to HQ. The HQ would apply the execution codes required for Gaia to perform the said actions.

This was how the system was supposed to work.

But given the number of decisions that needed to be made, the analysts quickly discovered that it would be way more efficient to just look at the recommendations made by Gaia and validate the data sets against that. And so they did that. This made the job of the higher ups easier as well, as there were no discrepancies between Gaia’s and the analysts’ recommendations.

Everyone was happier. They could get more done in less time. Efficiencies went through the roof! The system was working!

I woke up, shat, took a shower. Sat down meditating for fifteen minutes. Then got up, put the kettle on, put a spoonful of coffee in the coffee maker, poured hot water on top, and sealed it shut. A minute later, I pressed out the coffee onto a mug I had somehow saved from the old days. A minute later I was at my desk, logging into the system, sipping the hot coffee, looking at the mail.

Mere seconds after I had changed my status to online, I got a ping from Kari. Almost as if he had been waiting for me to come online.

“Hi” I typed back.

“Did you check my mail?”

“No” I lied. I had checked his mail. It was a long mail. The only sort Kari sent. And since I was still on my first cup of coffee, his mail had to wait. I had marked his mail as unread, to be read later. So technically, I did not lie.

“I will be there in five minutes. Check it. It’s urgent.”

“OK” I said.

Five minutes later Kari had taken a seat next to mine. I had put up the data he had sent on the big monitor.

“Do you see the problem here?” he said.

“Not in the mood right now K. Just tell me!”

“OK. OK. I was looking at the energy projections we had sent out. And it’s minor but I see this delta between what I had mentioned and what was actually sent out.”

I saw what he was saying. And a part of me wanted to lash out and tell him it wasn’t his job to be doing these projections, it was mine. But I wasn’t my boss. And so I did not say the first thing that came to me.

I alt-tab-ed to the projector app. Opened up the last month’s calculations.

“Any issue with the data?” I said, without looking at him.

“No” he said, “The data is consistent.”

“OK” I said. The calculations I had done showed the same values Kari had come up with. Strange. I could not remember now, why I had sent out different values. And then it hit me.

“Gaia” I said out loud to the emptiness of the room.

“Yes Soli” the AI replied.

“Can you bring up the habitat closure and maintenance stats for the upcoming month?”

The relevant data came up on the screen.

“Do you see it now Kari?” I said.

“Yes. I see it” he said.

I couldn’t sleep that night. Something kept nagging at me. I picked up my phone. 2 AM. Four more hours and I would have to wake up.

Just the four hours of sleep. I scolded myself. And forced my eyes shut.

I don’t know when I slept.

The first thing I did when I woke up was log into the system.

No point in acting like the routine would work today.

The messaging system popped up.

I could see Kari was online.

I pinged him. “No sleep?”

“Hardly any” he said.

“Coffee?” I said.

“5 mins” he said.

“I should not be on the system at this time. I should have been finishing my handover report. I should have been packing for my sleep. Well deserved might I add” I said.

I had disabled Gaia’s ambient settings for now. I did not want her listening. Or looking at things I was looking on. And so, I had to manually search and find the relevant data. In stead of just asking her.

“But you had to come up here yesterday and fill my mind with these ideas about deltas and missing numbers.”

“I was up too, you know” said Kari.

“I know. But you have time. You are going to go to sleep a week from now. Anyway. This is what I was looking for. Look, here.” I said. “These are the power plant closure projections. Let me put it on the large screen. There.”

I got up from the chair. Kari followed.

“That there, mid-month. You see it too, right? I’m not being crazy? Am I?”

“No. Might be nothing. Or might be catastrophic. I mean the end of the world type disaster. There is no scope for error here. This could bring down the grid, if there is even minor variance. I don’t understand how Gaia could recommend this..”

“Should we ask her?”

“What if she did it deliberately?”

“Let’s not go off the rails here. This is not a space odyssey. We are not dealing with killer AI.”

“Yes. But how do you explain this?” said Kari.

I fell silent.

“What are you thinking?” he said.

“Should we wake up Rakesh?”

“He went to sleep a week back, right?”

“Yes.”

“He will be pissed if we brought him up and it was for nothing.”

“I remember..” I said.

“Yes. I do too.”

I got up. I needed to feel my feet under me.

“So, what will you do?”

“I don’t know. I just wish I could fucking hibernate man!”

Kari laughed.

“There has to be something we are not seeing.” I said. “There is no conspiracy here. This is not my job. I did my job.”

“But..”

“No. No buts. If you want to wake Rakesh up. Be my guest. It will not be me this time around.”

“But, this could..”

“This could, but it won’t”

I got back to my desk and shut off the screens. The system could rest now. Just as I would. Starting tonight.

“Nothing will happen. Don’t worry. I will put up a memo. They can take it up with the bosses. We did our time. You should prepare for your sleep. I need to. I've already wasted too much time on this.”

“Yeah.” Kari got up. “But what if…”

“No what ifs… I will see you in six months. And we will laugh about the time we thought the AI was trying to kill us!”

Soli wrote a memo.

It was lost somehow.

No one else looked at the anomaly.

Gaia executed the orders it received the sign-off for.

There was an unexpected spike during the maintenance activity mid-week. It caused the grid to fail. Power backups kept the world running for a week. And then everything failed.

The ones in hibernation died in their sleeps. The ones awake were not so lucky.

Do You Trust Me?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Thump!

I looked up. Some one had just put a whole new stack of files over the stack of files already present on my desk.

I sighed.

All I could see, without craning my neck, were files. Some new. Some old. All stuffed with papers that needed me to do something about them.

What?

Something.

I sighed. I looked at the clock on the opposite wall. Nine-fifteen in the morning.

I sighed.

Fifteen minutes passed. My phone buzzed. I looked up from the file I had buried my head in. The momentarily lit screen on my phone told me I had received a text. I picked up the phone.

“Good morning.”

I smiled.

Harsh and I had been together for the past six years. We had met at work. I pivoted, and decided that I wanted to pursue a career with the Government of India. He continued working where he was. He was in Germany now, and I at Kochi Customs.

This distance was not new to us. True it had increased recently, but this distance had always been there. The only difference was that along with the distance we had a time difference between us as well.

“Good morning” I texted back.

“How are you doing today?”

“Not particularly well” I replied.

“Oh?”

“Yep”

And that was that.

And that would be that for the next half an hour or so, till the man on the other end of the phone had finished going through his early morning rituals.

At ten, I received the next text.

“Listen. This might seem weird. But, do you have a desk phone?”

It did seem weird. But weird was normal. Weird was what we were.

“No.”

“So, if the commissioner wanted to reach you. How would he?”

“There’s a phone in the department. I would get a call there.”

“Oh”

“Yep”

“Why do you ask?” I said.

“Nothing. Research.”

“Oh.”

“Oh yes. Catch you in a bit” he said.

“TTYL”

“Love you”

“Love you more”

I put the phone down and got back to the task at hand.

At ten thirty, the phone in the section rang. It was the commissioner. I was needed.

I looked at the clock on the wall behind the secretary.

Five past eleven.

This was supposed to be urgent!

I had been sitting in the waiting area for the past thirty minutes. The Commissioner’s office was on the fifth floor of the Customs building. The lift was out of order, and so I had to take the stairs. I did not enjoy taking stairs. I did not enjoy waiting.

“He should be done in another five minutes” said the secretary.

I nodded. Smiled, absently.

The JC was just getting up as I entered the commissioner’s cabin.

“Good morning sir!” I said.

“Good morning Prerna” said the commissioner. “Take a seat”

I did.

A minute passed in silence while the JC gathered the files and left.

I did not like him.

“ Yes. Where were we?” said the commissioner, not really needing an answer. He continued, “Yes. Miss Prerna, you are needed at the airport. Right away. Take this” he said, handing me a sealed envelop. “Hand it over to Ramanujan at the airport. He should have something for you.”

It was not usual that I would be asked to escort packages like this. But, when the commissioner asked you to do something, you did.

I took the envelop and got up to leave.

“Also good job with the Custom’s day event.”

“Thank you sir”

“Check with Sarla madam for the transport and escort details”

“Ok sir” I said and left.

The official transport was a Toyota Innova. It was waiting as I reached the ground floor after picking up my belongings from my desk.

Sarla madam had informed me there would be escort assigned for the journey.

The man was sitting on the other side looking out the window as I opened the car door and got in.

“Hello” he said, as I settled in my seat. The driver started the car.

“Hello” I said. Something. My brain was telling me something. I pushed it back as I concentrated instead on finding a place for my bag, lunch box and the package.

“How are you doing?” he said.

That voice! It couldn’t be.

I looked up. It was him. He had removed the sun glasses. And had that impish smile on.

But how?

“Hey! Are you ok? Say something!” he said.

You are supposed to be in Finland. This can not be happening. How the fuck is this happening?

I was having difficulty getting the words out of my mouth.

I cried.

“Hey! It’s ok” he said.

“But .. how?” I said.

“Trust me” he said. I don’t know how or when but I had slid into his arms. My head resting against his chest.

“I love you” he said.

“I love you more” I said.

But how?

I recognised the plane. I had seen it on TV many times before.

What is happening?

The Innova had been joined by a motorcade of similar make and model cars as soon as we had left the Customs Office. The sirens were muted, but jarring still. We had cruised from the office to the airport in an hour. At no point did the motorcade stop, using an alternate entry at the airport to directly reach the tarmac. Now, we were standing at the tarmac, in front of the Air India One.

What is happening?

He took my hand in his. “Trust me” he said. Somehow that was enough.

We walked past the security personnel, up the stairs and inside the plane. We turned left, past the many seating areas until we reached a cabin door.

We entered. Harsh closed the door behind me.

As I stood in the centre of the room, it felt as if the walls were closing down on me. As if everything would collapse and I would wake up from whatever this was.

But then, I felt his hand on my arm. As real as anything could be.

I returned back to the room. The walls back where they were supposed to be.

This. What is this? What are we doing? Is this a dream?

Harsh looked at me, keenly, as if he could read my mind, my thoughts.

“If it were a dream”, he said, “would you spend it arguing what all this means, or..”

He pulled me close, and kissed me.

I found myself unable to respond those first few seconds. But then I found myself. I found him, his lips, his touch.

If it were a dream, I would rather be doing this.

I was woken up by the knocks on the cabin door. It took some time for me to find my feet. I found my clothes on the floor. I picked them up and put them on.

The knock recurred.

I was standing in the middle of the cabin. I could not see Harsh around. Maybe he had walked out?

I reached for the door. It was locked. I pulled the latch.

The steward was polite.

“Madam Prime Minister, we would be landing in fifteen minutes.”

I simply nodded and receded back into the cabin.

Madam Prime Minister?

I found myself pinching myself.

I winced, as I shouldn’t have. This had to be a dream. I should not have felt that. I should not be on this plane. I should not be called madam prime minister. I was no one’s prime minister.

It felt as if the walls were closing in on me. It felt as if the world would come crashing down unto me. But then I heard his voice.

And I knew.

Everything.

Whatever I was, you are it now.

There are rules, of course. There are limits. But I found out I could be whoever I wanted to be. Whatever I wanted to do, was possible. There are rules, of course. There are limits. I can not be in two places at once, for example. Whenever I travel, I have to use whatever is available, a plane, a train, a bus.

I could be whatever I wanted to be, and I was.

I wish I had the time to talk to you, to explain to you. Everything. I had plans. Man did I have plans!

But things changed.

I asked you to trust me, and you did!

You can talk to me whenever you want, but I wish you wouldn’t. I am gone now. I wish I had more time. I wish we had more time. I wanted to roam the world with you. I wish we had more time.

Whatever you need to know, you know it now.

This is your fight now.

I know you will win.

Musings

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Prologue

“You sure we’re going correct?”

“Yes, absolutely”

“Coz, I for one, don’t wish to spend my wedding anniversary sitting in a car!”

“No! No! No! I’m quite sure!! See, there goes the petrol pump. Now I have to turn a right and that will…”

“Look Up! Look Up!!”

“God damn it! What the f…?”

A man stood in front of the i10, his clothes were tattered; there were scratches all around; scars were visible on his forehead. He quickly moved to the driver’s seat.

“Please! Please!! You’ve gotta help me! My.. My friends!! Anya… God!! I don’t know where they are…!”

Prabhakar didn’t wait for more, he stepped on the gas.

“Hmhhh…. My friends…Blah Blah Blah”, he mocked, “The next second, he’d have a pistol at your face.. Fuckin’ lowlife..! I’m not a fool who’d….”

A loud scream filled the air, punctuated with sounds of metal crunching into human skulls, and into some more metal. The truck that performed the ritual, passed into the thick fog, in just the way it had appeared.

In dino, dil mera,mujhse hai, keh raha, tu jile zaraa….

“So…, where are we goin’ again?”

“Dalhousie!”

“And, why does Rawat think this is a bad plan??”

“Coz, we’re a week from sessional”, screamed Rawat from the back to Sarthak’s enquiry. All of us fell about laughing.

Anya was still sleeping; the wind, flirting with her hair. God! How I loved this girl!!

”The Blue Lagoon”, read the neon sign outside the Dhaba.

“Lets go!!”

The four of them; Patel, Rawat, Sarthak and Sharma got out.

“C’mon babe! Lets go!”

“Hmm”, she said; still toying with her dreams.

I took her in my arms; she giggled.

It was a chilly December morning; I was at her college, waiting. Official business you see!!

“Hey”, I forwarded my hand, “Sharib”.

She was looking stunning in whatever she had worn that day( I never pay due heed in this department )

“Heya!”, she accepted my hand. “Anya”, she continued, “So, you ready for the job?”

“All in for you, I mean IF”

The December frost shaded my nervous shaking. I giggled, “It’s cold!!”

The meal was fun, duly punctuated with my one-liners. It was 12:05.

“We need to hurry, C’mon!!”, Sarthak was adamant.

“Deadlines are not meant to be met…!!”, I said.

I did get the look on his face though, “Accha Accha!! Lets saddle up, guys!!!”

Our bunch moved on.

“Hey, I forgot my hand bag back there. I’ll just get it back”, she said.

“I’ll be in the hatch!”

She smiled at me, it was pristine.

I’m on a highway to hell..

“Would you change the track??”, this was almost the hundredth time, Angana was asking him to do so; and this was also the hundredth time, she was gonna get the same reply.

“No”

“God, why the heck am I stuck with you?! Why?!! Why?!!”

John laughed on.

“You sure we’re going right, coz…”

“Yeah, Yeah I’m dead sure. See….”, he pointed to the map, he had in his hand; “We’re currently on NH-20, a few kilometers more and we’d cross over into SH-33; then…”

“Look Up!!”, screamed Angana.

“Holy shit!!”

John pushed his foot down as hard and as fast as he possibly could.

The man in front of the Scorpio quickly moved to the driver’s window.

“Open up please!!”, “I… my friends.., are in danger!!”

John put his hand on the Glock and rolled down the window.

“W…We were at this Dhaba; then, I don’t know, I…., when I woke up, they were all gone. You, you have to help me. Please!! Anya, God!! I don’t know where she is!! How is she!!! I need to see her… Please! Please!!”

“Whoa whoa mate!! Easy! Easy! Come on in!! I’ll get a lil’ something for ya!!” John tucked in the Glock.

The man was in tatters, clothes were shredded, had scratches all around his arms and fore head. Angana passed him the first aid kit, “Here!”

“I don’t need this! You don’t understand!! I need to find my friends please!!”

John came out of the back, “Here, you need it”. He passed on a bottle of Gatorade.

“Can you please move on”, the man pleaded.

“Ya! But first you have to tell us what happened!”, demanded Angana.

The man went into a deep thought, trying to come up with bits of whatever little he remembered.

“We were on a road trip to Dalhousie….”

“She went in to get that bag of hers… “, he paused, “And that was the last time, I was with her, Anya…! Only God knows how she is!!”

“That place, hmm…, it’s.. It’s a few kilometers on this stretch; but…”

“Yeah! We’ll drop you there!!”, John cut her short.

John drove fast; the man was adamant; there was a dire need to reach the place, quick.

“Stop! Stop right here!!”, screamed the stranger.

“What happened??!”

“I know this place. Yeah! This is where we parked Fortuner. Yeah! But…”, the man looked all around, “Where is the Dhaba??!! I don’t get it..! God! Anya!!!”.

He screamed, “Anya..!”

John and Angana had joined him by now.

“Maybe you’re mistaken…”

A slight flicker of light shone in the woods. The man didn’t hesitate for a second; he ran straight in…

“Hey wait…!”, Angana shouted, but it was already too late; John was quickly back with his bag, “Lets go!”

“Are you kiddin’??!”

“What? Why? This is serious! We have to give it a dekko…”

“But..”

“C’mon Now!!!”, John dragged her with him.

The woods soon gave way to a walled structure. The man went looking for a gate. A beautifully carved wooden gate stood in front of him. He did not have time for pleasantries, he pushed it open. The place had the look of an ASI monument, there were 5 domes, 1 central, the rest forming a sort of square. All were connected to each other via pathways. It was dim, The lone light shone on the central dome. A woman was standing in front of it.

The man didn’t have the time to let the woman finish.

“Err…! I’m sorry, this may sound a lil’ weird; and you might not be willing to help either, but, have you seen a silver Fortuner…”

The woman had by now turned.

“Why wouldn’t I be willing to..”, she put some light on the man’s face, “You?!!”

She reached for his face, “But.. But!!”

The man stepped back, “I’m sorry, but I don’t… I’m looking for my friends; one of them is a gal, Anya. Have you seen any of them?? Please..! This girl means life to me..!”

The expression on the women’s face changed;

“I don’t…. What are… Don’t you….”

She grabbed him and forced the dome onto him. In the flickering light, he could make out the text written on the fore.

In remembrance

Sharib Prakash

22.11.91 – Forever

A bunch of white roses adored the base. The man got back in shock.

“No! No ! This is not….! You’re crazy! This is a lie!! I’m not…. Anya!!! Where is she?? You tell me woma, or I swear to God….!”

In the faint light of the dome, he could make out the small pendant around the woman’s neck.

“The chain that came with it wore down… Had to get a new one made…”, the woman quipped.

“I don’t understand… How is this…”

“You have to let go…”

“What if I don’t wish to…!?!”

“You have to!!”

“I can’t. I just can’t”

“Please Baby..! Do it for me..!”

“I…”

“I love you. Remember that? “

“I love you. Remember that!!!”

___________________________________________________

“We have to get this back”, John quipped.

“This; this right here is our ticket to fame. All these years…”

“No”, said Angana, “Some relations are too pristine, let’s not exploit them. Please?!”

John threw the tape down. A few seconds later, it was up in flames.

New Delhi

Some time back

CNN HQ

“This has to be our most challenging job so far”, quipped Angana. John shook his head in support.

“This particular stretch has seen as many as thirteen road kills. All on this particular day May 3rd, all around 12 am, all in the same pattern”, John explained.

“Hmm.. Anything more?”, demanded the head honcho Sanjeev.

“Yeah. The first case, in which these five college kids got rattled; is the only one in which the vehicle which did the damage was found. In all other cases, only the victim vehicles have been found….”

“Hmm… So, which way is it gonna be?”

“We’ve got a plan chalked out… It’d be just the two of us; with a bugged vehicle. The other crew should be following at a 1km range. Plus I need a Glock boss..!! “, John grinned.

“You got it. Let’s bust this myth too!!!”, Sanjeev got up, followed by the team; “By the way the last job was nice”

As asked, they got a bugged Scorpio, and John , his Glock!! At around 9, John and Angana set sail…!

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She says:

If you do this to me, I will kill you. Know that.
I mean it.
I will f*ck you up so bad.
So so bad.

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sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

A Couple of Rasagullas

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The bus to Hajipur was late by an hour. It was nothing new, or in that matter, exceptional. The woman and her son got down. The road crumbled beneath their feet.

“Chaliye madam, badhte rahiye!”

The woman, moved on; carrying her son in her arms. The boy never demanded much, but that did not mean he had to live in want for anything; his mother understood her needs. It was a circular-ring sort of situation.

The place bore that typical Bihar town look; shops were typically rectangular, constructed in wood. Wind helped plaster dust on their faces, they moved on. The first stop was ‘Chandan Sweets’. The kid’s eyes gleamed; a box of rasagullas were packed. Ahh! Life is sweet!!, he thought…

A rickshaw to her village chowk was booked. It ferried on. The woman bought a sweet typical of Bihar, something her father loved: ‘lai’. The rickshaw dropped them off at the chowk. It would be a good half an hour walk to her place. A long walk through the mango orchards ensued, a part of which was inherited by the woman herself. The Sun was scarcely visible; hence it appeared to be dawn at noon. They decided to rest. The boy looked at the box of rasagullas, her mother was looking the other way. Maybe, he could snake a few!

The thought remained what it was! Just a thought!! The rest of the passage consisted of the local government school, a ‘tari’ shop and the pond. The pond was of prime importance as it was around this place only that ‘pojhiyan’- the Sunday market was arranged. She finally reached home. Her brothers welcomed her with open arms, and animated faces. The kids, watched in sheer amusement, after all it was their ‘bua’, who had arrived; which meant loads of gifts and sweets!!

None was disappointed, the pack was opened. The kid’s eyes lit-up, finally!! His mama called up his name, two pieces of rasagulla were bulging out of his hands. The kid ran, his mama followed; round and round they went, laughing, screaming, jumping. In due time, his mama gave up the chase; the kid went back to have his trophy. He was back, just in time, to witness his mama gallop the two pieces in one go. The kid’s face turned sour.

“What happened??”

“Nothing”

Things That I Think About

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There are quite a few things that I worry about, no that does not sound right , let me try again. There are quite a few things that I think about, a lot. Things that I keep getting back to, again, and again, and again.

As a kid, the stars fascinated me. So did the television, and the remote that controlled it, I was fascinated by the workings of the machines, the hidden strings that were behind what was visible, pulling at stuff, so that the things just worked. I was lucky enough that the sense of wonder continued on till I was in the twelfth standard. I was lucky, that I did not just do it for the marks, the grades. Protons, electrons, neutrons, galaxies, supernovas, black holes, and the stories that they told, it all interested me. It was perhaps one of the reasons I took engineering after school, not that there was much of a choice, that I was aware of.

Then college happened, and I was systematically broken down. Or maybe I couldn’t cope. Or maybe, we were incompatible. I don’t know. I had big ideas, different ideas. After one point, I simply gave up. The inquisitiveness died.

There are a few things I think about a lot, the two paragraphs above, do not describe any of those things. They are things that needed to be said, the story that needed to be told.

The future of humanity, our survival, our journey out into the stars is one. Writing, telling stories is the second. And opening up a school, changing how we teach, what we teach, is the third one.

Look at the stars!

Space has always been interesting, I mean how can it not be, and as I read, and learned, more and more about the things out there, the massive scale of things, I got even more hooked. Then came the knowledge of the utter fragility of human life, of our home, and space became the solution, the only place we could go to. Then, after I wrote a story about AI, somebody said something about Asimov (I had no idea who he was till that point, but was too shy to admit, so I googled him, then thanked the person for the great honour of comparing me to him, then bought I, Robot) and I was introduced to these cool dudes, with these awesome stories, and I was even more hooked. Then I realized when these stories were written, and I got a little sad. We had messed up. That’s what I thought. Still do.

Then came Mr Musk, and he said he’d put people on Mars, and I let a sigh of relief!

We don’t need no education!

Pink Floyd had nothing to do with this. Education was not really something I used to think about earlier. In fact, it has been a fairly recent.. uh.. Obsession. Okay, maybe not an obsession. I don’t have obsessions, which perhaps is a bigger issue than I think it is.

There were a few TED talks, a few essays here and there (read Seth’s blog), and then, my own experience kicked in. I remembered my class, remembered the people in my class, the teachers who taught me, and the manner in which they taught. And while I remembered it all, I felt, again, sad.

Teaching, hadn’t really changed much. It was still crushing creativity. It was still creating cogs, workers for the factories. There was a time, when that indeed was the need, but that time, that need is now not really there. We have machines for the factories. AI is already here! And the schools are only making changes on the surface. Projectors instead of blackboards!

And well as for the writing, well go through the blog!

Why I Feel Like an Impostor at Times

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I think the problems began the day I paid for a domain, the blog was no longer going to be at “sajalchoudhary.wordpress.com”, I had paid to have the “wordpress” removed. And that changed things. This was not just going to be an interest any more, I was a writer now. I even changed up my bio to reflect the change. I also cooked up a facebook page to reinforce the same. That page incidentally has around hundred likes now, not that I have any clue as to how the people who got there, got there..!

Yesterday, I read a post on Medium. I do not remember exactly what the whole of it was about, nor do I have a link to it, but I remember the end. In essence, the author said, that she’d love to see more bloggers out there, instead of all the essay-writing-writers that she inevitably does. She talked about the progression of the writer, from doing a couple of years of blogging, to an essay a week eventually. She rued the absence of good bloggers. Good, funny bloggers.

The “funny” part stayed. Why? Read on, I guess.

Before everything I was a little kid who loved his stories, both what I read, and what I wrote. The reading was what I did though, mostly. The writing was reduced to, or rather had never grown out of whatever the curriculum asked for, though I tried to make it as unconventional as possible, whenever given the choice. Why else would I write an essay on “Hari: the gardener” and be commended for it. In case you are wondering, the other option was to write an essay on road rage.

That continued on till college, when I graduated into writing stories that were not in the garb of essays. Stories about love, aliens, and ghosts. Also, spies. I loved writing those stories. I loved getting inspired by the wonderful people all around. It was during these times, when I heard people say some of the nicest things about me, my work, including, of course, how I had such a casually humorous voice! I was funny, and not in a I need to try to be funny manner.

The day I first paid those eighteen or so dollars for the domain, the day I decided I was going to be a writer, I stopped being funny! Stuff got real! Everything became a step in that direction, a stepping stone towards greatness!

As I read the post that day, I realised I missed the spontaneity. I missed being funny. I missed not having to write for an audience. I missed the freedom that that brought. But more than anything else, I missed writing.

For an uncomfortably long period of time, I wondered if I should end it at that. I couldn’t shake the feeling of incompleteness though. It did not feel right. Or, maybe it had something to do with the fact that the bus is taking an unbearably long time to get home.

Turns out, it was indeed the latter! And, I did not wish for this to turn into one of those posts.

Fiction Takes Time

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Fiction takes time.

Anything from a short story to a novel, a thousand word something to a hundred thousand word something. It all takes time, effort, and patience. That’s the beauty of fiction. You sit down, and write. At the beginning, the fire drives you, the joy of having stumbled upon something new. Then, comes the middle, the muddy, murky middle. Most stories are lost here, left by the writer, to die slow, painful deaths. And then, at the end, the story, which was not making any sense whatsoever, till this point, suddenly starts making sense. You are able to fill in the blanks, see the light at the end of the long, dark, proverbial tunnel!

That, is also the sad part about writing fiction. Unless it reaches completion, there is nothing to show for the effort.

And I really don’t know why I should give a fuck about it!

Off to write some fiction..!

Birth, Death and Everything in Between

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Birth, and death,
Death, and birth,
Are either two ends of a line,
Or, two points in a never-ending circle.
Now way to know, to be sure.
After all none have come back,
From the great end.

What lies in between,
Is the great green expanse. Life.
The one thing, the only thing,
We can be, and are, sure of.
The great green expanse called life.
What we do here, the people we meet,
The experiences we have,
Are the only things that matter. No?

And yet, we worry about death.
I do. It’s weird. Baffling.
We worry so much,
That we stop caring about life.
You know, the great green expanse?
The one thing we are sure of..

And then there’s you.
The lotus, the rose of my life.
The thing that I don’t want to leave,
The reason I’m afraid of death.
You. With all the colours, and scents.
You, who make it all worthwhile.
The struggles. The battles.
The ghosts in my head.
You. Are it all. My love.
You. Are. It. All.

They Killed Some More Men Today

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

They killed some more men today,
At a place where men kneel,
To gods, looking down at men.
They killed some more men today,
With a gun, a bomb, and a knife,
There was a man, a woman, and a child.
They killed some more men today,
They said it was for the good cause,
Their cause. Their fight. Their war.
They killed some more men today.
They killed some more men today.

I wonder, at times, what to do the gods think,
Of this cause, this fight, this war.
I wonder if the gods think alike.
I wonder if the gods think.
How puny! Of us, to think of gods as men,
Angry gods. Jealous gods. Demanding gods.
But then, I stop thinking.
These are men. Puny men. Jealous men.
They bicker. They fight. They slaughter.
In a misconceived notion, a fit of zealous bigotry.
Fuck them!

Sometimes I wonder, if we will survive.
I get afraid, scared, of the power these crazy men hold,
In walled-off, crystal worlds of theirs.
‘We share the same boat!’
I want to shout, but, then, I don’t.
That’s the beauty of science.
Evolution takes care of these things.
We will live if we are fit.
We will live, if we stop being afraid.
We will live if we stop being animals.
We will live if we can look at the stars, together,
And think of our place in them.

Where We Love

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The past , is like ink on paper.
Present. Permanent. Persistent.
The thoughts I’d had then,
Feel like a different universe now.
A universe in which you would have been,
In love with your work, and I would have been,
Close to you, in your city.
But that’s what it is. A universe,
In which I don’t exist.

The future , that ways,
Is like air in a balloon,
One pinprick away,
From going kaboom!
Plans don’t ever materialise, and still,
I plan. Patch up the balloon, and fill it,
With air. A pinprick away! Kaboom!

The present , is where we live.
Where you and I, share an universe,
With all of its complexity, imperfections,
It’s where I love you, and you love me,
And we hope, and work, so that we’d be,
Together one day, in each other’s arms.
The present is, where I write you poems,
So you may have a good start to your day!
The present is where we live, you and I.
And dream, and hope, and love.

What Is a Blog?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Yesterday was the second day in a row, when I was ridiculed for the stuff I had put up on the blog. Okay, maybe ridiculed is not the best word to describe what happened. Let’s see. I had to go through some pretty harsh criticism, for the things I had said, the things that I had written, the things that I had posted here.

It got to me. So much so, that I had to go through my earlier posts, only to look at how I used to do things. The difference. In case you are wondering if I found something, the answer to that is a big resounding: “NO”.

Maybe not as resounding as I’d like you to believe. Anyway.

The whole episode got me thinking. Good critique does that to you. Of course, you need to have the ability to recognise which is what.

I found myself questioning the motive of this thing here, the blog. I found myself looking for definitions. I found myself thinking, looking for answers to the question.

What is a blog?

I’ll save you the effort. Here’s what you get when you google it:

“a regularly updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small group, that is written in an informal or conversational style.”

But that is not what my question was about. It was a rather personal question. I needed to answer the question with respect to me. If you’ve been following the blog these past few months, you would have noticed by now, that I really am trying to find my rhythm. I initially thought posting twice, thrice a week was good enough. Then, I looked at places such as Whatever, and realised, that was not going to cut it.

In fact, it was not just a matter of looking at these other blogs, and aping what they were doing. I wanted to put fresh content out daily. I really, really did want to. It was the only way I knew by which I could grow, get better, as a writer. Also, it was fun.

Along with the want though, was also a realization that it is not that easy to belt out fresh content every day, until, of course, I had found this all elusive rhythm of mine. Today, it seems I’ve found it. Apologies for the detour, getting back to the thought. Until I had my rhythm, a specific time frame, a little window, in which I did nothing else, but write, it was going to be real hard to get fresh stuff out the door. And so, I had imagined, that the types of posts would vary. Poems, pictures, and the written stuff. I was going to juggle it all.

I struggled.

Yesterday, I found myself questioning it all, after it was suggested to me, that I did not really need to write everyday. Two, or three times a week should be fine, but the quality, should be ought to be top notch. The question after all remains the same:

“Why should people hit the follow button?”

“Why should people come back here?”

There has to be something that I must offer in return. That’s how transactions work. In exchange for your attention, what shall I offer you? Surely, not half-baked, half-assed attempts at posts.

A blog, hence, I found myself thinking can be one of the two sort of places.

It can be a place where ideas are exchanged. Ideas, stories, content.

Or,

It can be place where lives are shared.

There are enough places here, on the web, which fall into either of the two categories. But, then again, these are the extremes, the theory, the dream. The categories hardly represent the reality we live in. Most blogs are a mix of the two. After all that is what defines the genre, the term.

The dominant percentage of content can hence determine, if it’s a personal blog, or an ideas blog. This is not a personal blog. I am not that comfortable with sharing the entirety of my life with you. Nor, am I that honest. Though, I’m not honesty is a major requirement for a blog to be of the personal sort.

This is a place about ideas. This is a place for conversations around those ideas. This is also a place where I occasionally post pictures of my stuff. As I said before, nothing is black and white in this world, but in shades.

That is the answer, my answer. What’s yours?

A Day of Firsts

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

This happened yesterday. I received only one response to the post I had scheduled yesterday, and it was this. To quote:

You are duplicating now.

You keep writing the same thing, that you need to write.

And, I am tired of reading the same thing again and again.

Guess I was not the only one sick of the yo-yoing!

A couple of other things happened as well, though, they happened before this. Now since we are doing this in a descending order,

I went out, and ordered a bike. It got delivered today. Here’s a picture.

It was sometime during the training period that I had decided to get a bike. I had originally imagined that I would be placed in a place other than home, a place like Pune, or Bengaluru, which should have been more conducive to cycling. Here, in UP, and Delhi, road rage is not just something you write an essay about. It’s a thing.

I don’t know how to cycle. Somehow, I never could get it done. Something or the other always ended up in the way. Today, as I tried pedalling my way to glory, I had a couple of kids stopping by, and giving me tips on how to cycle. I was grateful! I was expecting sniggering from them, not, ‘ the faster you go, the easier it is to balance! ‘

I hope to be good enough to cycle up to India Gate within a week’s time. It shouldn’t be that hard, after all, I almost had it today.

The second thing which happened was this: a friend called up, with ideas about starting an online publication/site.

The only thing I had to say to him was be sure. Really, really, really sure. I have in the past walked away from a couple of such initiatives myself, and the one thing I’ve learnt is that you have to do it all by yourself. You can not expect strangers, friends alike, to step in and work for you, more so, if you are not paying them anything.

And, they are right to do so.

That, was my day. How about yours?

Here's How I Plan to Beat My Laziness

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Here's how I plan to beat my laziness

For the past three days, Friday included, I have been making excuses.

I’m tired.

There’s no time left to do anything today.

I should start off with fresh resolve in the new week, starting Monday.

I had posted my last blog post on Thursday, which also, was my first post since the trip/break, and I had hoped then, to continue where I had left before. Posting something new, pretty much every day. There was to be no limit to what that something could have been: a picture, a thought, a quote, a poem, anything!

Guess it was too much to ask for! Days later, I sit here with nothing to show for it but a poem in the drafts section of the blog. I had the poem to the blog on Friday. I had written it sometime before. Anyways I could not get myself to publish it. There was too much work: a couple of edits, and a picture. Too much work!

I think there’s a better way to categorise my behaviour. I was being lazy. Looking back, at all the three excuses now, I see that they are all really manifestations of the same core issue.

I was being lazy.

More than any thing else, I was being lazy. Add to that, the fact that all discipline goes out the window over the weekends, and you have the perfect losing formula!

One of the fall-outs of the trips that I make is that the discipline, the routine goes out the window. There are no triggers, no structure. There’s nothing that makes things easier for me. That’s what the goal of all the hacks, the routines, is, right? To take redundant, and unimportant decision-making out of the picture, so that you can work with unfettered attention?

Lack of discipline then becomes a real issue, a persistent danger. More often than not, I find myself at this place in time, where I ignore, or fail to see the inevitable. I close my eyes, you know, just like the pigeon before the cat. Even though I know I have some appointments at a future time, I conveniently fail to plan in advance, and have a draft ready.

And, more often than or , later, I find myself unable to sit at the chair, and write.

I am sick of it.

I’ve had enough of it. I’ve had enough of the elaborate plans, the castles in sand. Because, if I don’t write, then there’s no point in calling myself a writer. And I plan on calling myself one.

P.S. No resolutions this time, just a silent determination. Also, I’m getting myself a bicycle today.

Life, Death & Priorities

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There was a moment, between when I had picked up my luggage, and when I began looking for a cab, that I felt this sense of loss, this sadness. I had just returned from one of the four or so trips I need in a year to function. I was back in the city. I was home. And yet, I could not shake this feeling of entrapment!

This happened this past Sunday. And a moment was all I had, to feel anything, as the rest of the time was spent trying to catch the last metro before it left the exchange station, which happened a couple of times during the journey.

There were no cabs. And as for Uber, it has these surges!

Today , I saw a dead woman. A dead woman, on the road, her belongings scattered, a little pool of red on the road. It had rained in the morning, the night before as well. The red was not that dark. The road, wetter than it would have been otherwise.

The incident, did something to me, reminded me how short life is, and how seemingly pointless! Accidents happen, and well, most come with no warnings. An instant is all it takes.

Seemingly pointless!

Nature loves duality. Conservation. Zero.

Since Monday, I had wanted to write. Monday was too tiring, Tuesday, a little better. I had an idea about what I wanted to write about. After all, my brain was on fire! All I could think of was writing stuff. Things about the blog, things about the book, things about life. There is a reason why I take these breaks, you know.

I wanted to write about it all.

I wanted to write about finding myself again. Time forced a fog at me, smudging what was once clear. I was reminded of my single mindedness about becoming a writer, about how badly I wanted it, and how I had made everything else about supporting this one thing. I was reminded of it all. I was reminded of the obviousness of it all.

That in turn, had freed me.

See, each day, there are a specific number of free hours I get. There is no way those hours can be increased. And I am not so much into productivity hacks. So, in the hours that I get, the time would be well spent, if I had no decisions to make. I would be doing what’s needed, and not worry about the other things. I had missed that clarity in the past. I mean I had it to begin with, but somewhere along the way, things got botched up.

Having your priorities straight helps.

I guess this is what today’s post was about. This, and the magic of breaks.

Dragon-Slayer

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

You ask me not to imagine,
You ask me not to build,
Castles of glass, and sand.
You are afraid of what they do to me.
What they make me do.
You’re right. In parts.

I walk in the castle,
With my eyes open.
I know what they are.
I walk. Don’t stop to stare.
Or lay down in bed.
I walk, through the castle.

You ask me to stop walking.
Or so I think. Realize. Feel.
I can’t stop that. Walking. Making.
I need to keep making the castles.
Not need. Its natural, usual, knee-jerk.
I create castles out of thin air.
I make dragons, for you to slay.
I can not not do that. Its natural.
Its usual. Its who I am.
The writer. The dreamer. The story-teller.

Why Places Matter in a Story

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Decisions, decisions…!

So my sister left yesterday.

It was raining as I stood there in the midst of in the middle of blaring car horns, and dark skies. It rained later that day. This was Thursday. Today is Friday. It rained today as well.

I’m not sure any of that detail matters.

Something else happened yesterday as well. Something related to writing, and storytelling in general, and the book in particular. I finished the first draft a little while back, and since then, I haven’t managed much fiction. I took a break, hoping that I would be able to start work on some short stories, but I couldn’t. And so, a month or so after I had finished the draft, I began reading it, noting the good, the bad, the things that needed to be changed.

The first draft was reached at after rewriting multiple things, multiple story lines, multiple times. In the previous iteration, I had been trying a first person mode, and eventually I felt that would not get me to the climax that I wanted to get to. And so, after writing three parts in switching first persons, for the three major characters, I re-wrote it all in third person viewpoint.

That necessitated, and perhaps, because I am a lazy lad, I managed to write that first draft in four parts, with around twelve to fifteen chapters under each subheading. The four parts, still held the same stories, the stories told from the viewpoints of the first three major character. All in all, it was not as much of a third person viewpoint as was the freshly written fourth part.

Yesterday, while thinking about what I had read of the first draft till this point, and the little description I had put up, in each of the chapters, I came to a sudden realisation. I was going to rewrite, and reorder the story, in terms of scenes, places, where the actions happen.

I was going to describe the surroundings, setup the scenario, and then let my characters do their thing. The place, the setting would allow me a chance to truly rewrite the first person in third person viewpoint. And, improve the story. Because, there have been many places, where I have felt that I haven’t described what was happening, because when I had been writing it, the future had been known to me, and I had assumed that the reader knew it too.

It happens.

While writing the writer has a tendency to assume things.

This is it then.

Till the next time. Till the next insight.

Sometimes, I Wish

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Painter and his muse

Sometimes, I wish I were a painter,
And not a poet,
So that I had a better reason,
To sit, and stare,
To have you, sitting across from me.

You’d be my muse,
As you are now,
But not just in my head,
You’d be out there,
Physically, in front on me,
And I’d faint creation.

Sometimes, I wish I were a painter,
And not a poet.
Sometimes, I wish I were a painter,
And not a poet.

Why Build Walls?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

We build walls.
Bricks. Cement. Slug.
We build walls,
Strong, high, menacing,
Forbidding any to breach,
Enter our hearts,
And minds, and souls.
When in need,
We go deeper,
Inside the shell.
Do you know,
Why we do that?
Why we trust us,
More than others?
More than those,
Who love us, care for us?
It’s fear. I think. Fear.

How I Felt When My Jawbone Broke

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Broken!

I had bought a Jawbone UP, back in November. Since then, the tracker was on my wrist 24×7 for most of the days. This Wednesday, after roughly six months of careful usage, the straps broke. The device came with a one year warranty, but apparently the warranty did not cover broken straps. I looked it up on Amazon, and there, I found that I was one of the lucky ones. Many had reported broken straps after a month of usage.

Despite the beginnings of this post, this is not a rant.

I mean sure I feel duped. I invested seven thousand rupees in this thing! But as I said, I am not too sad about it. Mistakes are fine. They teach lessons. This one told me to not buy, or recommend a Jawbone product to anybody in the future.

As I mentioned this is not a rant, and so with the background done, I feel I should move on.

The day the straps broke, and I was left with no tracker on my wrists, I did not feel anything. I mean sure there was a hint of loss. But back then, I was expecting the UP to be replaced. Then, that night as I slept, my wrists felt lighter.

By the next day, the customer care had replied to my mail with a standard, “tear/breakage is not covered under warranty” response. Then, I was angry. That night, after an entire day of no step tracking, I felt lighter.

My head felt lighter.

I had a worriless day, where I did not fret whenever I opened the app. There were no numbers. It felt better. With this great advent of social everywhere, there is this increased tendency for competition underlying everything. We want more. Everything has turned relative. And that is not a good feeling to have.

Hence, something supposed to improve my health, was actually pulling me down. The realization was confusing. I mean data is good. Right?

I’m not so sure anymore, which is why, even though I’ve tied a rubber band around the broken strap of the UP, I’m not so sure if I’m going to put it on my wrist again. Maybe, I don’t want it in my face, all the time.

Maybe.

Washed Lands

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Washed lands, moist soil…

There is on an average one poem that I write each day. That, gives me at least one thing to post each day here. Come to think of it, that’s a good way to manage post a day.

On that note, here’s one I wrote yesterday, as it rained outside, and I sat slaving the day away inside the building, the cubicles.

Washed lands. Moist soil.
Gray skies. Cold wind.
You and me. Me and you.
In a thunderstorm baby,
In a thunder storm.
Dancing to the tunes,
Of the rumbling moon.
You and me baby. Me and you.

There can be no fire,
Here, in a weather so damp.
Says who? The thinker.
The scientist. The sane man.
And still there’s fire,
The friction. We birthed it,
Our own. Lightning. And fire.
You and me. Baby, me and you.

Gloomy weather makes for moody me. And moody me, makes for poems like these. The feeling captivity, when the said weather happens at moments when I am confined to the office, also makes for interesting thoughts on the nature of work, and the consumerist tendencies, and mindsets that have taken hold amongst most of us.

It makes me yearn for a way out.

It makes me yearn.

Who Am I to You?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

What am I to you?
Who are you to me?
These are the questions.
Questions without ends.
Beginnings, or otherwise.
Infinite. Parallel. Never-ending.
The who, the what of us.

Who am I? What am I?
What is the basis of us?
It’s not that. Not the who.
Or the what. No.
It’s something else.
Something intangible.

We happened. You and I.
As stars did. As skies do.
As does the rain,
The sun, the moon.
We simply happened.
You and I. We happened.

It was nothing gradual. No.
It was an explosion.
Nothing short of a volcano.
There was fire, and tornado in us.
Between us. Time stood still.
Or at least slowed to the snails pace.
And then we happened.
Just like that, in an instant.

So, you see, the who, the what,
That does not really matter.
For you and I, are stuff of legend.
Are stardust. And ether.
There’s no scope for definitions,
Or boundaries.
We had no choice, in being.
We don’t have any choice,
In the answers either.
The questions may exist.
They most probably will.
But I have only this to say to you.
Fuck them.

Let's Talk!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Let's talk!

The three of us stood on the side of the road, butter soaked burgers in hand, talking sweet nothings. The road was jammed, as it usually is. See, the road was not designed with this much of traffic in mind. I had no difficulty in imagining how things had continued to grow worse, since I had shifted here. Back then, there were not this great many families living here. Back then, it was fairly peaceful. Now, it’s a maze of sounds, and sights, bright and harsh.

I continued looking at a distance. There was a board on the opposite side of the road, announcing the food that was on offer. I was faintly aware of it. I was also aware, faintly, of the things that my friends were saying. And, I remember thinking that this should not be the way thing deserve to be.

I deserve more. They deserve more.

We share our lives with people, our friends, families, co-workers. And, when you think about it, the times that we spend in the little chit-chats, the how are you doings, is really time that could be spend in a better manner.

This is how the conversation went that day.

U: How are you doing?

P: Same, old. Job. Girls.

U: How are you doing?

Me: Same old. Job. Girlfriend.

It was during this time, when I had my fill for the day, and decided to talk about something else, something better. Really just talk about something. Something that involved words which were not ‘same’ and ‘old’.

Because, whether we admit it, or not, life is interesting. And beautiful. And fun. Just the power of our intellect makes it all worthwhile. There is so much to talk about, and so many different ways, views on a single topic. And still all we manage to talk about, are things that don’t really matter.

Job. Women.

Okay, you can put the tomatoes down, women matter. Love matters. They are the good things in life. Things that make life a little easier to get through.

Love drives the world….

..is something that I often say. Not just because it sounds cool, but also because I believe in it.

Moving on then.

I feel as if I’ve misplaced the object of this post. I do that. A lot more than I want to. I’ve misplaced the object. And now I feel as if I’m just doing this to increase the word count.

So, I’ll end things here.

The point of this post, I think, was to say, that we don’t have to go through the niceties whenever we meet with people. Friends. We can head-first jump to the interesting bits, and worry about the safety later! We can talk, hold dialogue. We don’t have that much time here, to indulge ourselves in the uninteresting stuff. We ought to know the people in our lives more. We ought to know what ails them. We ought to know what keeps them up at night. We ought to know what excites them, scares them, makes them happy.

They deserve this much. As do we.

Thoughts on Self-Hosting

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I was away for most of this week. Among other things, what kept me busy, was the thought of self-hosting my blog. I was thinking, reading, and researching.

As of now, all that I own is the domain name ‘sajalchoudhary.com’. The blog is hosted upon wordpress.com, the commercial identity, not the free open-source software, it is built upon.

This past week was about that.

I am talking about it, here, now, because among other things, it was the major reason why I was away from the blog. Not being able to actually write anything.

I am struggling with the structuring of this post. And so, I think, I’ll begin with what made me think of self-hosting. Originally, when I was setting up this blog, a couple of years back, I had, like I am now, read up on self-hosting. It had seemed too much trouble back then. From hosting, to security, and backup, it was too much work. And I did not want that. I just wanted to write. And so, I set it up with wordpress.com, and bought the domain name later, to it at least a little professional.

This week, I wanted to add an email sign up form to the blog. I wanted to be able to write directly, and a little more personally to those who had shown interest in me, and the blog. When I decided to add it to the blog, I realized I could not really do that.

That was how it started. One thing led to the other, and I realized there was a bunch of stuff that I could not do. In addition to it, I did not really own my stuff. All of that led me to even more stuff, more blogs, more sites, and everybody suggesting the same thing.

Self-hosting is better.

This continued for four to five days. I researched hosts, I researched plans, and I managed to zero in on a few things. But then, somewhere down the line, the numbers hit me.

Not the money, no. It was about the people reading my content.

Till date, I have not crossed two thousand views on my blog. That figure, made me realize two things. One, I needed to write more. Two, I really, really needed to write more.

With that, we return to the present. I am not wondering anymore. I know what I am to do. It’s what I was supposed to be doing already, writing.

Writing, daily.

Basic mathematics dictates that. Also, passion, and want dictate that. I’ve also decided that the movement will happen, but only when it justifies the spend. That need not be in the way of money earned. No. That can be nothing for all I care, but in terms of reach.

What I want, from this blog is to be able to talk, and not just talk into an abyss. I want to say things, and listen things in response. I want dialogue.

Also, it feels nice when you see the likes at the bottom of the post!

What Does It Take to Be a Writer?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

It can be pretty damning, to promise something, and not follow up on it, just a day later.

I did that, yesterday. But maybe, the promise was taking things a little too far.

That was yesterday though. Today, is a new day, and today, I want to talk about what being a writer is all about. Like always, something happened which has prompted this line of thought. And like always there’s a story.

I began writing in college. I saw a superb article in the university papers, and decided that I wanted to do something like that. With that, I approached the seniors, and got into the field. They expected, or maybe, wanted me to be a reporter, but that didn’t quite work out the way they had hoped. I liked stories more. I liked telling them.

That day, happened some five to six years before today. I wrote for an online publication, wrote stories mostly. And that was that. Then, in the final year, I began writing the first novel, which I finished, just now.

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine, asked me to read his first effort.

This friend of mine, had no background, and/or, interest in writing from before. He does not read. The only book he has read till date, is, ‘I am legend’, and that too, because he really loved the Will Smith starrer. This friend, basically one day decided he wanted to write a story, and managed to do so, in fits and starts.

When the fat lady sings..

I am proud of my friend.

I finished reading the novel sometime today morning. I finished it, and I could see a hundred things wrong with it. The grammar, the tenses, the dialogues, the way the same person said opposite things in the same paragraph.

I could see it all, and I could see the story.

I could see Sukhi, and Mannat. They are the protagonists of this story. I could feel their pain. I lived their lives, no matter how cheesy, or melodramatic it was. I lived it.

And then, at the end of it all, I found myself wondering, what does it take for someone to be called a writer?

Look around you, and you’ll see that everyone is a writer. We all write. It is a need. We write emails, and blog posts. We write stories, and poems. Everyone who can, is a writer.

But that does not seem right does it?

It feels wrong that all the pain that we go through, when we create people, and their lives, the situations that make, or break them, has no reward. It feels wrong. I mean what’s the point, if anyone can come up the street, and call themselves a writer.

I think, the only thing that matters, the only thing that differentiates a writer, is that they write. We write. We sit, and we tell stories. Everybody else, is an impostor.

What do you think?

Post a Day!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

For a long time, I held this belief that I could not write each day. I could not get myself to sit in front of a computer, and type. I mean, there was no time. Having a day job meant, not having the time one has by default otherwise. Having a day job meant that I had, in all, hardly an hour to write each day.

I still have that day job.

But, something else happened this past month. There was something else too, but I’ve already written about it, and it wasn’t as much of a force in this case, as the activity of this past month was.

All right then, moving on. Here’s what happened.

At the beginning of the month, I promised to both myself, and one other person, that every single day, I will write a poem, and send it to her. While I was making that promise, a part of me was sneering at me, saying, ‘Really? You will manage that!? You?’

But still, despite the obnoxiousness of that voice, I managed to make that promise.

And then, I managed to surprise myself.

Each day, between the time I got up, and reached office, I managed to write a poem. Each day, without fail. And each day, I thought tomorrow would be the day I break the chain. Because, really how could I write something everyday? And that too, a poem?

But tomorrow never came. The chain did not break, and I still continue to add a poem a day to the last month’s collection.

The point of this post, I think, is that it’s all in the head. I decided that I would, and so I did. The point, as well, is that I am making another promise here today. No matter the day, I would post something here. Some idea, short or long, would end up on the blog everyday.

Are You Tired of Everything?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Life’s hard.

It’s one of the greatest truths of life.

Life, is tiring.

That, sort of, derives from the first statement. I mean you are tired when you hike up a mountain, don’t you? You are tired, all the while you are climbing. You might decide to take rest a couple of times, or more, but the tiredness, it remains, all the while. Happiness, is when you get to the peak, and the cold gusts of air wash all over you. When you can look around, and down, and look at the progress you’ve managed to make.

There is a problem with that analogy. Can you spot it? Did you spot it?

The problem is with the thing that I called happiness. It does not quite fit in with the rest of it. We’d be crazy to be in pursuit of moments sprinkled at random, at nobody’s discretion in particular. We’d be crazy!

It would make far more sense, if, for instance, there were a couple, or more people doing the trekking alongside you. And the places you went, the barren huts, the angry bulls, the mini-summits, were all shared, with these people. And you had fun! You laughed, while climbing up. Sure, when you reached the peak, you’d still be in awe of the view from the top, the things you managed to accomplish, but happiness would not be isolated to just these few moments. It would encompass all. It would be spread throughout the journey.

That, is an eloquent analogy.

Now then.

One way to counter the tiredness then, would be through this route. The happy route. Where the journey does not seem tiring. After all, we all have our truths. There is nothing absolute. All that is, are interpretations.

But sure enough, that should not be the only way to go through life?

It escapes me.

I mean sure enough, you could be driven solely by the achievement, the desire to be at the top, that you ignore the bloodied feet. But living with blunted senses, does not seem like a great use of the time that we have here.

This is our time, when we are aware of the I.

Maybe I am missing something. As I said, it escapes me. The one way, and perhaps the only way to tackle the tiredness is if you did not feel it. There are multiple roads that you can take to get there.

I vote for the happy route!

What do you root for?

Are You Afraid of Dying?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Are you afraid of dying, my friend?

For the last week, and more, I sat, and stared at the above line, wondering, what would be a good way to follow up the above statement? What can I write after that line?

I could have written, how I feel about it. I could have written about my answer to the question, but then, that is the the object of this post.

And so, for a week, I did not manage to write anything after the last post. Maybe, just maybe, I should not be making any announcements before having written something. Yes.

Death, is the most interesting of topics, almost as interesting as the purpose of life. It’s a topic, on which discussions can be had, without worrying about reaching offending conclusions. It is one of the truths of life, one, which we quite conveniently, and mostly, to our peril, manage to forget. We, are designed to die one day. That’s Biology 101. Cells die.

And still, we behave as if we are invincible.

I think I got carried away a little. This, is a story, not a rant.

There was this boy, who was not afraid of dying. There was this boy, who had known loss, death, hurt, and love. He had seen it all. He often told himself, that he was not a boy, that he had grown way too quickly, but, in reality, he was just a little boy, trying on big boy pants.

The boy, was not afraid of dying. And no, it wasn ’t a childish view of the world. He knew a bullet would kill him, so would an accident, and a million other things, he could see, or not. He was detached. He saw the world, and did not find a single thing that he would miss if he died that day. There were his parents, his sister. And he loved them, sure, but they did not bind him to the planet. He was not afraid of dying because he had seen, and known the inevitability of it.

Does that sound depressing? It isn’t really, and it picks up. Promise!

Then, the boy found a girl, a girl with a feisty soul. They danced. She burned him, and he, well, he burned, hot, into a volcano, a supernovae. The boy, was afraid. Afraid of dying. He had something, that made him want to stay, that made him afraid of dying.

Death is one of the truths of life. Perhaps, one of the greatest truths of life. And the inevitable nature of it, demands that it be taken into account when priorities are calculated, and decisions are made.

Death, provides a perspective, which is hard to match. There was this book, about which I had read an article. The book was written by a nurse who had been with men, and women, on their deathbeds. Nobody, nobody, talked about working a little more.

It’s funny, how we manage to narrow our vision, to planning the next day, and not see our lives for what they are. The people who live in our lives. The journey. The moments, the experiences.

That, brings us back to where we had begun..

Are you afraid of dying, my friend?

Why Standing Still Is Scary

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Standing still

There is this weird state that I am in, right now.

I think, I have overdone, overstayed my welcome rest, respite, from writing, and everything else. I had managed to finish the first draft, a couple of weeks back. I wrote about it. It was after all an event quite unlike another. It was a first. And no matter how bad it is, the first one is the first one. So, I had written about it the next day, and then, in my mind, I had decided that I will take a week long break. Clear my head, so to say. The first week slipped away, like sand through the fingers. The week after that though, was not so fluid. It dragged on.

And now, that I wish to describe it, the only word that comes to my head is ‘uneasy’. That’s how I was feeling. Uneasy.

I felt out of my element. I felt trapped somehow. I hated where I was, but I did not wish to leave where I was either. I did not want to work. That extended the week, to proportions larger, than standard. There was no end in sight.

I was thinking a lot during the week.

Clarity, as is the case usually, happens later.

I was struggling with the reason for my struggles. I was struggling to come up with an explanation for the blandness of the times, the uneasiness I was feeling. The feeling that I was somehow missing on things, because I was not working on a short story, or thinking of things for the next one, made me uneasy. That was my finding. I, like, many in my age, was, and still am, afraid of standing still.

Standing still.

Two syllables that haunt my generation. The feeling that we have somehow been cheated. That we have so less time, to achieve so much. That we can not walk, just walk, and not be in transition. From point ‘A’ to ‘B’.

I don’t know how to end this. I’ve just finished talking about the core of what I wanted to say. This is, of course, not something that is new. Something that is a revelation. It’s not. It is part of the ongoing struggle. Something that I have to keep reminding myself of, whenever I face it.

I don’t expect that this is the last time, I will be seeing this behaviour in me. But I do expect, hope, to have a better response to it.

That reminds me, I have to speak to you, about death. It has returned, the fear!

How It Feels to Finally Finish That First Draft

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

If you asked me to describe the week that went by in a single word, I would say, ‘awesome’. But then, I use that word a little more often than oft needed. So, there’s that.

But the week that went by, was pure joy for me, or rather, more precisely the weekend. That was when, after all, I finally managed to finish the first draft of the little something I had been working on since the past couple of years at the very least. When I think of it now, I feel, not that many good things about it, but it’s the first draft, and the reasons first draft exist are to make you feel crappy as a writer, and a proud one as a person.

How did it feel then?

It felt great!

That “THE END” stapled on the last page of the document was like gold. The fifty five thousand words finally seemed to make sense. The hard work, of the weeks, and months before, finally made sense. The end, of the story, made the journey worthwhile. I know that sort of goes against of how I view the rest of the things in my life. I mean, I’m a guy who loves the hiking, and hates the summit, for there is little to do after reaching the summit. Okay, wrong example, I love the summit too. But you get the zest, I think. I love journeys. I love journeys far more than the endpoints destinations are. And so, here, when I finished the draft, the elation that I felt, was let’s just say paradoxical because I had hated the journey. I had hated the times I’d had to make myself sit on that chair. I had hated having to drag my feet through shitty chapters, and times. I had hated all of that.

I think, the elation had more to do with the fact, that I was able to see the story as a whole. As what it was. For, before I had written the end, there had been multiple arcs, multiple possibilities, and infinite stories. But once I had reached the end, I knew the fate of my characters.

Reaching the end, was not easy.

I remember not being sure where this was going, a couple of days before I got there. But things sometimes just click together, beautifully, and in those moments, you can not type fast enough. You can not put the things on paper fast enough. You are afraid to lose the thought, and so you keep repeating it in your head. I did all of that.

I remember not being able to sleep the night I finished the first draft. I could not sleep. I was laughing, madly, looking at nothing but darkness spread over me, in the void, and just laughing.

I had no idea it would feel this great.

And now, I have tasted the blood.

I Hold You

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I hold you, close to me.
I push you, shove you, into the wall.
I touch you, my hands on your hips.
I kiss you, on your neck.
I am intoxicated, with you.
I am on fire, so are you.

I undo your dress,
The little zip at the back,
I pull it all the way down,
I slide my hands in, probing, touching,
You are warm, soft, a treat to hold.
Your dress falls! To the ground.
You blush, step out of it.

We look at each other,
Our eyes meet, but don’t.
I ask, you say yes.
I kiss you, this time on your lips.
The fire! It grows. I think I’ll faint.
I am high! On you.

I hold you, you hold me,
The kiss continues.
The roles have reversed now.
You’ve shoved me, into the wall.
I don’t protest. I like where I am.
At your mercy!
I play with your hair. We dance!

You guide me, I guide you, till,
We are both in the bed, under the sheets,
I look at you, again, for the umpteenth time,
And I realize how lucky I am,
I see how magical the night is!

We take it slow,
One step at a time,
I grow in you, I go in you,
You hold me, and moan and writhe,
I feel happy, I feel pride,
We keep going, till we know ecstasy,
And then we sleep, like babies,
With not a thought, or care for the whole wide world.

It's Funny!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

It's funny!

It’s funny how all poems,

Which talk of love, are born

of separation, solitude.

It’s funny. And not.

It’s funny, how, when the thing you love,

Is away from you,

do you really come to realise,

How much you love it.

It’s funny. And not.

It’s funny how short life is,

And still, despite the fact,

We act as infinite.

All the time in the world!

It’s funny. And not.

It’s funny, how I do what I want not,

And continue to do so,

In the name of society, culture, sense.

The shackles I put on me.

It’s funny. And not.

It’s funny how clear things are,

And still we run in mazes,

Created, of course, by the brilliant minds

That run us. Yours and mine.

Nothing matters. Not really.

And still, we walk blind.

It’s funny. And not.

Some Numbers

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I had thought of exactly three different ways to start this post, before ditching them all to go with this one, which now that I look back at it, is kind of not so awesome.

In the last post, I talked of goals, about how they might have a possible negative effect on you, once you’ve gone past, or are just about to reach the said goal.

This, is me, talking about accomplishing one of the goals I had set for myself, and a sort of declaration for the goal I’ve set since.

It was almost a month ago that I decided to try something, to write something, anything, for the next month or so. They say it takes some thirty odd days for you to form new activities. There’s research on this stuff online. Plenty of it. You are encouraged to google it, read stuff. I was going to write, no matter what. No matter how tired I was, no matter where I was. And I did. As of this morning, I’ve written consecutively for the past forty days. That, matters to me.

In life, I think it’s important to celebrate both the good, and the bad. And I am very vocal about my shortcomings here, so, whenever I manage to do some good, that too, should go up here. Negativity sells, but you need happy endings too!

Today, in the morning as I looked at the numbers, I also decided on a new target, a new goal. That I would start hitting five hundred days per day. The last seven day average, which currently sits at 646, would stay above five hundred. I would write more, never less. I want to continue doing that for the next thirty days. There’s a counter that’d reset whenever I don’t hit the mark, so I’d know when I’ve done it consistently enough.

All right then, I think I’ve bored you enough. Please don’t run away. This Tuesday’s post would be different, a poem.

Bye world.

Does Setting a Goal Really Help You?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I run.

I love to.

The first time I tried to fall in love with it, was when I had just been diagnosed with type one. I had to. And that was, well, the reason for the failure I think. Though, I don’t think I’m the sort of person, who can be forced to fall in love with something.

Life continued, and then, for a couple of months I had to leave home, to stay in Hyderabad. Work. That, was when I fell in love with the running. It was liberating. It was my way of de-stressing. I formed my daily schedule around it, and I remember one day, breaking the schedule to go out, while it drizzled out, because I was under pressure. The run lifted me. And I just, fell in love with it. It required no effort. I mean of course, it required for me to get up at four, shit, get out, and actually run, but hey, I was in love!

Still am.

These days I go to the gym. The beautiful, early morning runs are just not possible.

This post is not about my love for running. By this point, you must know how the usual post works here. I start with something, and then tell you, it’s not what this post is about. I can’t help it. I love telling stories. It’s what I do!

Getting back to the subject of this post then. Today, as I finished my run, with no ideas about the subject of today’s post, I realized something. The clock was getting closer to the stipulated thirty minute reading, and I had run close to four kilometers. I was running still, and as I inched closer to the four kilometer mark, I decided to cut the pace, and begin to walk. As I did so, I realized that I had chosen to do so, not because I was tired, but, because, in my head, I had this target set, of completing four kilometers. So, as soon as I hit the four kilometer mark, I stopped making the effort. I was satisfied with what I had done.

I have not had a five kilometer run till date. The distance tracking is hard when I’m not in the gym, so, five kilometers on the treadmill. I have started hitting the four kilometer mark, quite recently in fact. I was not doing anything for the past one year. There have been multiple reasons for it, somebody always ends up hovering around the treadmill, or I get the machine a little too late. So on, and henceforth. It is a sort of mental barrier in my head. I am planning to break it soon. But as I slowed down, getting aware of the state my body was in, I thought, maybe, just maybe, I could have had that five kilometer today.

I didn’t though. Call it inertia, or whatever. It is easier to sustain running, than to stop, and start. I had stopped. My mind had told my legs to stop doing what they were doing. I had met the target.

I’m not sure if you got the analogue or not. (I’m assuming that you did) (Not that it matters, I’m going to talk about it now)

I wonder if the goals do us any good. See, there is a whole big crate of articles on the art, and benefits of note-taking, list-making, goal-setting, so on, and henceforth. But as with my running, once you’ve hit the goals, you lose the momentum, the desire, the fire to do more, irrespective of what you could have done, what your capabilities were. You just stop in your tracks. Inertia is a bitch.

Now, there are two ways to tackle the situation, you either create goals, that you know are impossible to achieve. You guarantee then, that you’re always in pursual, but, a couple of other things happen here. The value of the goals is hugely diminished. I mean, if you keep losing, faring bad at something, again, and again, and again, and again, daily, then you stop looking at the damn thing.. you stop caring about it. No one likes pain. The second thing that happens is, okay, I think I covered both up there: the value of goals diminishes, and you lose steam, motivation.

The other way to go about is creating a dynamic, feedback based system, wherein you create a new goal, as soon as you see you are approaching the old goal. Not sure about this, but this is what came to my head intuitively.

Of course, there is the option to dismantle the system all together. Why have any goals? But there are far too many holes in that question. The thing is all people are wired differently. Some can’t imagine their lives without the lists. Some are bothered by it. Some don’t care.

At the end of it all, I think it is about balance. Like every other damn thing in life, it is about the balance between the two.

What to Say to Someone Who's Feeling Down

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

What to say to someone who's feeling down

A state of being

I don’t understand the likes that I get here, on this blog. I mean most are new people, on each post. Most of the times. Each post brings with it, its own set of people. And each time I wonder, did the people who like the post, actually like it, or I don’t know they somehow ended up here, and just liked it.

It matters to me, that you like the post, for its content, for what it meant to you. If not, if you somehow ended up here, thinking, this was going to be about something else, then, you don’t have to like stuff. I guess you don’t have to either ways. Okay, this has dragged on for too long now.

This was supposed to lead to a point, where I say this to you. It’s very uncommon for me, to have a single set of reader(s) liking multiple posts on the blog. It has happened in the past, but the occurrence is rare. For the couple of posts before the last one, I had a visitor like two posts in continuation, and so I was intrigued. I also happened to have the time necessary to satiate my intrigue. And so, I went to this visitor’s blog, to pay them a visit, to learn of their story. To fill in the blanks as to why they might have liked my posts.

This post is inspired, in part, by what I saw there. The rest of it, is filled with the stuff in my head, with how I’ve behaved with the people I love, share my life with.

We, as, people, are capable of a whole range, a whole variety of emotions. It ranges from anger, to disgust, contains sadness, and happiness, and a myriad of other definitions. Life gives us a number of scenarios, scenes, moments, to feel, feel one way, or the other. And marvel at it. Marvel at our capacity for emotion. And marvel, at how everything in the universe is relative to how we are feeling at that particular moment. The same things that irritate you usually, each day, which are part of your routine, can seem out of the ordinary, can even amuse you, when you are happy. That’s the power of emotion, and that’s the gift, the fun part of being humans. Of course, it also puts a burden upon us, to make sure, that we are in charge of ourselves, and don’t do things when the emotion is in charge. It becomes important hence, to realize, and recognize the emotion, when it arrives, while it rages on, and to make sure that nothing which can have an impact longer than the moment in which it lives, is made. We are better than that, aren’t we? We are the cognitive animals. We have the power of thought, and reason.

One of the emotions, one of the states of being, is one in which you are down, despondent. Life, as you knew it has been destroyed. Nothing seems to be working out. The future seems either bleak, or non-existent. All that you want to do in those moments, is quit.

It takes guts, when you are in such a state, when nothing makes sense to you, when you don’t even know if you need any help, to talk to somebody. It takes guts, to put yourself on the line like that. Look there are two sorts of people, one who like to struggle by their own selves, who do not like to share, who like to solve their problems on their own. And then there are those who could do with a little help. Talking always helps. Unsaid things, kill things. Be it people, or relations. Alright, so, yes, it takes guts to put yourself on the line like that, to open yourself to somebody else, to give somebody the power to make, or break you.

The visitor I visited, had her latest post about something of the sort. The comments I read, were mostly positive, telling her that things would be alright, that this too shall pass. You get the zest, yes?

I do not think, that is what you want to hear. I do not think I would want to hear that if I were feeling down, and depressed. When you trust a person with your struggles and all you get is a ‘it’ll be alright’. When you expect a person to understand you, and all you get is ‘you should do this’. Because whenever you say something like ‘you should do this’, you are basically telling them something that would work for you. Not them. You. They don’t need that.

I think, all that a person needs, in times such as these, is an assurance, that you understand. That you are listening to them, and maybe the tragedy they face is too big, or too different from what you’ve seen in your life, still, you understand, their brevity, their courage, their struggles. They don’t need to know that ‘it’ll be alright’, they already know it. All of us do. It’s obvious. Life works like that, good, and bad, in tandem. They don’t need to know what to do either, for that too, comes from within their own selves. They know the answers. All that they need, in those moments, is you, listening.

Listening is tough, being there is difficult. Let’s do it though. It’d be worth your time, and effort. Pinky swear!

P.S. On an entirely unconnected note, I’ve altered the scheduled from Mon-Fri-Sat to Tue-Fri-Sun. It seems better this way. Friday is the last day of work, and Sunday is a holiday, so. This too, can change however, like all things, good, and bad, in life.

What If Life Were a Game?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Life’s a game!

I read a post today. It was about an AI created game-universe. Or something like that. It’s a nice post. Read it. The post ticked off a line of thought which I’ve tried to retrace. Hopefully, it’s going to sound a bit more lucid, out of my head.

I like playing games. Someday in the near future, I hope to get me a console. I am, of course, considering a PC too, but you know how these things go. I like playing games, but there is this thing that has been a fairly irritant part of most of the games I’ve played till date. They are played out in boxes. There is a limited amount of doors you can unlock, limited places you can go to, before, eventually, you face a wall you cannot cross. No matter how hard you press the buttons, no matter how many times you press them, there’s always a boundary you cannot cross, you’re always in a box.

The game is called “No man’s sky“, and the game contains within itself, an universe with no boundaries. You can go anywhere you want to, and there will be stuff there. Always. There would be no wall, anywhere. The tagline suggests it’s an infinite procedurally generated galaxy. I’m not here to discredit that.

Religion, interests me. Religion breeds ideologies, ideologies breed religion. So on, and forth. Religion, interests me. A crowd of humans, and the way it can be swayed, controlled, made into one entity, where they group-think, and act, instead of the individuals they live like most of the times, is too strong a force, too strong a phenomenon, to ignore, really. Plus, I really like to think, and all religion is really different philosophies. The Bhagavad Gita interests me. It is one of the greatest Hindu literatures, and is a fun read. The concepts, at least some of them are pretty awesome. Okay, maybe I should not be calling a holy scripture awesome. Maybe.

Read it too. It’s a good read.

All right, so, one of the concepts there, is that of atma , the human soul.., which is indestructible, which wears bodies like clothes, which is a small portion of paramatma , the supreme soul, God. At the risk of simplifying it too much, it says that the aim of atma , is to get better, via different methodologies, and join parmatma , quitting the circle of life, and death.

One interesting thing to think of, is, the concept, the possibility of us, living through a simulation. That’s where this morning’s article comes in. Imagine a game, with no boundaries, no boxes, nothing. Imagine a game where any door you opened, would lead you somewhere. A super-boring game, at times, where you had to go through the menial tasks of washing, and feeding yourselves, each day, in order to continue playing it. Imagine a game, where there was no obvious motive, no holding hands, no telling you that you were supposed to go there, do that. Imagine an infinite universe, in a game. We are getting there. I haven’t played GTA V, but I hear it’s fairly detailed. Someday soon, somebody might design such a game.

Maybe, you are already playing it. You, the one reading this, is just a character in the game, and the real you, the indestructible you, the let’s-see-what-happens-when-I-jump-off-this-cliff-or-kill-my-best-friend-to-see-if-the-game-allows-it-only-to-be-respawned-at-the-previous-checkpoint, is the soul, the indestructible little thing going through bodies like clothes, with just one crucial difference: you don’t respawn where you left off. This game, does not hold hands. This game, does not tell you what to do. This game does not have a motive, an ending you are supposed to get to. Maybe, it has one, but you can’t really tell it to anybody. I mean can you tell Lara Croft, you finished the game? No! There’s a cutscene!

That was confusing. I know. I would love it if you went through the last couple of paragraphs again.

Imagine a game, quite similar to the world we live in. When do you stop playing a game?

You’re tired of it.
You finished it.

But you continue playing games. You finish one, you go for the other. So on, and forth, until, you grow out of it. It is very easy, to be immersed in games… and with the recent advancement in technology, VR, and stuff, the immersion is going to go up, so then, the distinction between the game, and life, would continue to blur. The growing out of it part, hence, gets harder, and harder, till the game becomes life, or seems like it enough, that the distinction is blurred.

There’s a universe hidden inside each one of us. A micro-universe. Things too small for the eyes to look at, things we infer, through tools, science. Sometimes, I feel the people in the olden age were closer to the truth. About the point of it all. We are too immersed.

Why Do You Fight?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Stop and think!

There’s this thing going on in my country right now, maybe you’ve heard of it. It is not something I am proud of, of course. But I’ve been told not to write about it.

Before you assume anything, it has nothing to do with censorship, or fear, or any similar noun. If I chose to, I could very well write about it. It’s just that the person who has asked me not to write about it, has just asked me not to write off. She is put off by it. So, I agree. But then, with the end of day, Thursday looming overhead, and having just returned from a four kilometre run, by brain is too high it seems to think of anything. And so, I begin, randomly, and with the JNU incident as the latest example of the thing I am to talk about.

Without further ado, let us begin then.

We look at the world through a lens. All of us, with no exceptions. This lens is something that is formed, by a whole multitude of factors, ranging from education, to experiences, to relationships. The fun thing about the lens is we can both be looking at the same thing, and we both would see different things. We’d get the partial view. But then, that is no surprise, is it?

We are wired to function that way. We ignore the evidence that does not neatly align with our worldview, to the point that we actually start fighting anything, anybody who says otherwise. We say, more often than not, “Nothing else can exist ”, because changing the lens, modifying it, is so so hard, that we like to delay it to the point it breaks.

That sounds dumb, doesn’t it?

Breaking something, something so valuable, because you deny change. You deny the possibility of change. You deny the existence of it. It’s both dumb, and easy, which is also why, so many of us, at different points of time, do it. Most of us, most of us do it. All of us is a generalization, I am still not comfortable in using.

It is easy.

It is easy to look the other way. It is easy to behave as if the entire universe is planning and plotting against us. Us, yes, not the person, or ideology involved, but us. It becomes personal. It becomes personal, because it is an attack on our worldview, not at the person/thing we are supposed to be fighting for/against. The what, and why of why we are fighting stops mattering after a while.

You just pick a side, and fight.

Why?

Think about that for a little while. Why do you fight for something?

Think.

It has been a long time. We really need to see things for what they are.. we need to think. The people, need to be in a position, where they have the opportunity to think. Most of the population does not have that opportunity. We are born, we are trained to fight, and we die, worn out. Somewhere, in the middle, we ought to stop, and think. And really, look at things. We deserve that. As a race. As this singularity in the vast space of non-living, living but non-thinking things.

Take a moment or two, and look at the beauty of things, even in the midst of the absurdity. Help the fellow travellers. Do not be a cynic.

Bah! I’m blabbering now. Good night, or morning to the people elsewhere.

Why Persistence Matters

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The persistent ant!

Something happened yesterday. Something interesting. But before I tell you what that thing was.., like always, here’s a little back story.

I was drained, as I got home yesterday. Most of the day was spent outside, at an amusement park, in the lovely company of my little sister, and mum. We had dinner afterwards, and by the time I got back home, which was sometime around nine thirty , I had a little over half an hour to get the weekly post in, with me being an early to bed, early to rise sort of person.

I was drained, dizzy, with most of me asking me to just go to sleep. I mean, one day without publishing a post wasn’t such a big deal, right?

Wrong! It felt wrong. I could not get myself to not put something out, to break the streak. I am a little superstitious about it. If nothing else panned out, I had the following planned:

Title : “How does a day without a post feel?” and then in the body “This!”

It was witty, or, at least seemed so to me.

But I was not going to have it! Maybe, it was the fact that I wanted to really, really write about love, or maybe, it was me, not wanting to break the routine set-up here. Whatever it was, I could not , not flip open the laptop screen and type. And so I did. I wrote a couple of a hundred words, then discarded that draft. Then, I tried something else, which too failed in a spectacular fashion. I ended up posting this, which I might say is pathetic to say the least. The only reason it is there is because of what it stands for.. which is also something this post is about.

Persistence!

This is not the first time, I wanted to write of it. An empty doc in the drive, title “On Persistence” is proof of it. Guess, I’ll have to remove it now. Anyway, back then, it was something I had achieved in my professional life, by continuing to stick my head out, even when I could see no response to it, day in and out. I managed to get what I wanted, which spurred me to write about persistence, but I managed to keep looking the other way, till of course, today.

Persistence!

How do you define it?

It’s that thing, I think, which does not let you quit when the going gets tough. That thing which makes you keep coming back, for more, and more, and more, and more, till you get what you wanted in the first place. That thing which lets you form nice habits, constructive stuff you know, if you continue long enough , as a consequence.

Persistence is the key to things. To writing, at least, for sure. The number of days, when things become uninteresting, and plain awful, are too many, if you cannot stick through, persist through the shitty stuff.

Yesterday was interesting, because I became aware of this quality in me. The post sucked, yes, but at least, I managed to put something out there! I managed to not break the streak. And that, is what the routine was all about!

As a consequence, it also forced me to type out this post, as an apology, and explanation for that excuse of a post, and made me think if I wanted to alter the routine a bit, publish a post everyday. I thought about that. But I am too scared of it turning into a chore. I can not have that right now. So, instead of that I’ll just churn out an extra post per week, the new schedule being: Monday, Thursday, Saturday.

Someday soon, I would have expanded it to include all seven days, without it feeling like a chore. I dream of that day with open eyes. Till then, we strive, you and I, in this thing together, for betterment, for growth, for love.

Adios!

What Is Love?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Love is that thing which wakes you up, in the middle of the night, only to look at the other sleeping in peace, and wonder, how beautiful they are!

Love is that thing which makes you go the extra mile for them, even when you are broken, tired; to do the thing that will make them happy.

Love is the thing we may never find. Love is the thing that can not be seen. Love is the air that surrounds us. Love is the chain, that frees us.

Why Happiness Never Seems to Last

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Not for long!

I must admit something here. Must, yes , for if I consider my writing here something, an adjective if you may, it is honest. I don’t second guess anything I write. It is mostly a product of a single sitting, and when I get up, the post, the article, the essay, is complete. I consider this place, here, to be a sort of conversation I have with both myself, and the world at large. Now, the world is pretty large, and I get a mere fraction of it here, so mostly this place is about me, putting my ideas on paper.

Now then, to the admitting part of things. I actually have a couple of things to admit to.

Before this, I was writing something titled, “Why the world needs to be a little more compassionate”, but a couple of paragraphs through it ended up becoming a little too preachy, and once I had written that down, about it being a little too preachy, I could not get myself to write anything more on the topic.
I was, and still am confused between what to title this one. The two titles that I have, as of now, and you must, must believe me, when I tell you all I have is titles are, “Why happiness never lasts ” and “Why happiness never seems to last ”

This, is the object of this post. The differentiation between the two. What this post ends up being called about, is anybody’s guess right now. I for one, am literally making this up as I go.

I am obsessed with happiness, as a concept. I’ve read up concepts. I’m conversant with the different variations, different definitions, different goals, and sources of it. I have also written of it. Consider me, then the residential, armchair, happiness expert. There’s this thing I’ve read/heard/seen somewhere; I can’t exactly reproduce it here, but my interpretation of it, or rather summarization of it, is this:

Happiness can never be had.

It can only ever be realized.

I feel I should extrapolate on this a little. Anything that can be had, anything, a person, a thing, a property, can never be the source of happiness. All you get is a high, a momentary high, a whiff of joy, and then it’s gone! And you start looking for the next high! The thing that was supposed to give you happiness, is just another thing in your life, not worthy of your attention. Not the source of anything but contempt, at having failed to be the saviour, the big answer to all your sorrows, the endless source of all happiness! Contempt. Yes, contempt.

But then, the thing that you were looking for, the thing that you got as a result of wanting, and eventually getting it, wasn’t really happiness. And hence, the confusion between the titles.

“Why happiness never lasts?”

“Why happiness never seems to last?”

The fog has cleared a little now though. Hasn’t it?

Happiness can, and does last. Happiness is in realization; in seeing things for what they are. It is not something to be had. It is not something that can be had. It is just something that can be coexisted with, in harmony, and peace.

And that.., is how I chose the title! 😉

Why You Should Spend a Little Less Time Working

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Work never ends!

There is this thing we do at work around lunch hour, wherein one of us (usually me) gets up, and says something along the lines of, ‘let’s get up, and go eat’, and someone else (let’s call them Mr. S/A) say something along the lines of, ‘give me five minutes to finish this super important thing off!’

No points for guessing that the *super-important* task takes more than the stipulated, and or promised five minutes. As I said, this is a regular occurring, almost a habit for us, so, it was no surprise when the same thing, in the same order ended up happening on the last workday. This time around, however, I scribbled down ‘No work ever ends ’ in the already open Google Docs sheet. A couple of days later, here I am, writing on the same Google Doc.

Look around you, really, look; how many people of the above variety do you see around you? People putting more and more of their sentient hours to more, and more, *super-important* stuff. Super-important, my ass!

Let’s get this out of the way, right off the bat,

WORK

NEVER

ENDS.

You can spend your entire life giving a hundred and twenty percent of yourself to your work, and still, at the end of your life, it would not be enough. Don’t worry, it wouldn’t matter if you gave a hundred and fifty percent, and so on… I mean, even Einstein wasn’t finished with his work, when he died. That’s the nature of things. The universe is too big, to really care. Life goes on, you puny little shit!

Now, that does not mean you should not work. Hell! Put as much of your life on the line, devote as much of your time as you wish to, to the work that you do, if you want to. I would be the last person to stop you from doing so. But learn when to say, no. Learn to take a break. No that things won’t just up, and vanish, if you forgot to show up. Know your place in the universe! You puny little shit!

Look at the good things in life. Look. Really, look. The world is beautiful! Open your eyes, or maybe not. Close your eyes, and let the world in you, let it flow through you. Spend some time with your loved ones. Care about your health. No point in earning an extra thousand. if you end up spending it on medicines. Go out on the road, I guess. Or not, it’s your wish, just take a break. Once every couple of months works for me. Maybe it would for you too.

Remember, you are a puny little thing in the grand scheme of things. Do the work as much as you want, but with the devotion it deserves. Because no matter what, work never ends.

People do. Lives do.

On Writing : The Numbers

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

word count v/s date : courtesy of the infamous sheet, and google

When I had begun here originally, I had imagined this to be a place where I would talk mostly about writing, and then, as an add-on, a little bit of other stuff. I mean all you have to do is hover the mouse pointer over the blog menu, and you see “on writing” and “everything else” as the prominent sub-items displayed there. That also reminds me that I need to revisit the menus, given the times I’m living in, the idea of putting videos out there does not make much sense now. I’m a writer for god’s sake! Or maybe I will do that once I’ve reached the 100 post mark. But getting back to the point of this paragraph, I was supposed to be writing mostly about writing, and it made sense, as the past had shown me, that that’s where I got most of my likes and follows from.

So, when I clicked on the “On writing” sub-item, this Wednesday, after posting my latest article, I realized that my last post on writing was on December sixth, after I had reached fifty posts here. That’s almost a couple of months gone without writing about the thing that I am supposed to be writing about.

Wow!

And, surprisingly enough, it does not bother me as much as it should. I mean it bothers me enough to warrant a post, but it does not warrant a rethinking of how I am doing things here. See, for after a long while, I am happy with where I am in life, with all the three parts of it, the writing, the health, and the work, existing in a sort of dynamic equilibrium. Of course, things could be better, that’s after all the point of perfection, having something to strive for… but, I am happy. Actually, as I re-read that, there’s a fourth part to my life, but it is so above, and around everything else, that I did not bother mentioning it. I would like for it to be better too.

Now then. I’ve been writing, and writing consistently too. The more public figure that I have set for myself is that of publishing two posts here, per week. That is something, that I have been pretty successful in achieving since I decided I would do it. The less public of the two, is the resolve to write something every day. Ideally, I would like the number to be at five hundred, but right now, when I’m still trying to gain something resembling consistency, any number would do. I have been consistent for the past fifteen days, averaging somewhere around three hundred words. That’s a full two hundred words shorter than the goal.

Gaaah!

Too many numbers!

I surrender!

I use Google Docs to get most of my writing done. During one of the earlier days in my recent past, I thought it would be fun to have a count of words I wrote each day. This was after I had read Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ and I was trying to hit a thousand odd words each day. I tried a few variations of it. An Excel sheet journalling the stuff I wrote each day, which was mostly a qualitative way of looking at things. Then, I happened across this LifeHacker post about Jamie Todd Rubin, one thing led to the other, and I ended up implementing his methodology to my already established process, ending up with the numbers.

Also, on that, go see Mr. Rubin.

I am not sure what the constant stream of numbers at the end of each day, will lead to in the longer run. I had set the tracking back in November, so these are still early days. I am not sure if it is supposed to do any good. The numbers can be daunting to look at. They can be depressing, pushing you down more than pulling you up. It is like all technology. It is easier for us to forget that the technology is for us, for our assistance. It is not supposed to make our lives harder.

It seems to be malevolent, at least in this case, till date. Maybe that’s so because I’m just happy to sit down, and write. The technology is just a faint reminder of the fact. A feedback of sorts. An appreciation maybe.

I don’t look at it. The little Excel sheet that has all the data. I don’t. What I do look at, however is that one mail the code sends out at the end of each day, mentioning the number of words I wrote the previous day. It also mentions some other nifty pieces of info. And it gives me a certain satisfaction, getting up in the morning, looking at the number of words I wrote yesterday. It feels great if I manage to cross the five hundred work mark. It feels good if I don’t. After all, if there is one thing I have learned all this while, through life, it’s this:

Writing matters. Writing, over and above any damn thing. Writing.

Everything Withers Away

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Everything withers away. Everything.
I envied something yesterday,
Today, when I walked past it,
I saw the cracks appear in it,
Almost out of nowhere!
But then, I remembered,
Everything withers away. Everything.
It’s about time, all the time.
Time numbs things out, pain, pleasure,
Beauty, strength. Time numbs all.
Nothing survives. Nothing but time.
Time is the one true constant in this world.
Nothing stands in its way.
Everything withers away. Everything.

So then, why do we live…
Struggle, go through the motions?
Why? Why indeed? I don’t know.
Love, maybe. That’s what life is.
Isn’t it? Maybe I’m a romantic,
But, I’m a realist too. I see things dying.
People leaving. And somehow, the world
Continues to revolve. It’s love, then,
Isn’t it? Love makes the world go round!
Love mends the broken. The tired.
For I know time is the one true constant.
Nothing stands in its way.
Everything withers away. And so,
love exists. To mend the withering.
To maintain. To paint. To build.
Love exists, to bring balance to time.

Everything withers away. But love.

On S*x

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Can’t even write it without the asterisk!

The last time this came up, I was in college and the editor-in-chief (we liked having grandiose titles for ourselves) had asked me, actually not me, but the whole group of us to write about it. Me, and one other girl had put up their hands to write about it. Then, as is now, I found myself struggling with what exactly to write of it.

See, I love sex.

But when you think of writing about sex, you cannot really write I love sex, in different ways , the entire length of the post. It would have been better, if there had been somebody asking me something about it. We, here in India, can have some pretty funny questions about it, which can be forgiven, given the state of sex-education, and/or general inability, or want to talk about sex. And many people have already talked about it, and do continue to talk about, which is good. Which again brings me to my inability to come up with something to write about sex.

So then, I love sex. I love the act, and I love all its manifestations, all the things it stands for, all the ways it is looked at. I love the basic nature of it, how it drives men, and women alike. I love what it means to different people, from something casual, a sport, to something divine, not just the physical.

I love it all. And still, I find it hard to write about it.

I just ran a google search for “About sex”, and ended up looking at a page full of facts, and hyperboles. Mostly written by guys for potential first timers. I admit to having gone through that phase myself. No shame in admitting to it! I’ve also gone through hours of porn. These are the things. which we have, in general, in the name of education, which, as expected, leads to lofty ambitions, and depression when faced with reality!

But here’s the thing, size does not matter, okay, that’s not entirely true, but it does not matter as much as the other things. How you make the other person feel matters. Comfort matters. Consent matters. The mechanical aspects of it don’t really matter as much, in fact, I’d argue that they come in the way of things. When you are in the zone, when you are one, you know what the other person wants. And that’s that. In porn, people are not people, they are monsters. Period. Don’t expect gymnastics. Or monsters.

Also, get used to the idea that women can want sex. They are not just a collection of isolated things. They are more than that. I remember having multiple discussions with my friends, male friends who laugh at the idea, who don’t find it possible, that women can be forthcoming about sex. They should. They should say what they want, when they want it, and how they want it. They should have a say.

This has been one of those, directionless, aimless, wandering posts of mine. I hope you forgive. See, it is as I said at the beginning.

*Scroll up*

Also, I love sex.

On the Competitive Aspect of Things

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

This is bound to get a little confusing, and complex because this is part of life, how I view life, and no matter how much you try to compartmentalize it, box it, label it, life always finds a way, to destroy the boxes, the boundaries, and to flow.

We were taught, and raised in a certain fashion. We were supposed to be good at everything, excellence was coincidental. The law of averages, if you will.

One by-product of it all was the competitive nature ingrained into us. We compete with every member of our group, species, even when it is quite obvious that the conditions prevalent around all of us are hardly the same.

There is no time , hence, becomes a common complaint.

Why? Because Mark created Facebook at some age, and I, at the same age, am still trying to figure what I want to do with my life!

It was during one of my walks that I started thinking about this. It all started with thinking where I was, professionally, compared to the rest of my friends, our gang of six… err.. five (looking at you Sharma!)

Well I’m not satisfied, to put it, bluntly, and simply. That led to this question:

Why do we compete?

We are all unique. Each person in my six membered friend subset, is different. We were born, and brought up in different environments, we all have different aspirations, and hence, we are all following different paths. Yes, money is important. Yes, I realize that if my survival was on the line, I would not really be thinking of this; but, it’s not. So, I can, and hence, I am.

How can we compete, really, logically, when what we want are different things?

Is it fair? To ourselves? To our friends? To our families? To humanity?

This unneeded competition, brings worries, and drives happiness away. We become zombies. What differentiates us from zombies is our brains! I’m not sure if we are using them as much as we should. Schedules, and processes, are everywhere. You are to do one thing, in a specific function, in a pre-specified time frame. We are cogs. Which is also one of the reasons why most of our jobs are on the risk of annihilation. We will have something else to do in the future, I hope, but what we are doing is mechanical.

We are cogs.

Okay, I feel that I grazed a little too far away there.

Why do we compete then? And should we compete?

Won’t it be easier if we did not?

Try to imagine it.

Competition brings nothing but unhappiness. You don’t care about anything but beating the guy. The best coder in your vicinity, the best table tennis player, the best chef.. It goes on, and on, and on, and on. There is no end to it.

Day in, and out, you tire yourself out, trying to beat that guy. There is no concept of self in it. What you know? How you are growing? If you are growing?

You just want to beat that guy!

There should be no competition with anyone else, but yourself. You should not worry about beating the guy, but improving yourself, your knowledge. You should grow. And if that is not the aim of life, I don’t know what is!

Any thoughts?

Letters to an Imaginary Girlfriend : Two

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hi love,

I know I can call you that now!

I’ve been home for a day now. We’ve been away for two days now, and that solitude I so dreaded, has finally engulfed us. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little, maybe, there’s too much of a flourish in how I’m writing this. But that is also how I feel.

I have lived the past month so many times in this one day, to have already gone through the troughs of happiness, and depression. And all through it, I still cannot believe that we are in fact doing this. Because let’s just be honest here, I am broken. I am not really.. I don’t know how to say this.. I’m not worthy of you. I don’t know why I say that. Maybe, it’s a lifetime of being this way.

That is not cheery. At all.

And that, brings me to the other aspect of this. I’ve also had time to think of what this is; what you are to me, what I am to you, and perhaps, what we are, to each other. We have not defined that. My issue is not that we haven’t defined us, for this is love, and you can not really define it, or so I feel, it’s one of the most wonderful things we can have in life, yes, but there is no easy way to say what love is. So no my issue is not that we haven’t defined us, my issue is that we haven’t tried. Because that says we are still very much attracted to each other. We are still blinded by affection. We are still where there is a fog around us, where we haven’t gotten around to looking at the bad stuff about each other.

I hope that makes some sense.

So, I’ve thought about what we are to each other, what defines us, and I believe if there is one thing that can, and should define us, it must be a promise of telling each other whatever we want to. There can, and should not be any second measures to it. We have to be honest to each other, if this thing we are in, has to last. And I want it to last. I know you do too.

I can not leave you at just that though. I must explain to you; why honesty? Why not anything else? And I must also tell you, why we must not have any exceptions to it. It is all a jumble in my head, let me try and make some sense of it, and try to make it seem sensible to you too.

It is actually pretty simple. Remember the times when the teachers told us that the answers lie in the questions themselves. It is kind of like that.

Two people, in this case, you and me, we decide to share our lives, that’s what ‘we are together means’, no? You share your lives. And when you keep doing it enough, and when you’ve done it enough you turn from you, and I, to us. So, there, sharing. That’s the keyword. Sharing.

We, you, and I, are mere mortals. Humans. We make mistakes. I make mistakes. I am dumb. I do stupid things. And so, I don’t feel that I am a good enough judge of deciding what I get to share with you. You should have the full dataset in order to make a proper inference. You need everything, to begin with, so that you can sift through it later. To decide, what matters to us, as an entity, and what does not. And so, it goes for you.

Honesty breeds trust. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

But the thing is, that is what the cornerstone, the bedrock of a relationship is. More so, when we are separated by hundreds of kilometers. Before this, I was a staunch believer in the statement that long distance things don’t last. It is still early days for us, I know, but I feel we can make it. I know we can make it. And I know we will make it.

Looking to seeing you soon.

Yours,

My Muse

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Source: Google Images

I’ve had muses.. now and before.
I’ve had muses.
That thing, which held my hand,
And walked me through a story,
Or a poem I wrote, later.
That thing, which was actually
A person. Or so I thought.
But then the person left.
My muse however, did not.
Infact, she found a vigour I had never
Seen in her before. She found
Passion, and sorrow, and love.
And she found me, in those days of
Despair, held my hand through the darkness.
Gave me the strength to hold the pen,
And put some blotches in ink on the paper.
I’ve had muses.. now and before.
I’ve had muses.

Time is one of those things,
That things you can never be sure of
Liking or hating.
Time does not care though. She is,
Was, and will be. She is the constant.
My muse on the other, is anything but.
She is a case in constant change.
The treacherous trustworthy woman in life,
Hard to please, Harder to keep,
Impossible to let go of!
My muse left me, hence. Left me dry,
Having consoled me in need. Or,
having done, taken, what she needed,
From me. Either ways, I was left alone,
In need. In desperate need.
See, I hadn’t just lost my muse,
I had lost her voice in my head, her soul,
From all I dared write. Nothing I made,
Was mine. And then, you found me.

See, I’ve had muses.. now and before.
I’ve had muses. But none like you.
You came to me as a result of a coincidence,
But then isn’t life a series of sometimes happy,
And at other times sad coincidences?
I think it is. As I found you, I find my voice,
My muse suddenly returned, only to be killed
Off by my sloth. But it did not matter, for with
You, had returned my muse. And I still don’t
Know if you are it, and it you. Or it’s something
Else entirely. You keep pestering me, to write
You a poem. Give you an ode. And I find it hard
To do. For I find it hard to describe you.
You are not a story, a thought I could pull out,
And put down on a piece of paper.

See, I’ve had muses.. now and before.
I’ve had muses. But none like you.
None so tenacious, none so complex,
None so beautiful, none so true.
I want to write of you, really I do,
But I don’t think I can, or ever will.
There’s just too much to you, as a person.
As an idea. But be assured my love,
That all that I write from now, till ever,
Will have something of you, if not be of you.
See, I’ve had muses.. now and before.
I’ve had muses. But none like you.

On Emotions

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Source: Wikipedia

This happened.

It was one of those days. I had called up almost all of my friends (it ’d be helpful to know, here, that I maintain a fairly short list, a single digit is sufficient to count the number, in fact!) and was yearning to meet somebody, anybody. But I was not really able to. And that had started me down a downward spiral of self-loathing, and depression. Most of the times, I can do with little to no contact at all, but there are times, when I actively seek conversation, company. This, was one of those days.

The depression hit hard. It does, usually,

One thing led to the other, and I was contemplating the decisions I had made, decisions which had been made for me, and other things. In fact, I was worrying of things I had no control over! The way past had been. The way future was shaping out to be. And how, it was all so utterly out of my control! And in the middle of this terrible tornado, I had no one, no one to hold my hand, tell me it was fine, it was going to be quite all right, I was going to survive.

The depression hit hard.

And even though I knew that that’s it’s thing. I mean it’s depression, it is defined as “ feelings of severe despondency and dejection ”. You are supposed to feel down!

And I knew it in advance. And still, I fell for it. Even though I knew the trap had been set, that I was going to fall in this big black hole, I happily walked over and jumped straight on in!

That is exactly how things are with emotions too. All of them.

Happiness, sadness, anger, jealousy, so on, and so forth. We know what these things are. We know what these things do to us, and still, in the heat of the moment, when we actually have to apply this knowledge, things fall through. We just are not able to let go of things.

We are just not able to let go of the emotions.

We are just not able to look at our state, look at the emotion we are feeling, really look at it, say hello to it, and let it go.

Instead, we hang on to it. And then we say things, do things, think things.

That ruins stuff for us. Long, and short term.

I don’t know how to end this. I don’t know why I wrote this. I had thought it would make things clearer, in my head at least. I needed that to explain this philosophy, this theory to somebody I care about. But I am still standing where I was before I had begun this.

I still do not have any idea about the how… how do I let the emotions go?

On Killing

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I play games.

Not the sort where your body moves. But the sort where you sit on the couch and use a mouse, and a keyboard. Or if you are one of the rich kids, you use the console.

Now most of these games are of war. You are fighting, one way or the other, against anything ranging from any army of aliens, to mostly men. The settings vary; you could be in a World war setting, or one of the recent ones, or you could be stranded on an island. But in the end, you fight. You fight, and you kill.

Just as well, it’s better than going out and taking out your frustration/anger on actual people. There are of course arguments, and good ones at that, which state that instead of suppression what we have is aggression; encouragement would be more fitting, but aggression sounded better. I am not going to get into the arguments of either side, because that really is not what this about. This one too goes into the ‘ someday I ’ll write about this’ cache. So, there’s that.

Okay, so.

The point is I play games.

They are entertaining.

And the thing is I’ve never felt bad about killing any person, ever. Most of the times, they are shooting at you, and you, reflexively shoot them. Kill them, before they can kill you. But then, every once in a while something happens. Something interesting.

This happened when I was playing Far Cry 3. It was my introduction to this series. And this one too, involved a war. The plot is thin. In the end, you kill. Which is not really interesting. What’s interesting is something else.

With that, I’ve built enough suspense I feel, so, here it goes. Also, spoilers ahead.

In most of the games that you play, you start with the basic minimum sort of weapons, that would get you through the level, and then as you go ahead, you upgrade, get better weapons.

In this game, in order for the upgrades to work, better ammo pouches, for example, I had to kill animals. In case I forgot to mention, this is one of the features of the game. So, I was stuck somewhere, or, was wanting to go for the full upgrade, I’m not sure what, but I left the story line behind, and just started butchering animals for stuff. And that, made me sad. And disgusted.

Disgusted, yes.

And believe me, I have never felt anything, but joy at the mayhem, if done properly. Personally, I like being silent with the kills. Hitman changes that however.

Getting back then, to butchering the animals. It felt bad. Inhuman. They were just roaming around, and I was butchering them, because I wanted a bigger ammo cache. And then, I had felt really bad about it. And I had marvelled at it. And I had looked for the rationale behind it. There was none. Still isn’t.

It’s funny now that I think about it.

Well, it was funny back then too, so that sort of makes sense.

It is funnier when you think about the things we actually do.

New Year, New Rules!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Okay, not really.

But first of all, congratulations to all who survived 2015; hope to see you on the other end of 2016; unscratched.

Second of all, apologies for my absence from the blog. I was travelling, and as it turns out I still can’t plan in advance, whenever the blog is in question. I will I hope. In time. I am taking my own sweet time with it. I do not want to fail. I do not want to quit. And I do not want to just write for the blog everyday.

There, I said it.

Okay, so the new year’s here!

And even though, I had been planning it for a while, there’s no better time than now, to say that I’ve decided to increase the frequency of the blog posts to two per week. Four post per week is, let ’s just be frank with ourselves, pathetic!

So yes, I’ll be posting now, on Sundays, and Wednesdays, starting tomorrow. Again, _I really don ’t want to fail at this! _So, wish me luck.

Here’s to the new year then. Will meet you on the other side. And a lot many times in between.

The Second One

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Come with me, you had said.

Come. Love. Live.

I’m not the ordinary,

the same, the mundane.

I’m a poet, a writer, a lover.

I’ll teach you what love is,

I’ll shower you in prose,

make you my muse.

What happened to that?

I ask you, what happened to that?

Come with me, I had said.

Come. Love. Live.

And I am not ordinary,

no one is! Not you, or me,

or the man in the rat race.

We are all unique, and maybe,

all the same. Looking for love.

Looking for life. And I still plan

on teaching you, what love is.

Showering you, in prose, and love,

Making you the subject,

And object of my work.

One poem!

One poem, in the whole wide year.

That’s what you gave me.

One poem. Far from a shower.

And you don’t need to teach me

What love is. I know what love is.

Show me. Show me instead.

Come with me, you had said.

I’m not the ordinary, you had said.

Well this is ordinary.

This is how it always uncoils.

Life opens up its fangs,

And bites us, incapacitates us.

Hmm. One poem.

You are right you know. One poem.

That’s what I’ve given you.

It’s been an year since we

Were separated. That was when

I had written that poem. Sitting

In the train, lost in my world,

And your thoughts. That’s when I

Had written that. And this.

Not in a train, but a cab.

Lost in my world, however. And you.

I don’t know if this mends things.

This is not about mending things.

This is about you. Showering you

In prose, and love. Showing you

What love is. Telling you that life might

Open its fangs, but I will grab those fangs,

And break them. Before it incapacitates us.

See.. I am not the mundane, the ordinary.

I am a poet, a writer, a lover.

And how’s this for muse?!

Fifty Plus One

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I drew that!

I reached a milestone with my last post here. It was my fiftieth post on this blog, and I felt I had to write about that; to commensurate it. It is important after all, to celebrate the big, and the small.

Fifty is not that big a number if you look at it that ways. It’s not a five thousand; or a five hundred thousand. That would be a number!

It is a beginning of sorts.

Back when I was about to begin writing, I mean, after I had written a few posts, I was thinking of the possible categories of posts here; the stuff I would be writing on. Back then, I was also thinking about the theme of the blog, the about page, what would go in the text for the comments section, what would be the sub-heading, what would be the heading…

Basically, about everything but the subject of the blog post.

I wasn’t doing any writing, I was just thinking about the dressing. I remember, one day, I was just walking, and thinking about the categories, and it sort of just came to me, that the more I wrote, the more categories would start popping up on the blog by themselves. I mean it would be easier to find patterns when there are a hundred pieces of the puzzle, instead of one. On that day, I decided I would categorize everything between stuff on writing, and the other stuff.

And it seems to have worked. It reduced the clutter.

God! I’m tired of sounding like I have this thing figured out.

The thing is I haven’t. Not yet. Writing part time is still a pain. I still need five minutes (sometimes more, sometimes less) of getting into the groove. I can’t just pick up the pen and paper, and write. It takes time. And when I do have the time, I always end up doing things other than writing.

I hate every single word of whatever I have written here. But, the only reason I am still doing this is today’s a Sunday, and a post needs to go up, one way, or the other.

This, is the other. The incessant blabbering of an irritated mind.

I guess I’ll write something else now. Farewell.

P.S. My sincerest apologies to anyone who had to go through this ordeal. I promise I’ll be better.

The Hopeful Human Condition

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There are days, when, you question things, not the good things, no… you question yourself, and your doings…

If what you are doing makes any sense?

If you should continue doing what you are doing?

Are you special, or is it just a product of the times that you live in?

One of such days happened to happen, on one of the days, in this past week. I am experienced now, in these things, as I have had several of these bouts in the past, to know that these usually pass, but still, you cannot really do anything during this depression you’re living in. And so you sulk, as I was.

The subject of this post is not that; maybe, some other day I’d write about the depression, and the state of inaction. The subject of this post, instead, is the discussion I had with my friend afterwards. I called her up as soon as I was in the cab, and continued talking to her a good thirty minutes. For those who don’t know me, that’s a lot. I don’t like talking on phones. Anyway, it started with me explaining to her my situation, but that was all that it was supposed to be, a conversation starter; once we started talking, I asked her one of the questions I keep asking people around these days,

‘Can, and if yes, how can we have a human world at peace and satisfaction?’

I asked her this question because she is preparing for civil services, and when selected, would be responsible for shaping this country’s future. The other person I asked this question is doing a major/doctorate concerning world peace. So I guess the ‘asking everyone around’ thing was a bit of a hyperbole!

Okay, so, yes.

Consider, this to be, then an essay on “The hopeful human condition”

I talked of poverty, of the existent classes in our society, and she said, ‘we need the classes: the high, the mid, and the low. This is how things have been, and this is how things will be. The illiterate, do not care, all they care about is getting food on their plates, howsoever little that is, and survive. It’s the middle class that is pandered to, by the politicians, because, this is the class, which has food on their plates, a roof over their heads, and so, have the time, and the brains to think about things; things other than the food on their plates, and the roof on their heads. I think I forgot to mention sex. That’s kind of always there; we are all animals after all.

Somewhere there, in the middle, I crossed the line between what she said, and what I am saying, so don’t be alarmed by the missing trailing apostrophe.

And it made sense, but then, I said, ‘Can’t you imagine a world, inhabited by humans, but without the pettiness? Can’t there be fairness, and equality? I mean if we keep fighting, how are we going to leave this planet? And if we don’t leave this planet, how is humanity going to survive?’

And then she sighed, ‘Are you reading Asimov again?’

‘No!’ I said, ‘I just finished watching Cosmos!’

‘That makes sense’ she said.

‘Look’ I said, ‘I am thinking of writing a science fiction story next, and for that I am looking for the ways in which humanity can coexist peacefully, where everybody is, you know, satisfied. And if not satisfied, then they atleast have enough’

To which she said, ‘I don’t see it happening’

‘You mean humanity on it’s own is incapable of achieving the pinnacle of growth?’ I was of course thinking of Childhood’s End when I said it. It has been one of the thoughts that keep on going round, and round in my head. Without a third party intervention, we will continue killing ourselves, and the rest. Our attention spans are too small. And anyways, it can be quite scary imagining going round a star in an empty space, with nothing but gas separating your home, and the darkness. The insignificance of our individual lives can be quite daunting, and is not something that most people are equipped to handle.

Humanity, on the other hand, is not of no significance. I mean sure there have been at other times in the past, different dominant species, but none had the inquisitiveness of our species. Nobody asked why? Nobody wondered, but we do.

We are unique, in that respect. And with that, I think I will close this essay, for anything more than this, would be giving out the plot of my story.

On Honesty, Part-II

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Okay, so I messed up this weekend.

See, it was my birthday, and a couple of other things, which left me with little to no time to write something. I know that I should have planned ahead, but that’s not me. And that is bad, evidently, as I have absolutely zero idea of what to write about. Of course there’s the list of the ideas, but there’s a reason why they are in a list, and not on paper.

There was this post I read today, about Adele; about how she’s making people buy her music, instead of streaming it. In it, the writer talks about her being honest about who she is. I think that goes for all of us artists out here.

And I consider myself to be one!

Honesty is important for us. Honesty of both sorts.

We have to be honest in the work we do, and we have to be honest about who we are.

I, for example, am, at least currently, not someone who can write a post each day. I just am not. I wish I were, but am not. I tried acting like one, for a bit, a little while back, and it brought me nothing but unhappiness, so, that is that.

I am being honest about what I am. I am someone who thinks, for a week, about what he’s going to put out. I think, and think, and think, and think, till it makes at least some sense in my head; before I begin to even think about writing.

I am also someone, who, on days like this, just sits down to write, and hope something strikes!

Today, it did.

I am also someone, who constantly sits, and stares at the screen, and hates every single word, every syllable he sees on the screen, and still writes. Bah!

Actually, many a times, I just sit, and curse.

But here’s the important thing, I’ve stopped presenting grand ideas of myself to myself. I’ve stopped living in the castle in the clouds. I’ve stopped dreaming about being a writer, and started to deal with the mundane realities of the profession.

And that matters a lot; for if you don’t know who you are, how can you ever know what the world is? How can you love it, play with it? How can you live?

Letters to an Imaginary Girlfriend : One

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Hi love ,

Can I call you that? I know I want to.

I don’t know what this is. Maybe, you’d prefer looking at me, sitting across from me, sipping on a cup of coffee, and hear me talk. But I find letters intimate, reminiscent of a time, when phones weren’t so prevalent, when people had solitude. Solitude served it’s own purpose.

This is my first letter to you; the first of many I hope. And I still don’t know why I am doing this; what this letter is to achieve; what this is about. And maybe, that’s the point.

This month has been crazy. We’ve gone from strangers to soulmates in this one month. You are everything I had ever hoped for in a woman. You are my perfect woman; the perfect mix of brain and brawn; the woman of my dreams. See, I had fantasized about you, but I had never thought you possible, and still, here you are!

It has been a month since you called me irresistible. Irresistible! That’s every guy’s dream, to hear that he’s irresistible. I still remember the awkwardness, and joy. How often, and how pathetically I had failed to keep a straight face.

You are beautiful. Have I said this to you?

Yes?

Have I said this to you enough number of times?

I don’t think so.

So yes, you are beautiful, so, so, beautiful. It’s weird, I remember not liking your lips that much; now they seem like the most beautiful lips in the whole wide world. I love your fingers too. I love all of you.

I’ll tell you something else too. Remember that fork in the road, where we turn tight, each day, to go to work. I’m not sure if you notice this too, but on the plot to the left, there’s a family of pigs loitering about, blackened by the sewage and shit. I remember it used to disgust me. Now, it looks beautiful!

Now, to something a little serious.

In life, we settle; more often than we would like to admit to ourselves. Most of the times, we don’t even realize it. I had too; with Anya. I had been something I wasn’t, to impress her, to mould myself into her idea of me. With you, I was me; pure, unadulterated, shameless.

And that mattered to me. The fact that I did not have to hide behind something. Something invisible. That I could say what I felt like, that I could do what I felt like, that I could be what I felt like.

See, you freed me.

And that’s something that I cannot repay you for, no matter how much I tried. Not that I would, or would even want to. All I can do, is love you the more for it.

The break neck speed has hardly given me any time to think; so maybe, this is me thinking out loud, for both our sakes. Because, neither of us has really given it any thought. We haven’t had the solitude. We have been away from each other, yes, but we haven’t had the solitude.

We haven’t had the time to think about anything; who you are, who I am, who we are. And maybe, it’s better that we did not get that time. Because, if we had that time, we would have had time to think, and the more we thought, the more we would have found reasons not to do this. And I am glad that we did this; are, doing this.

I am glad that we jumped straight in.

I’ll send this to you one day, when you are not here, with me. And I hope on that day, this will make you smile.

Yours,

On Honesty

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

It was easier this time around; thinking about the thing to write about this week. It happened naturally enough; you see I had just finished writing the eleventh chapter. And so, it was quite clear that I was going back to writing about writing.

Also, I’m using a lot of these ‘ And so ’s. Too many for my liking.

It was this Wednesday that I felt I had moved enough that the chapter could end here. I might eventually feel otherwise, but right now, it felt right; and so, I stopped. Two things happened as I put the proverbial pen down. First, I remembered how good it felt to finish something, maybe that’s why we have chapters, to satiate ourselves. Second, and more importantly, I realized how easy it was to write, when you were writing.

And I guess that is the secret to writing, you just show up.

Most of the times, it’s the showing up part which is difficult. Something comes up, always. But when you listen to the same thing, said by different people, who don’t know each other, in any ways, who realize that this is the truth of the universe. You surrender.

Here’s something funny which just happened, sitting here, writing, I just realized something else, I don’t write dumb stuff. I worry too much, I edit too much. I don’t say pure things. Things are edited even before they hit the paper. That should not happen. Editing and rewriting should happen, yes, but for any of it to make any sense whatsoever, the unedited should come out first. The pure. The true. The unbound. You really don’t matter that much, yes, I am talking to you. And still, in ways, I had never thought possible, you still matter, I don’t speak my mind.

I swear to you, this, was supposed to be about something else.

This was supposed to be about routines, and how writing daily helps. How, when you show up each day, you are persistent, it becomes easier, much more natural to write, and even though, that is a hundred percent true, somehow, this has stopped being about that.

This has instead turned into something else. Something far more controversial for me to admit about my own self. I am not honest here. I mean parts of the things are true, yes, but they are only a part of the whole. I don’t even care about that. What I do care about though, is I can’t be true to myself, even when there is no one here, but me, and this blank paper. Me, and the paper, and nothing else.

Fuck.

Yes, I said that. Most probably I will edit that out.

I should write more. Really, I should.

If I say, that the characters guide me, then I should fucking let the character guide me, and not worry about our combined futures. Damn it, the future is the only thing that has stopped me. The worry that what is happening right now, will not fit in with the grander scheme of things.

I am expecting things.

And the issue with that is, expectations are never, never ever, never ever ever, fulfilled. That never ever ever was a little joke I remembered from somewhere. Maybe I’ll edit this out too. Fuck.

There, I said it again.

So, what was this about again?

This was about writing, above, and beyond anything else. Something so dear to me, that I can never have coherent thoughts about it. Something that is always a mixture, and that too a heterogeneous one. Also, it was about the honesty in writing, the need to be true, first of all, to our own selves, and then, bring some of it to you, the readers. There was also persistence thrown in there somewhere for good measure, though, that just makes it even harder to name this piece.

Now, let the rewriting begin!

On Possessions

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Today, the day I begin writing this post that is , is a Saturday. The plan, you see, is, or rather was, to have finished writing the first draft of the current week’s post by this point. That, however, did not happen this time around. You see, the week started a little late for me; on a Wednesday. That, was because I was working over the weekend, and so, the time I get to think about what to write, was not there; but then again, in all fairness, this is a two week ritual, nothing written on stone.

Sunday, is usually reserved to polish the blog post before hitting the post button. I don’t have the luxury of having an editor!

So, you can understand the condition I was in, at the beginning of the day today, with no real ideas in my head; and the last couple of days having already passed with nothing concrete yet.

Today, however was going to be different.

Today, after I was finished with my morning run, my father asked me to clean my room. You see, Diwali will be here soon, and one of the rituals regarding the festival involves cleaning up your homes. Something to do with making sure that the Goddess Lakshmi visits our home. And so, some time past nine in the morning, I began pulling things down from the upper echelons of the cupboard in my room, and putting it on the bed; as a result of which I had a real hard time finding my bed afterwards.

It was actually sometime in the middle of it all, when I had all the stuff on my bed, and I was deciding what to keep, that I decided to write about this. It was when my brain was telling me, that maybe, I was going to decide to start studying for that paper, that I decided to write about this.

About our tendency to accumulate stuff.

Think about it, what is the oldest thing that you own?

For me, it was the comic book I had bought sometime in my childhood; I don’t remember when exactly, I do, however, remember that I had to beg for it, and my mother had caved in, picking it from that stall on the Patna Railway Station. That, and a copy of Nandan, which was of course, something my mother had bought for me. Because hey; comics!

I threw that comic out today.

The Nandan, not surprisingly enough, has been passed on to my younger sister.

Possessions.

The things we own, the things that are not just the things which they originally were, but rather the things they morphed into; in due time.

I have been fairly obsessed with materialism; reading about their effect on happiness, and the ways in which material possession end up acting as sources of happiness. I have also read up a lot about minimalism, and personally, I find the concept pretty awesome. The idea of being able to carry all of your belongings in a suitcase, and a laptop bag, and/or a backpack is pretty appealing to me.

In life, we are all hoarders, to a certain degree.

Today, I struggled, to throw away my signed shirts, from my last day at school, and college. Functionally, they serve no purpose; none. But, it was so hard to throw either of them, because they reminded me of that last day at school, and college. Each statement, fading, and otherwise, reminded me of the moments I had shared with these people; these people who co-owned my memories.

Does that make any sense?

Today, when I began, everything seemed important; the notes, the printed sheets, the notebooks, the reports, the bills, the photographs; but then, as soon as I threw that first thing away, as soon as I made up my mind, and decided to really look at things for their inherent value, things became much more clearer. And as I started cleaning the cupboards, I saw the increasing empty spaces that stood in their wake.

And it felt lighter.

I felt happier.

Maybe that is what is required in life at times, a purge, and a reset.

On Tolerance

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

This Monday, as I was walking in my society-complex; I began thinking about the next blog post. See, after the last post, I had decided to keep this regular, except for when I was travelling, or some other ‘Hey-I’m-here!’ thing which would have me away from my laptop, and the internet for long. I had defined regular to be once a week, and so, as I walked, I thought. Keeping continuity in mind, I reasoned, this better be something on writing. But the more I thought, the more I kept going back to this one thing in my head.

This happened. A couple of weeks in the past, yes, but this did happen!

A friend of mine had posted on Facebook, a quote from The Hindu, from one of their pieces from an author who had just returned his Sahitya Akademi Award, along with a couple of other writers. Since then, quite a few of the writers have returned their awards in protest. This, speaks of that time.

That time, when a man was murdered, and nobody cared that a man was murdered. All they cared about was the religion of the man who was killed, and some other things. It was, politics as usual.

So, I had read that post, and I had immediately thought of commenting on that post. But, you know, I’m lazy. And so, I didn’t. Facebook seems too much of an effort these days. You put your view out there, and then you have to keep coming back to defend it, and in order to do that, you put something else of yours out there. A cycle of sorts. Vicious or not, is an entirely different matter altogether.

To put all this in context; here’s the comment:

All spaces of liberal values and thought, all locations of dissent and dialogue, all attempts at sanity and mutual trust are under assault almost on a daily basis. All kinds and forms of violence, whether religious and communal, consumerist and globalising, caste-based and cultural, social and domestic, are on the upswing.

…A lot of this is being done in the name of Indian tradition and culture. There cannot be a bigger insult or greater damage to the Indian tradition than this. One of the most ancient in the world, this tradition belongs to a civilisational enterprise called India. It is perhaps the largest in the world, unique in its plurality of language, religion, custom, cuisine, costume, craft etc. Nothing in India has remained singular for long, everything sooner or later turns plural or becomes part of a large plural. Not god, nor language, not system of philosophy and reflection, nor faith and worship, not to speak of belief and value. There have always been forces amongst us who do not like this deeply enriching plurality and who would see it replaced by some kind of uniformity which they believe would be more manageable. Our tradition has not only been one of plurality but also of dialogue and accommodation, interrogation and dissent, of public debate, innovation and scrutiny. The shastraarth, one of the unique institution of public testing of ideas and insights used to take place in public between contesting view points. The Indians have never been afraid or intolerant of dissent or debate

I re-read the post and now, I’m not so sure what my original comment was going to be. Let me try nonetheless, a different comment is way better than a non-existent one.

See, tolerance, in itself is an interesting concept.

Would you value tolerance, in a person, as a value?

Would you want somebody you knew to be tolerant?

Tolerance brings with itself, a sort of passivity, which, somehow feels unbecoming of the aggressiveness that we have as a species. In all our years of existence on this planet, we have killed many, and are on the verge of killing many other species, without even wanting to! Really, it was all just a by-product of all we were dumping in nature, which in turn, was a by-product of the processes we had employed to get something we wanted.

Just think of the things we could do, if we were really focused on destroying something!

Destruction, isn’t that our legacy?

Actually, I’m not so sure…

We are builders too, and explores, and all sorts of other good things too. But in order to create something new, you do have to destroy the thing that previously existed in your place. Things hit the proverbial ceiling when we start destroying our own-selves!

Getting back to the walking then… I also noticed a newspaper clipping stuck on the communal board; the headline for which read “ Paying guest karenge party, to uncle police bula lenge ” which roughly translates to, “If paying guests party, then the uncle(s) will call the police!”

I do not know both sides of the story. Maybe, the people on whom the cops were called were at fault. Maybe it was the other way around. This is not about that; the right, and wrong of things.

This is about the act of putting that article, that intolerance out there, on display, as if it were a great thing. And this, is what my truck with all of this is. The growing intolerance in our society, as a whole. The ruling government is purely coincidental.

The other day I turned to the television in the living room to catch some news, and there was so much of noise there, unnecessary noise. People shouting. And it looked eerily similar to the image I have of the Montag living room. Being washed in screens of different shapes, and sizes. Being washed in noise of different shapes, and sources.

The author, in the article, talks about this as a form of protest, against the rising cases of violence, and intolerance in the country. My point, is that, never before, did we have so many people cramped in such a tiny space, and given them a medium to speak their mind.

Everybody, can be irritated by the right person. And we love to follow!

Combine all of that, and you reach where we are right now.

One last thing; I don’t like writing about political things. Because no matter what I do, when I re-read those pieces, I find everything but clarity in these pieces. I hold myself responsible for that; but at times I feel the reason that happens is because, in real life you can only wish for neatly defined things, and boundaries. In real life, everything is a mix of things, good, bad, and muddy; and no phenomenon can ever be explained to be caused by just this one thing, there’s always a second, a third, a fourth, and forth..

I'm Back... Again!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I'm back... again!

That’s supposed to be a hand coming out of the ground. Yeah, I know!

If I decided to list out all the times I have taken a break from blogging, and started linking them out here, then in addition to it being a pretty long list, it would also be a fairly time-consuming and boring task. And time, and attention are too things, I am fairly a miser of, these days.

So, I’ll just begin.

The break, this time lasting close to a couple of months, was a well-intentioned one. This in stark contrast to all the times I’ve done this before. Times when I had been plain lazy. Lazy, yes, that’s a word I picked up today. A word that describes me, and has been describing me, quietly enough, for all my good years of college, and another one after that.

Lazy.

Not in a ‘ lazy people find short cuts ’ way, but rather in a ‘ you’re wasting your life away ’ kind of way. And if that was not clear enough, a bad way.

I am at a job, which allows should allow me, to write. It fits should fit perfectly with the plan I had; of a job not too taxing, of having time, and money, to write.

We must live after all!

But every once in a while, and a little too often for my liking, I find myself wondering if I did right; if I am doing right?

I look at my compatriots, mates, and otherwise, from college, people I know, people I did not know, doing things, that look so awesome!

See what I did there?

I could not even say that they are doing awesome things!

I look at them, doing these awesome things, and I question my decisions. I look at the world, building things; and I question my decisions. Yes, my decisions. Because, I chose this. And yet, now I question it.

This is reading more, and more the journal entry, I seldom make, and less, and less the blog post that it is supposed to be!

Getting back to the break then; I had decided to concentrate solely on finishing the book I have been meaning to finish for close to an year now. More, most probably. The stories have changed, true. And I am still halfway through, truer. But I had decided that I would finish this book, and then I would pick up the blogging from where I had left it.

And that had helped, initially.

See, I was writing. Really, I was! And then, I wasn’t. And then some other stuff happened. And today, I realized there was no point in not writing anything!

Because, ever since I had stopped writing, a couple of people who actually enjoyed reading what I wrote, here, had grown unhappy.

And I saw no good coming off of that!

Life is funny this way; at times it feels a little too short to do things that matter, and at others, a little too long, allowing you to sit back, and just breathe it all in!

So, I’m back here, hoping again, like the hopeless romantic I am, that this love affair will continue. That something good, presentable will come of it.

This, this is trash; but it needs to be out there too!

(Untitled)

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There are some books, which when you’ve finished reading, make you want to write all that much more!
They remind why is it exactly that you are doing what you are doing!
Writing books, is not a pleasant process!

Fahrenheit 451 was one such book. It was art. It was beautiful.

(Untitled)

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There are a couple of reasons why people choose to follow you. You either fill them with money, or you fill them with ideas. Your ideas.

The Idea of Being a Writer

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Wish I had clicked a picture!

I am in love with the idea of being a writer, the image.

The idea of sitting on a table overlooking a giant window. The view outside the window keeps changing, but the table, and the chair, and the image of a writer, they stay.

As I said, I am in love with the idea of being a writer.

I am not entirely sure, who the first one was, but over time, there has been this one sentence, this statement, going around in my world. It says this:

Nobody pays for the idea. Ideas are abundant; actions, few.

Okay, I said it.

I think, a lot. I think, and plan, and imagine.

I imagine the future, a perfect future, in which everything would line up perfectly, enabling me to write. What I forget, however, is that there is no perfect time. Not now, not ever.

The idea, for this post, the title mostly, registered with me, once I had entered my abode for the next six days, and had looked at the table in the corner. There was a wide door to the balcony, and outside you could see the greens from the balcony. This was essentially a nice property. The image was perfect: the table, the chair, the laptop, and above all the changing views outside the balcony. It rained twice, yes, twice, and each time, I came to know about it, after hearing it…

There is this post in my drafts, I haven’t written a word there, all that I have, is the title ‘Fear’. I’ll let you in a little secret. I was so afraid of the content, that I dared not write a word. I will let you in on another secret; I was afraid, that I really was just playing a writer.

I was scared, because this wasn’t the irrational, ‘You write like shit’ voice. It was the cold, rational voice which said, ‘Look, this really isn’t working out. You aren’t writing anything. Are you sure, you aren’t just afraid of accepting your mistake, accepting that it has always been a charade?’

I was afraid of that!

But then, something changed. I am not afraid any more. And I am not afraid any more, because I know the above to be false.

I had no idea, this is what the post was going to be about.

Seriously.

But then, I never do!

Progress

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I wrote that!

It was on the first of July that I wrote this post.

The first of July, was some eleven days in the past.

Now, at that point in time, I was at some ninety-four days from my intended deadline for this project. Also I was on the eighth chapter in the book. Something, or rather, some place I was at, since the past couple of months, or something of that order. I say that, because it really was inconsequential. See, when I marked a date in the calendar, saying I’m going to ship this book on the date, then, by that action alone, I had made sure that anything I did before this did not matter; in a way.

I mean, the couple of months I was stuck on the eighth chapter did not matter, what mattered was the eventual thirty-six days on this calendar. From 118 to 83, which is today.

Yes, I finished the eighth chapter today. And yes, I am happy about that.

The moment I finished it, the first thing I thought about was writing about it. Weird, ain’t it?

Makes you wonder, who am I really writing for?

And does it really matter?

Shouldn’t the end product matter; the fact that I finish the book?

But then again, that is not how I look at life. The journey has always been more important than the apparent destinations. Somehow, I had this idea that this was going to be utterly incoherent.

I am not sure if I wrote about this earlier, but I had to scrap what I had wrote earlier, and enter this dark, foggy place, where I had no certainty, no idea about what the future held for me, or my characters. As I stand here, looking back at the finished chapter, I realize that, finishing the chapter has snapped the very last strand of connection I had with the earlier me; the me who had written the previous seven, and a half chapters.

I am different. I am changed. And I am not sure how the change in state, is going to reflect in what I write. And boy, is it scary!

This is, kind of like what life is; isn’t it?

I mean, you stumble through it, most of the times. You think you have something figured, mapped to the ‘t’ and then one fine day, it all tumbles down. And you’re left wondering,

What was I doing?

What am I doing?

What will I be doing?

I am at that point in life, and though it’s not unique to my life , it still feels novel. My life, and my story, both.

I guess, I’ll need to stumble through. Again.

Again, being the keyword. Let me underline that for you! Done!

Intelligence

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

All intelligence is subjective. Creation however, does seem more fulfilling than destruction. Why would any non-human intelligence be interested in destruction? Aren’t we painting everything in our insecurities whenever describing any other form of intelligence?

Why I Decided to Set a Shipping Date for My Book

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Well, I did say I might decide to explain what this was all about. So, here it goes.

Now, before I begin, I must say this, the paper wasn’t really working for me. So, I tore it off, and made a digital copy. With that out of the way, I guess we can move forward.

See, here’s the story.

I had a blog before this. It was called “First Time Novelist“. It did not have an About page; if however, I had decided to use one, then this is what it would have said:

This blog chronicles my journey as I go through writing my first book.

It is going to be a two month affair.

It is as much a diary, a journal, as it is a blog.

This is going to be spectacular!

I was going through the blog again, and boy, were those months I maintained the blog, awesome. See, here’s the thing; I was writing then, and so, I think the more you write, the more you write about writing. That was the point of it, or at least that’s what I think.

Between then, and now, however, a lot has changed, and not.

I started another blog, the one you are at now. I finished college, got my degree, started working, found love. The whole story changed, multiple times.

However, there was this one small little thing that did not change. I was in the second section of the book, when I left that blog. And, well, I am still here, in the second section, at the eighth chapter. And now, today, I think, it might be a better idea if I scrap this section altogether. Or not, because suddenly, it has all started to make sense in my head again.

Getting back to the picture(s) then.

The last book I read was “Linchpin” by Seth Godin. The one I am reading right now, and have been, since the last fifteen, or so days, is “Tribes“, again by the same author.

Now, somewhere, in one of these books was an idea of setting shipping dates for things. That, coupled with my mounting insecurities, and fears, about not being what I am , made me decide on what you see in the picture.

I set a shipping date for the book, that date being the fourth of October.

One way, or the other, I will be done with the book, as the day comes to a close.

But that is that. What about this?

I guess, it is the same set of ideas, thoughts, and feelings, as when I had started “First Time Novelist“

I want this to be spectacular.

One way, or the other.

Let’s end at something from the First Time Novelist.

P.S. I have really mentioned the “First Time Novelist” a lot many times, so go see it maybe?!

The Google or Windows Dilemma

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

It is weird for me that I have been obsessing over something as trivial , and permanent thing like the coming of Windows 10. It is weirder that I am actually writing about it.

See, I don’t write about tech, hadn’t thought that I ever will; but heck, here I am! I have, though, consumed tech, and so, I think, the progression sort of does make sense.

Windows 10 wasn’t news to me, till two things became apparent:

The upgrade was free
Word, Excel, Power Point would be built in.

And hence, the worry.

I am a Google power user, or so I like to think. The major reason that happened was because I decided to use Google Docs, instead of Microsoft Word. The reason that happened was because I did not want to use the pirated copy of Word, or buy the software. In other terms, the absence of Word pushed me toward Docs. Once that happened, I became delightfully aware of other Google offerings.

Somewhere around this time, my Blackberry died, and I had upgraded to my first Samsung. I’d root the next Samsung, the S3, and then I’d go on to buy a Nexus 7. I think you get the idea.

The proverbial last straw, the biggest commitment I made, was when I chose to use Google Photos, the newly launched version. For a good couple of days, it felt as if I had sold my soul to Google. Then, I realised I was overreacting.

Microsoft has orchestrated an awesome comeback of sorts. Something, I think only Apple has accomplished in the tech world. The revival would reach its summit, if they are able to get the one billion machines they are hoping, and/or, planning to reach with Windows 10.

Getting back to the worry though.

See, as I explained , I began using Docs, because Word wasn ’t around. But the thought of Word returning to the fold is a little worrying. The problem is that Microsoft has embraced cloud, and so, every Google alternative already exists with Microsoft; in fact I’d say OneNote is far more comprehensive than Google Notes.

The reason I haven’t used the Word Android app till date, because it would have meant signing in to One Drive, and that would have meant too much work. But, and this is a big but, if a similar, and perhaps can be delivered by the Word and One Drive combination on the laptop, and the phone, then why would a rational me choose to stay with Google?

Let's Sail!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Let's sail!

I ’ll meet you on the other side.

Perhaps, I’ll explain this

Satisfaction

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Remember the Benny Benassi song?

I remember going through the foreword/introduction of Malgudi days by R.K. Narayan, wherein he talks about how short stories are easier done, than a novel. Why? I’m not sure if he answers that.

The thing is, I guess it was yesterday, when post one of my ‘lets do some thinking’ sessions, I came up with something. But some background first. I am writing something, something longish. When compared to my days writing short fiction, I’ve realised that I am having too many unproductive days, too many brooding days.

Once, I began thinking about the earlier days, how I enjoyed writing stuff, these days, those moments come in short bursts, and burn out really quickly; the conclusion I came to was, that when I used to write those short pieces, there was instant gratification. I mean I wrote something, which was complete, unique, which did not require any more work. I mean it did not drag on, and on, endlessly, which this one does feel like.

And so, I sort of decided that this is the one thing which is missing these days.

Maybe, I am writing a little too slowly. I mean a hundred words a day isn’t something you can be proud of. But here’s the thing, finishing a chapter does not feel that great somehow. It doesn’t.

And I guess, that’s why we do not have that many writers novelists around.

In Search of 'Routine'

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

In search of 'Routine'

This happens with a fairly sickening regularity.

I write, I post, and it goes on for some two to four weeks, and then, I stop.

Then, a month or two later, driven by the accumulating guilt, I flip the laptop open, and with a new-found, almost rejuvenating determination, start typing. And, I finish this post. I do.

Usually, it is a semi-inspiring post, wherein I shamelessly declare things. Then, I write for another two to four weeks. Drop off. You get the idea.

It is almost time I did that.

This is not that.

***

Routine, and mundane are sometimes considered synonyms.

I have an issue with that.

See, extraordinary is rare. I mean that’s why it is called extraordinary. If you had many of these, then it wouldn’t be so. But what goes into it, the extraordinary that is, is lots of normal, routine tasks. You need to be in love with the ordinary, the regular, the routine, if you are to make something extraordinary.

***

Writing is not a glamorous job/thing.

Most of the days, you absolutely hate what you are writing. You feel like tearing apart whatever you’ve written, because, for lack of a better word, it is shit!

The extraordinary happens when you’ve been through lines and lines of the ordinary.

For a long time, I really used to trust my muse. But then, I realized she was a fickle bitch!

Then, I tried befriending routine, but she played hard to get. And for a long time.

Then, in time, I guess, she realized that I wasn’t going to give up so easily.

***

Most people aren’t able to get past the mundane.

Most people, have a half-written zombie novel saved somewhere.

Most people don’t create the extraordinary.

I feel, you’ve got to love the routine, the day-to-day, the work, the sweat, the blood, the tears.

Okay, too cheesy!

Children, and Truth

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

It was all fairly routine.

I mean she, or rather they would say something on the lines of: “You won’t get milk, if you don’t eat dinner”, or in the rather more outrageous cases: “I’ll break your legs if you don’t behave”

Now, I don’t have any issue with the outrageous cases, because, hey they are so outrageous that even kids, get , that it’s but a joke. It’s the first case, the routine case which I have an issue with. Because, the kids, can’t really differentiate in these cases. Or so is my view.

See; kids, when they come in this universe are like a blank slate. They are the universe, to begin with. But then, things change. They interact with the environment. They see. They absorb. And they learn.

It might seem fairly unimportant.

I mean it is to begin with. But then, when the thing is repeated; again, and again, and again; it becomes a routine. And then the kids see, absorb, and learn…

Then, finally, it becomes an issue. Or so I feel.

The issue is this.

The kids stop paying heed to your words.

It does not matter what you say, because, hey, they’ll just cry, or shout, or both, create a ruccus; and you will give in. It’s the truth. It’s how things work. At least in their universes.

And then, you complain.

The kids don’t listen!

All the Motivation You Need!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

“You are going to make an awesome Dad!” she said.

“What?”

“Yeah. I mean you can stick to schedules. If you want to write, you write; if you want to run, you run!”

In life, it becomes real easy at times, to relinquish control, to dole out blames to things that exist, or not. I went to the hills a few days back; lost my purse, and on the way back, was stuck in a jam because of a land-slide just a kilometre from us. Once back, I found my mind going back to blaming the gods. I caught myself a few times, I reprimanded myself a few times, but time and again, I went back to the gods.

We give too much importance to ourselves. I mean seriously, consider this: ‘The person running the universe, surely has more important tasks at hand than you!’ But that’s religion. This is not about it. Maybe later.

So, getting back to it then.

I have done this a lot many times. Whenever I’ve been unable to do something I’ve doled out blames: to the traffic, the weather, the people, the shitty luck, the gods! But, what she said, even without it occurring to her what it might say to me, she gave me something, which I know, but conveniently choose to forget, almost all the times.

I do what I want to do.

Seriously. If I am not writing, that’s because I chose to not write, for there were better things to do. Better? Yes.

Writing is important, but not urgent. Not all the times!

I guess it’s important to consider this, but then again with a certain balance to it, as always. You can’t for example, be so obsessed with you being the cause of everything that you feel nothing else can affect your life. Okay, that does not bode well with the general scheme of this piece. Still.

Life is not the choices you make, but it isn’t in complete isolation of it either.

The Therapeutic Act of Writing

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

“What I do” she said,” is that whenever I am in a shitty mood, okay, shitty might be an understatement, but still. Whenever I am in a shitty mood, I take a blank piece of paper, and write, furiously. Then, once done, I tear it to bits, and sleep”
“Why?” I said.
“What why?”
“Why do you tear it up?” I said.
“Because if anybody else saw it, I would be in a position of disadvantage”

I remember, once, while looking back at my diary, I noted that most of the entries were mapped to the not-so-good events. I remember coming up with something on the lines of: ‘I only need to write when things are shitty’

It was bad.
And scary.

It meant that I would write only when I was in a bad mood. Back then, all the writing I used to do was in the diary. So I guess the fear was well founded. Because, it sort of did cramp, limit the range of emotions, or rather, the things you could write. It could either be a rant, or a semi-philosophical piece.

So, yeah.

All through life, this current phase, one question has always kept wanting new, and improved answers. That question is: Why do I write?

The answers have varied mostly, and that is not to say I have revised the answer at one point, or the other. No. It has been a rather stack-based approach to things, with a certain polishing aspect to things. I have added. I have also refined.

I write because writing is being. There is no other way of existing.

Sometimes, when I write, I go to places, I had no clue existed. I start with something, and I end up with something. When the something I began with happens to be a problem, a not so great situation; I most of the times end up with at least a little more clarity. And most of the times, that is all that is needed.

So. Yeah.

Yesterday, and yes, it’s yesterday because it was three days before, that I had written this post down, up till the ‘So. Yeah.’ Today, I’m writing the rest of it.

So.

Yesterday, post shower, after perhaps a gap of, okay, not perhaps, but rather exactly, eight days, I made another entry in my journal, #18, with no title to it. During the shower I had been angry, or at least had rather wanted to be angry, wanted to shout, wanted to rant; but couldn’t. I was in this semi-confused, and irritable state when I sat down, my breakfast growing colder by the second. And I wrote.

I miss writing like this, in a flurry. Writing when things hit me. Which is I can’t be sure, but, is bad. But more on that later.

So. Yeah, I wrote, and I wrote about how it was a bit of an issue, being able to step into other people’s shoes, because, then you couldn’t even be angry with them fully. It turned a bit philosophical, and I considered whether cramping an emotion, as anger, was really an issue or not. In this case, I ended up with more questions, than answers, but, I was angry no more.

This, is not a one-off incident.

This has happened many a times.

The Whorish Aspect of Things

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lautrec\_the\_sphinx\_1898.jpg

You need to feed the body! – Many, many people, including yours truly

I was seeing this video yesterday, and in it, in a particular section, the comics, talk about corporate shows. The view varied, mostly, I mean some took it as a challenge, while the others weren’t too happy, but they all agreed it was something that was required. You had to whore yourself out, because that ’s how you got the leeway to do your stuff.

I had a few blogs before this. Actually, just three, if you don’t count the blogger experiment that is. That does not even exist any more. So, three. The first one, called ‘Arcane Acumen‘, was the one I had spent most time on, even though, two or so years were spent with almost no update on it. Still, by virtue of it being there the longest, it still has the maximum number of posts. Apart from the blog, I had a Facebook page for it, still do, used to share content to twitter, even had accounts set up on some other services, services I did not use back then, or even now. Things like Stumbleupon. Nothing against the service. It just did not stick.

Then came ‘First time Novelist‘. It was from the very beginning supposed to be a three month deal. How optimistic of me! It was supposed to chronicle my way through my first novel. God! I’m so afraid of saying ‘novel’ out loud. Novel! Novel! Novel! Novel! There, I said it! Better now. Okay, so, yeah, I decided to go incognito for that, but because I did not want to create another WordPress account just for that purpose, it wasn’t entirely incognito. Sure, it did not have an about page, but you could see who was the author. I could not remove that, not in the free version at least. Naturally, I did not share content from this blog.

Finally, or at least currently, came this blog. A few days into publishing things here, I disconnected the Facebook account, this one linked to my personal profile, disconnected the twitter, and facebook accounts, because well, I still planned on using twitter for sharing the content. And so on.

I don’t know why I did that. Actually, I do. But.

Well, okay. See, I did not want the facebook people to be the only ones here, and that too, because I was bombarding their feeds. Okay, not bombarding exactly, rather being subtle, and at times, not so subtle directions. Now, it seems weird.

Most __ of the things these days, stories, or otherwise, start with this idea, which is not a premise. Just this singularity. This, started with ‘the whorish aspect of things’. I wanted to have found the answer, by the time I reached the end. In case you’re still wondering, ‘Should I create a Facebook page?’

I struggle with these things. I haven’t, yet, published anything anywhere. And so, it sounds, or rather seems a little pretentious to have a page, pronouncing yourself as a writer. Because, I might argue, that everybody is a writer, but then, not everybody has a page created by them.

That aside, I feel, it is associated to the so-called ‘whorish’ aspect of things. I need to sell myself. I need to. I can’t expect people to, well, just find me. This is too big a damn place.

Okay, so it seems, I have an answer.

The Human Connection

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The unimaginable is usually imaginable….

For a long time, whenever I used to read something on the lines of “..and unimaginable horrors fell upon them..” I used to scoff. People used the term ‘unimaginable’ a little too lightly. Then, I began reading science-fiction, mostly Asimov, that happened after a reader compared me to him. I had to read his work to know. Where was the similarity? I started with I, robot. I was smitten. I ended up finishing the entire robot series. It was awesome.

Then, somehow, I came up to the unimaginable condition again. I don’t remember now how. And I remember thinking, nothing in this universe can ever be truly unimaginable, because once it reaches the conscience of a human mind, it becomes imaginable.

Again, during the time I was reading Mr. Asimov‘s stories, I realized most of what he wrote, had to have, in some way, some connection to us. Even the robots, the aliens, somehow behaved humanly, in all their monstrosity.

Fast forward to the previous year, my trainer asked me, the entire class, to tell him what they’d do if they were gods. People talked about knowing it all, seriously, I said, I’d like to destroy stuff, then make stuff again, and keep doing it. Differently. Because well, it’d be fun. Some people had issues with that. They talked about guilt, wouldn’t I feel guilt, for killing that many people? I countered they had no idea about the psychology of God. I’m not sure if I said that in my head. But the point here is, that, anything we think of, any extraterrestrials, any gods, anything, we would be humanizing them. We would give them human reasons for doing stuff. Which I think is something that can’t be not done. Because, the reader, needs to have a connection, something he could root for, or scorn.

So, now that I am at the end of this, I have no idea how I am supposed to end this. Really. I could I think end by saying that I might try something, truly imaginative, like, the parallel universe of Asimov’s ‘The gods themselves’.

I think I will end at that.

Something About Nothing!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Sometimes, nothing is supposed to mean anything. Sometimes, you do stuff just for the sake of doing stuff. Sometimes, it all falls into place.

I wrote a story today, a short one, after what can safely be considered an eternity. Actually, I began yesterday, and finished today. It was weird for when I began I had nothing, but this one, single line:

This is of a time when the trees had stopped talking

I began with this, just this. And a vague, distant idea about what the end might be. I knew it wasn’t going to end that way. I was in the bathroom, when I got that idea, getting ready for work, and so couldn’t start yammering at the keys right away. That was scary, for I am famous for dropping things midway and never visiting them again.

I think I have talked about this before. This whole approach to writing stuff. Now I think I’ll try and explain the process.

I can think of two analogies. Both involve walking, for I don’t think anything else describes what writing is. For just as walking is nothing but controlled falling, writing too is nothing but that. Stumbling. Feeling. Falling. And finding.

The analogies then.

Imagine a thick fog, a fog so thick, that you can see your hands, yes, but only when you hold them up. Imagine walking through that fog, walking, stopping, looking, feeling for something, anything, finding nothing and still continuing; for there was nothing else that could be done.

The second analogy is something similar, actually exactly the same, but instead of walking in the fog, you are walking in a cloudy, moonless, starless night, and it is raining! You know something else? You know, in your heart, that you are very likely going to die of Pneumonia. But still you walk, for there’s nothing else that can be done.

And that was I did. I walked. I walked to that tree, I sat under it, and I let the tree tell me the story, for it encompassed all reason, time, and space. And sense, as I realized at the end.

Bit it did not matter. Not really, because even though I had started with the aim of putting it out somewhere, it ended up being something else, something too personal. And even though I have shared it with a few people, people I trust; I am at peace with it, because I am confident they won’t get it.

Heck! Even I don’t get it!

The Journal

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

“You don’t worry about grammar, structure spelling and all when you write with a pen and paper”

I have started maintaining a journal of sorts. I don’t know if calling it a journal will be correct, as more than anything else it just has my views, reflections on stuff, reciprocated on paper.

*flashback*

It would have been the same yellowish white wall I’d have been staring at, had it not been for the periodic table pasted on it. I closed my eyes, and repeated the s-block elements out loud (the sole reason for having the periodic table there was this; knowing all the elements, and the general trends)

I opened my eyes then, and fairly satisfied with myself, opened the diary at the appropriate page. It was a nice diary. The paper wasn’t that thin, and it felt nice to run your hands over it. I picked up the pen, and started writing…

*/flashback*

That happened.

And happened quite regularly, without fail for an year, and intermittently so, before and after that.

I have the proof!

As a kid too, I used to maintain journals. Back then, all they used to contain were fairly trivial matters: the high fever I had a couple of days earlier, the newest song I liked, or the latest Pokémon episode. Fairly trivial.

But I used to do that, and that was perhaps the earliest form of my writing. Also there were the letters I wrote on postcards for my grandma. They were kind of sweet. Always began the same damn way, ‘Hoping this letter finds you in the best of health’

The period from the first year of college (when I stopped writing in the journal) to now, I mean a week from now actually, I maintained an incident-specific journal, i.e. whenever something happened which was worth noting down somewhere I’d write it down there, in that diary. Again it was fairly regular in the beginning, but the last entry I made in it was sometime in mid year, last year.

Then, some time back, while talking to a friend of mine, I was pushed into journal writing again. It happened in part because I was needing it, and in part because most of the times, all you need is a little push to do things you’ve been wanting to all this while.

I’ve been at it for a little while now, this morning I added the fourth one, in as many days. And it has been fairly liberating. There is no red tape. No need to worry about things. No need to think about the people who might or might not be hurt by what I write. It is writing at its purest. It is writing all for me, and by me.

Someday, while going through this, apart from the nostalgia, and the memories it will surely conjure. There will be something in here, which will push the seeds of a new story in my head.

Or not.

Michael Christie: Reading and Exercise

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

A balance of things, is almost always what makes things awesome.

Observations!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I was in love, for even the exhaust from the pipes seemed, incredible and beautiful to me.

How many times has it happened to you that you were so engrossed in something, mostly your thoughts, that life slipped by?

I say how many times, and not has , because, well because I wanted to. And it seems incredibly obvious to me. Something that I can almost pass off as a fact. Almost because, hey I’m still new to the writing about the life stuff, and I’m still uncomfortable with passing beliefs as facts. There is theory I have about self-help books, and why they almost always click, at least while you’re reading them. I think I wrote about this somewhere, but looking for it now , will be, well not possible. So. Yeah.

Getting back at the question then. How many?

If you reach a figure, drop me a mail, or comment, or something.

If, however, you are like me, and your answer is something on the lines of: ‘too many times to give a fuck about!’, read on, and leave a comment, or drop me a mail, or something! Its getting lonely here!

Alright, alright I know, I know.

On my first day home, I actually felt disgusted as I stood outside the railway station, waiting for my people to come pick me up. I was disgusted by the rickshaw driver, who almost pulled me to his auto, as if he was there to pick me up; I was disgusted by the man who came to pick up the person I was standing next to, and the manner in which he talked, too much of kiss-assery in every damn statement out of his mouth; I was disgusted by the dirt, the paan-stained mouth of some fat bastard, almost everything, really. I guess I was sad. Most probably, I was overwhelmed.

And it was weird, for I loved all of this! I loved the people, I mean not really, but I loved looking at the little intricacies, the actions and reactions, the mannerisms, the emotions. I loved that. I loved to look, to see, to observe. I’m not sure when that began, but it has been there since at least my college days.

What is life, if not wonder?

Life becomes long, boring, and tiring, when you don’t look at it. I find it sad to find people, and in troves, who don’t look at it; who get bored by it. Our senses are getting, or have gotten blunted by the information overload so much, or maybe its just a personality trait ; that we have stopped looking at it, and getting amazed by it.

Take, for example, the camera. As a kid, I was obsessed with it. ‘How does this thing work?’ was the one question that constantly ran in my head. I remember not being allowed to handle the one we had for a long damn time! And when I did get to hold it, click a picture, that was magical!But then again pictures used to matter back then!

Yesterday I saw two pictures back to back, clicked by my little sister. One of them had my dad’s head off.

I am not a sentimentalist, I get that times are changing, and I’m actually happy about a lot of things. But knowledge has never held that much value to me, experiences however, are a different matter altogether.

Also, I’m hungry.

Too much of boredom, can be well boring, and dangerous. What’s the point of it all, if there is no value to it?

And then, what would you do if there’s no value to it all, and if you find yourself actively bored by it all?

Too many questions. Fun stuff.

Incomplete

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Why u end abruptly?

She has impeccable grammatical skills, but when she texts, it all sort of goes down the drain. I had sent her the Life piece I had done a few days back. That was her reply, no, not the reply, rather the evaluation of it. Quick note : these are all different hers, I just don’t want to keep naming them again, and again. So. Yeah.

I feel that’s what describes my work these days. Not just these days. What I write, has evolved in time; from pieces with faltering structures, from pieces with holes as big as, well, you know, as if tanks had just rolled down the streets; to stuff that has some semblance, some structure, some idea about tense. Back then, I was just starting out. I never, never , read what I had written down; if I had, half of the ebbs would have ironed themselves out. Practice. And experience.

I also remember talking to her, about the stuff I wrote. It was all short. Really short stuff. I remember the longest one I did, stretched for around six or seven parts, with each part growing in size, and the whole series being around three thousand odd words. I remember looking at it, and thinking I could have done it better. But that’s always there, isn’t it?

Also remember something that I did as an experiment, an interesting one at that. I had done it in a jumbled up, Memento style. Weird shit. I guess I just did not have the balls back then. To sit down, and work through. To get something polished. They were all first drafts, not that I had any idea about drafts back then!

Now, is a little different. Now, I can’t write in the metro, in transit, or in office. Now I need to get in the zone. The time I get, elsewhere, is just not enough. And once through, there is this hurry, to get the thing completed. Get it up on the blog. Because it has happened, and with enough repetition, to make me believe that picking up these essays, once I’ve stopped is quite hard. And so, at times I don’t soften the edges, at times I let it hang, or end abruptly.

Abrupt endings, though, are something I like.

Anonymous

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

“X called me yesterday” she said, “he said that he really liked that last day of the year post you did. He also said some other stuff.”

As she said what she said, I realized I’ll have to disconnect the blog and Facebook. Something that I myself was wanting to do for the past few days.

Why?
I want to be anonymous. Actually, not really anonymous, I just don’t want the people I know, reading my stuff because its there on their timeline. I want them to be wanting to read what I write not just because it’s on their timeline. So yeah.

I had another blog, titled, ‘First time Novelist’ which was supposed to chronicle my journey through the first project I undertook. One important step was making sure it was not connected to any of the many accounts I owned. I did not want people I knew from outside the virtual world too, to look at it. I hadn’t expected them to find it, and look at it. I wanted nobody to know it was me writing what I wrote. I guess that was one of the reasons why it did not have an about page.

I wanted to blog anonymously because there was a certain freedom associated with that. The fact that I did not have to worry about what I wrote because my father, or folks at work, or from college would be looking at it later. I was free. That is something I find hard to come by when I am blogging. I still find it hard.

Nothing similar exists for the fiction I write though. There’s no room for that there. You can’t as a writer worry about your readers at that point I think. The work just doesn’t remain honest enough if you do that. And honesty is important.

There is something about giving a man a mask, and seeing him go! I guess its about that!

I was thinking about putting something about this on Facebook. Haven’t done that yet.

Even though I get why I need to what I did, the dual nature of this act does not escape me. I want readers. That’s there. And when I disconnect Facebook, I’m effectively alienating quite a few of my readers.

There was a time when things used to be simpler. Nostalgia, you bitch!

Life!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

What is life?

-A journey.

I understand the vastness of the topic, and the fact that too many great men, have lived, and died, whilst still working on a solution. I’m not even claiming, that this, in fact, is one.

Now that we have the disclaimer out of the way.

Yesterday night, or rather morning, whichever way you choose to look at it, I entered in a conversation with a person regarding decisions, or something else, not sure, it eventually led to the very basic question, the question at the beginning of the post: ‘What is life?’

There were two basic, definitions, which came out, this, is mine. The other one, quite entwined with my definition, was her choice. I have asked her to compose something, and share it with me. If it gets here, I will be posting it too. Till then, my view. Also, for those wondering, her answer was: ‘Life is the decisions you make’

I like travelling. Most of the times I have more fun during , and not after, or before for that matter. The journey has, and perhaps always will, matter more to me than the destination. I guess looking at that analogy, it becomes easier to imagine why the decisions don’t seem that important to me.

I don’t believe in having any regrets. That’s the other thing. And I sincerely do believe, that on my deathbed I would be more concerned with how I spent my time, rather than worrying about why I spent my time the way I did, or wondering how life would have been had I chosen A instead of B.

The choices we make, I believe, don’t even matter in the long run. And as far as choices are concerned, how many times have you really made a choice?

The time spent after the choice has been made, that is during the journey, is another reason I feel Life is a journey, instead of the choices. I mean around eighty percent (just because I ’m feeling generous) of our lives are spent in the during part, so, logically it should matter more.

I had initially thought this would be a long one. That was one of the reasons I had stopped midway, I had thought I’d need a lot of time to condense, and present my thoughts. But as it turns out, I had more to say, when I was talking to a person.

P.S. Awaiting your response.

At Work!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There is this interesting problem I am facing at work these days. ‘At work’ as in the place, and not related to.

Most of what I’ve posted here over the past three days has been written on my mobile phone, while there’s music going on in my ears, again thanks to the phone. The music is not the issue. Calling the situation an issue might be stretching things a bit, I fear. Calling it a dilemma might be appropriate.

Yesterday, I was talking to a person about the lack of time, I was getting to write.

‘ I wasn ’t getting time‘ I said, ‘ so that I could turn the laptop on, and write ‘

I remember having a similar discussion with another person, when I did not have a laptop. I remember what she said.

‘ Its all in your head, all excuses ‘ she’d said, ‘ if you wanted to, you could use a pen and a paper’

It wasn’t anything the person said afterwards that got me thinking. It was rather my own musings, which made me question what I wasn’t doing. After all I was writing, writing stuff that I wanted to, and in the office, in the time I made, then why not write that half-finished book again? What was missing? Or rather, was anything really missing?

There is this image I have, of my home, not really my home, but rather my room. It is an empty room, and I don’t know why but the interiors are all in white. There’s this great big window on one wall, what’s outside keeps changing though: from a beach, to the mountains, to complete darkness at times. What stays though, is the desk in front of the window; the desk, the chair, and the laptop.

I guess in order to write, a couple of things matter the most; actually now that I think about it, there’s just this one thing that is required: a peaceful mind. That’s how I like my brain to be. At peace. The room, the laptop, it all adds to the comfort, the peace I need, but more than anything else I need my mind. Because after all its my brain working.

I believe writing is a continuous process; there’s no switching. You are always in the story. And as of now, I am here, most of the times, not there , in that world. I know it sounds like a whole bunch of excuses right now, and it might very well be. But till I can get back to the place, I’m sure I won’t be able to add a single word to what’s already there. I’m not sure how I’ll get there. But I’m also sure of the fact that once I’m there, it wouldn’t matter if I’m sitting in my office, or home; whether I’m typing on my phone, or my laptop; or whether anyone is looking or not.

Because as I said, once I ’m there , I won’t be here!

Do You Remember?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Do you remember the plains my love?
Do you remember the rains my love?

You are amongst the waters now,
In a land of plenty, and more.
There is water all around,
The weather’s nice and gay.
The Sun shines, but just enough,
To leave a tinge of red,
In an otherwise perfect blue of skies.
The air is not that cold, or hot,
The breeze lulls you to sleep.
The birds sing, and wake you from sleep,
There’s plenty to eat, and drink!

I, am in the mountains my love,
Cold, dark and stark.
There’s no sun in the skies,
It’s all gray, and damp!
There’s food, and water,
But all’s frozen!
No birds, no dogs, no cats either,
But plenty of men around.
My men, my people!

I know I chose this, my love,
The time in the mountains.
I know the times, are hard for you.
I know the food’s raw,
The drink sour, the birds hoarse!
I know you are in pain, the head hurts!
The oceans are salty,
The island a prison!

I know this.

Do you remember, though, the plains my love?
Do you remember the rains my love?

I remember the mornings in your arms,
The long walks, the fine breakfast!
I remember the day in toil,
In hunger, and fire. Fire. Yes.
The fire that consumed us,
Forged us into one.
Yes, the fire. Yes, that fire!
I remember the restless evenings,
The walks in the night.
You’d hold my hands, and talk and laugh!
I’d hold yours, and smile, and see.
I saw you, my angel, my hope!
I walked with you, and forgot the world.

Do you remember the plains my love?
Do you remember the rains my love?

Time flows, it does my love!
The only dimension worth any effort.
Do you remember the plains my love?
The walks, the laughs, the frights, the smiles?
Do you remember the rains my love?
I see dimensions, the people and all.
They’re all here, around, across.
They see me I see them.
I see me, me sees I.
Do you see the future my love?
The laughs, the walks, the frights, the smiles?
Do you see the rains my love?
The curtains of water, the rivers of light?
Do you feel my touch my love?
My hands in yours, your lips on mine?

Do you remember the rains my love?
Do you remember the plains my love?

Was

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I was looking at one of my lists, wondering what to write about. There were a couple of good alternatives there, and I had almost made up my mind when I realized today was the last day of the year. Believe me, nothing is going to change. I will be in the office again tomorrow, wondering what to write about, or how to write what I know to write. Nothing will change, apart from that increment in the year portion of the date. The rest of the resets will function usually.
Then why this?
In part, because its fun to look at the stuff you did in the past three hundred and sixty five days; its fun to look at the year gone by, its fun to be reminded about the good mostly. Also, the other stuff that I was supposed to write about, required me to write something other than this first. So.
Also, somebody had written about her year, as it was, and since I did find a mention there, I found myself wanting to do something similar. That want however was momentary believe me.
This year was massive, change-wise. I graduated, started working, left the job, joined another firm; but then, I have never really given that much credence to situations; people have always been of far more value. So I think it would be fitting if I did it in terms of people: lost and found.
There are people you know, all your lives, but not really know ; and when you come to know them, you feel stupid. _‘ How could I not see this?’ _is the usual reaction. And you feel stupid, but depending on the nature of the revelation, you either feel awesome, or bad. It was by mere chance that we ended up on that trip together. But it wasn’t a mere fluke that I realized who she was. And I got someone who’d probably last for life. Thank you, Rashmi.
College ended soon after, and even though I had sensed the departure, I never really wanted for it to happen. I lost a person, I mean not lost as in dead, but rather lost as in, we stopped talking. Thank you, Saurabh for the moments we shared.
Then I met people, some sixty odd people. Some of them I wanted to know, some I detested, some I talked to, some I wanted to help, some I did help, some who were fun to be around, some inspiring, and some just plain crazy. It was overwhelming, and tiring to listen to so many voices. Okay, not tiring. I stand corrected. It was fun.
Thank you, Windows batch. Thank you, Mandar for the walks, Pandeyji for the talks, Nilesh for the bakchodi, Sahil for the iron, Rajeev for Shetty-anna, Rohit for nothing specific, and all of you fuckers for the songs! Sandeep man, it was nice knowing you.
OFIs were awesome because of you Purnima. So yeah. Prabhu, Devesh, Navin. Diwali! Thank you for that! The chants were good fun.
And you, woman. For being.
There are around twenty odd minutes left in this year, and I know soon, a new year would have begun, but it wouldn’t be the same without those who have been there. All along. Thank you. You know who you are.

Coming Home!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Reminiscing about the past is something I don’t usually indulge in. Past, and future both should be left where they belong, which is, not here. Because even though the intent behind the deed might be nothing harmful, in fact the beginnings might well have been something great even, it all eventually leads to worries, mostly unwarranted in nature.
Usually. Yes.

I haven’t posted anything here in quite some time now. If you talk about the last time I wrote about writing, that would be longer. I had initially thought that I could write about writing even if I wasn’t; turns out I couldn’t. So yes, I haven’t been writing; stories. I have written poems, three of them in fact, though all had been written for people, and particularly so, hence, I haven’t been able to share them elsewhere. I have written other stuff, mostly snippets of thoughts, on paper of varying sources: diaries, notebooks, sticky notes. I have also been writing letters.
There is this list I have, actually I maintain many, but today was a long time after which I looked at this particular one.
Blog Ideas.

That’s the list, and boy did it need updation! I had at some sane, and inspired moment decided to come up with three new ideas per day, actually not per day, but rather per hour, in this one particular hour in the morning. So you can, I hope imagine the length of the list. There were these two entries in there: ‘Thank You Hyderabad’, and ‘When the most important lesson you learn in a technical session has nothing to do with technology’.

‘**Thank you Hyderabad ’ **was added to the list once I had left her, and was in the train to Delhi.

The one about lessons was added after that fateful session. I used to blog during that time!
A little about the lesson then.

When there’s help available, you should not let your ego get the better of you. You should go on and ask!

It was the last day of training, and this was the last thing I was expecting to learn, and as I try to remember; this is perhaps the only thing I remember with this much clarity! Perhaps the first thing I’d say if you asked about the training.
Home is a wonderful place to be at. Those two months away from home made me further shape, and sharpen my concepts of home. Home, I realized was not to be anything physical, anything I could attribute any coordinates to. I could define boundaries, yes, but most of them would be logical, conditions in time, and state of being, that would say, ‘Yes! I am home ’

Thank You Hyderabad I guess was going to be about this. Also, about finding Anya. Finally! You took your own good time babe!

I am not sure what made me do this. Perhaps that ‘Start writing ‘ entry at the top of my ‘To Do’ list did the trick; but that entry has been there for the past couple of days. Maybe lists have a cumulative effect!

But I am sure about the effect this has on me. I am above all the rest of the accompanying emotions, happy. Because that’s what writing is to me, home.

Decisions Decisions!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

How do you decide between what you have and what you want?

I talked to my brain today. Really, I did. I have no idea what it said. Gibberish mostly. This was also the first time it had tried that. Gibberish that is, usually its one of the only things in the world that sort of makes any sense. But not this time.
I had something. Something beautiful, gorgeous, serene. Then I lost it. There are choices you make, and then there are those you don’t. The issue with both is you live with the end result. That’s there.
That’s always there.
That is also something I have an issue with. See I am not comfortable with somebody else being in control of my life. I mean it is my life after all isn’t it? And so I blame myself for the shit, which, I also know is a psychosis. Ah, fuck!
So, how do you make a decision which is so skewed on both sides, so unfair that you’ll be broken no matter what you choose. How do you decide?
Maybe, just maybe, you don’t. Maybe you wait long enough for one of the options to slide into utter annihilation. But then again, I don’t do well with the passive-aggressive. It just isn’t my thing. And so, inspite of all, you end up with a decision, a decision you’ll question till the end of time.

Something New!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

It was only yesterday when, while going through the blog, my friend looked up from the screen, and said, “There’s nothing about the songs here”
I was stumped.
There has been so much happening both to, and around me that I haven’t been able to actually keep count of it all. And that’s not all. I haven’t been able to maintain the schedule. Heck! I haven’t added anything substantial to the book. And each, and every time I try, I feel unable to continue; in fact I feel disgusted. Why? Can’t say.
So, when he asked me there wasn’t anything about the songs, I was stumped. Not because it wasn’t important, or unmentionable; it is both, but because, there has been so much I have wanted to talk about but haven’t been able to. I was unsure of what to say. I did say eventually, that I was going to.

The songs.
Each morning, once I’ve had the breakfast, I go sit at the second last, single seat at the back of the bus which takes us to our training location. I like that particular seat. I never change it. I began sitting there because of the air, the wind that blew in your face was uplifting, and a gentle reminder of the early morning run I undertook each day.
Yes, I ’ve been running.
But now I like to sit there not just for the air, but also, for the songs. Each morning the stretch from Q-city, to the vendor location, those half an hour, or so, are filled with songs, our songs, our voices. We sing, mostly the classics, and even though none of us is really that good, we make do. I still remember the first day we did it, actually I don’t, but I remember telling somebody that one day, people would like to sit in the bus because of us, our songs.
That day did come real quick.

Habits.

I am a creature of habit.
I am also in a state of constant change.

I am not sure if any of that makes any sense. Maybe, just maybe, it does. Conflicting ideas, can complement each other.
Back home, I had done a couple of experiments. The first one had involved trying to shut out the TV from my life. That had happened when I had wanted to try it out for writing’s sake. EPL, then, was the only thing I watched on TV. It has also been a month since I saw a football match. And boy has the feeling been generally uplifting!
I have forgotten about the second one. I do that, a lot.

Maybe I’ll write a short story next.
I will. I need to.

Communication Protocol

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

“Do you have a blog?” I said.
He turned, looked at me in a way that showed his displeasure much more clearly than his smile did.
“A blog? Why?” he said.
“I find you interesting, and I’d have liked to listen to you talk, even after your tenure with us would have ended”
“But you are listening to me right now, aren’t you? And this is far better than anything virtual. I’m not a big fan of social media”
I felt offended; blogging, and social media?
“But it’s not social media! It’s a blog… it’s different!” I said.
“All right. How?”
“A blog is where you talk, and people listen; and if you’re lucky people respond. People who want to listen to you, are the only ones who do”
“But that’s not really a conversation, is it?”

This conversation happened a week or so back. I had immediately thought about putting it on blog, but couldn’t quite get to it, until that is, something else happened: a trigger.

The trigger
There’s this thing we do, where we have to talk about stuff that could be improved. I always write stuff in response. I think there’s nothing better. But the sad thing is nobody asks any questions afterwards. No conversation happens. Well it did happen once, but I guess that’s about it.
As always, I wrote something on the page I received, something that wasn’t as sharp, and or witty, and or helpful, and or poetic, as I initially thought it was. That does not happen often. For a whole day, I was in distress. I even thought about apologising. That too does not happen often. Then, I slept over it, and the next morning I wrote something about happiness, and owning your stuff up. See there’s stuff you should apologise for; things you did wrong, but you should never ever have to apologise for your thoughts, your ideas.

The debrief
As I thought more, and more, I couldn’t help but relate it to the conversation I had earlier. And I realised what my teacher had meant. When we can’t actually look at the person we are talking to, we can’t really judge if the message is getting across ; or if it has been lost somewhere in transition.

“Do you know almost ninety-percent of the conversation is non-verbal?” he said.
I wasn’t entirely sure about the percentage but I was pretty sure about the majority of it. I nodded.
“So, how do you expect me to have an actual conversation with you?”

That Blue Bird!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

A bird sat on my shoulder that day.

No, really!

It had pristine blue feathers,

A long mundane beak,

And a crown on its head.

It sang a song I hadn’t ever heard before,

A song so beautiful, so melodious

That it made me forget

The world I lived in.

The pace, the sorrow, the fears,

It all flew away that day,

The bird thankfully never did!

I could almost swear that

It would smile whenever

I looked away. Smile. Really.

I did not have a hard time imagining it.

For I could, and can imagine stuff

With so much vividness that

it becomes too hard to differentiate.

But I never actually saw it smiling.

It would almost always be there,

at the periphery,

But I’d never be able, or quick enough.

Here’s a funny thing though.

I never asked the bird what it wanted.

Why me? Why it?

Never. Not once.

It was out of character,

Certainly for me.

I never asked it, what would it want eventually,

In exchange for the songs?

What was the motto, the aim?

The bird could hear my thoughts,

It sang accordingly.

But it never answered any of my questions.

It just sat there,

On my shoulder, singing.

I heard it once, or thought I did.

It was singing a song

Which said something about

Mistakes and people.

Sorrow and happiness.

I never asked it why it sat there,

Why it sang the songs it sang.

Why? What? Who? For whom?

And it never responded.

Ever.

It just sat there,

On my shoulder,

Singing.

Universality

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

For a long, long time I was infatuated with the concept of one world-one government. The idea that we could all somehow come under a single government, an entity governing all of earth, as one. I had imagined multiple scenarios in which such a government could come to fore, most of them involving an adversary bigger than anything we had ever faced. I was so much in love with the idea of it, that even after I had read Balaji Vishwanathan‘s answer on Quora about the same, I found myself resenting the answer, the counter-argument. But then, something else happened.

Universality, the desire for earth as one is bad. Why? Because along with it comes the desire to abhor individuality.

I was talking to a friend of mine about religion, and my views on it; about how I was an atheist Hindu, and how lucky I was that I could be one ; about how Islam, and Christianity were two of the most dangerous religions on the planet; about how millions had been killed, and millions converted by the people in charge of these religions. It was when I was thinking about the conquests, that I realised the thoughts I had about seeing earth as one, will not be possible without a conquest of some sort; and having earth under a single government, would result in a conscious/sub-conscious desire to mould most of the population in that one image, which whoever is in power considers suitable.

That was when I found my beliefs shattering, and the arguments dissolving.

Throughout our history we have had many-a-great massacres when people decided to take over the world, or even when they found a new place, and deemed the inhabitants of the land unfit, their ways crude, and or evil. It was not anybody’s fault, after all the victors always write their histories, but it becomes hard to argue against the fact that we as individuals are so bound by the rules of the societies we grow up in, or the belief-system that we develop over time, that anything different from it seems wrong, something we could change, something we could make better. The fact is we can’t, or rather, we shouldn’t.

Individuality is beautiful, it brings newer, brighter shades to an otherwise monotonous world. Imagine a world without the variations, imagine a world in your colour, imagine a world as per your wishes, and then walk through it, and then, hopefully realise the beauty in blemishes.

New Life: Ties, and Cufflinks!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I’ve moved to a new place, nothing figurative, and or poetic about it. I have moved from Delhi to Hyderabad, and while I was in the train which took me from Delhi to Hyderabad, I realised this was the first time I was travelling alone. I am not proud to admit that. Travelling has been one of those things I haven’t been sure about. I mean it has never been at a higher position in the to-do list, say something getting a new laptop, or the playstation, or the Moto 360, or the next Nexus. I am fairly narrow-minded that way. Now, however, I have improved both travelling’s status, and standing in the list. Now, I’ve realised that all that kept me from travelling, mostly my diabetic status, was an excuse, a bad one at that, and fear. Because no matter how much I claimed I had experience living alone, I developed cold feet by the end of my time home. I was scared of moving out, leaving the comfort zone, letting go of all the little time management hacks.

I am not scared anymore. It’s been five days at the new place, and while I’m still struggling with time management, I know more or less my schedule for the next couple of months.

Leaving home was not just about leaving the place behind. No. It was also about letting a lot of stuff go: the Pokemon playing cards I had hoarded since sixth grade, that jeans I got on my birthday which I did not wear even once, okay, maybe once in the last four years. I still have a bit of stuff at home, locked away in my cupboard; waiting for me to come back, look at it, and reminisce about the olden days. Again, another thing I’m not too proud of.

Right now, I am in the figuring-stuff-out stage here. I am not sure if I’ll be able to manage the schedule. I will give it all I can, but as I said, still figuring stuff out here. And blogging, needs planning, some scheduling, and above all getting to the keyboard and typing stuff up.

Here’s me, in my room, again hoping.

How Important Is Grammar to a Writer?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The following was written in response to an edx assignment for a course I am part of. Shared as is.

I write fiction, most of the times. I can’t be sure if I’m good, though I figure I must be reasonably good, for the most credible comment I ever received was from a senior in college, a senior I had no idea even existed! There’s a bias associated with the people who know you; unless you ask them seriously they are always bound to say, ‘It’s good’. That however does not happen with strangers, I mean what’s the motive?

The prompt for the week was about discussing your writing process or discuss something you found interesting in Professor Fred D ’Agostino’s video. This will be a bit of both.

One of the things I struggle with, more so since I started writing longer stuff is converting what’s in my mind to what’s on the paper. The conversion rate/efficiency is not that great. I am not sure if it’s because of lack of impeccable grammar, or vocabulary. I think both of them do complement each other.

I never had what you’d call impeccable grammar. I am not a scholar. The last I had of grammar was five or so years before; back when I was in school. And even then, I had graduated to writing paragraphs, and stuff. That was all the creativity I was allowed. But then an impeccable grammar should not really be a requirement I think.

Scholarly people have their place in the world, and they should be there too, it’s just that Grammar shouldn’t be binding. Grammar should be like Legos, providing you with just the basic tools, allowing you the freedom to construct your world, tell your story the way you want. Grammar should not be binding, should not be a burden. It should not make you not want to write because you’re scared of the grammatical outcome.

I might be the only one thinking this, but I don’t like when somebody tells me this word does not exist. I mean how do you think new words are added each year in the dictionary?

Grammar is important, necessary even, but only as long as it does not obstruct writing.

P.S. I think I used too many commas, can’t help it!

Writing About Not Writing

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Before this, I sat in front of the monitor, staring at the almost completed sixth chapter of my work. I decided to give it half an hour, half an hour of pure, undisturbed, writing. I stared at the blinking cursor for the first couple of minutes; then I decided to give it a read, all that I had managed so far in the chapter. That took another fifteen or so minutes. Then I wrote a line, a line, looked at it for a while, and decided it will have to do.

I had hoped it would work; turns out half an hour isn’t nearly enough time!

The last I wrote was, on my last day of job. I had to take another job, and in preparation of it, I resigned a couple of weeks back. Turns out, having to go to a job helped maintain some sort of a schedule, something that is perhaps the most important thing if you want to write, even more important than a peaceful space. The brain works that stuff out. You do not really need to lock yourself up in a room, and write. The brain can do the isolation part of the deal. It takes some practice though; practice, and some luck with the boss not caring what you were jotting down in your diary.

The past couple of weeks, I have been trying to get this one little remaining portion of the sixth chapter done, I haven’t been able to gain much ground. I write a line, a two, a paragraph, and then that’s it. I guess, that’s what you get when you break the rules. The rule I’m referring to here, is about not jumping the queue, not jumping ahead in the story. Doesn’t work. I am done upto the seventh chapter, but haven’t been able to type those portions up because, guess what, I thought this little portion could be done later. Again, I was wrong. This little portion has been a pain in the butt for the past couple of weeks.

Sucks to be me right now!

I was talking to a friend, and when I told her about the issue, she said it could be because there’s so much stuff on your mind right now. I turned the clock back a few days in my head, but all I found myself doing mostly was sleeping, eating, and watching stuff mostly. There was also Quora, and edx.

Maybe there is a lot of stuff going on right now, or maybe I’m just being lazy, but here’s to hope, and words. Fuck.

How Democratic Is Our Democracy?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Democracy is a form of government in which all eligible citizens are meant to participate equally – either directly or, through elected representatives, indirectly – in the proposal, development and establishment of the laws by which their society is run- Wikipedia

India is the most populous democracy in the world, a fact we are proud of,no not the populous part. But how much of a democracy we really are?

We vote, people get elected to either the Lok Sabha, or the Rajya Sabha, and then, they are nowhere to be seen for the next five, or six years, whichever applies to them. I will not comment on the choices we are presented with; most of the times representatives are shifted from one constituency to the next hoping that people will not research on their past records, which we do not. What I am interested in is the way they rule, yes rule us, they’re not supposed to do that are they? They are supposed to serve but they don’t.

I’m not sure how democracies around the world function, but this can’t be it! The participation of people should not end with the vote they give. I mean there should be some sort of continuance, some form of participation by the citizens in the decision-making process, after all it is our money which is being used up.

A democracy with an absent feedback mechanism, or one where the only feedback can be provided in terms of voting the incumbents out can not be a healthy one. The state of politics in India has for a long time has been one where nobody looks for feed-backs. All are interested in running a closed system. But closed systems are not beneficial for either parties, us or them. In that direction, some recent steps taken by parties, like AAP‘s Mohalla Sabhas,__ and the GoI’s MyGov.in are welcome steps. I have not yet attended the Mohall Sabha, because well, AAP does not conduct them here, and I concede that there might be some issues yet with how they do what they do; but it is a step in the correct direction. I have been to MyGov.in though, and even though it too is in a nascent stage, and would require further iterations, but just the fact that citizens have a portal to communicate with the Prime Minister, however symbolic it may be , is quite frankly awesome.

Like everything else, there is a not-so-awesome-side to this too. Most of the population is not interested in how the country is run. Most of us, are interested in local issues, the issues which directly affect us. A student might be interested in what the government’s attitude is towards reservations, a factory worker in labour reforms, most of us though, are interested in the money we make, and the ways in which that money can sustain us, our families. We have voted for the people, who are supposed to be on our side, when issues that matter to us are up for discussion/debate in the power circles. I mean if I was supposed to run the country, then why the politicians? If they are not going to make any decisions, then why the politicians?

I guess all we need, is a balance. Sure I don’t want them consulting me on every trivial issue, but it would be nice if they asked me about some of the important stuff, because believe it or not some bright people do function outside of bureaucracy, and they do have some interesting ideas regarding the nation.

FSoL: Happy!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Surprises, and Good Stories

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Before you begin, the following is bound to contain spoilers about Death Note the anime series, and The Mist.

I finished up with Death Note yesterday, it came highly recommended by a friend, and rest assured it did not disappoint. I also watched The Mist, and before I began I had no idea it was based on a book, and after I was done, it felt like the fact had been staring at me from the very beginning. I don’t usually do reviews, this could be a part-beginning. Part-beginning because unlike conventional reviews, this would mostly be focusing, on the story, and telling-it part of the complete project/product.

From Wikipedia: Death Note centers onLight Yagami, a high school student who discovers a supernatural notebook that grants its user the ability to kill anyone whose name and face they know. The series follows Light’s subsequent attempts to create and rule a world “cleansed of evil” as “God” using the notebook, and the efforts of a detective known as L to stop him.

Death Note was ruthless. Yes, ruthless, unrelenting, and other such synonyms combined. There were two things in particular I loved about it. The first thing was obvious from the very beginning: the absolute disregard to conventional storytelling. I mean the moment I began to root for a character, any character, it was killed off. Yes. Be it the dead FBI officer’s fiance, or eventually, the protagonist L to our antagonist Light. The series never really stepped off the pedal. Just when you began to root for a character, just when you thought, yeah, L/Light is winning, the other would bounce back. Killing off characters, well-thought, and developed characters is hard, believe me, I know but the rate at which the series kept killing characters, and introducing new ones, and at the same time, staying true to the central theme, was frankly unparalleled. I haven’t read, or seen, any such work. Okay, maybe Harry Potter, killed them at a healthy rate too.

The second thing, was something I realised in the last episode. I mean it was there from the beginning, too, but the ugliness of it, is only made obvious in the last episode. Maybe it was because we were told about the antagonist/protagonist’s view from the very beginning. Maybe. Or maybe it was so obviously out in the open, that I did not really stop, took notice, and thought about it. Like if you lived in the mountains, the scenery, the air would be routine to you, but for somebody not from there, the scenery, the air would be divine.

The corruption of character, the way the decay in Light’s character is shown, it was beautiful, really. There was this thing, I had read somewhere about heroes turning into the worst of villains. Also, there was Batman (You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.) You do not really feel that bad when Light is killing off the criminals, or even the other not so bad guys; but by the very end, when he gets desperate, and when really all he cares about is killing off the opposition, that’s when you realise the ugliness of it all.

Enough with the death note. No, not really, go watch it if you haven’t yet. And once you’ve done that, come back and we’ll talk.

From Wikipedia: The Mist (also known as Stephen King ’s The Mist) is a 2007 American science fiction horror film based on the 1980 novella of the same name by Stephen King.

I did not know it was a King adaptation to begin with but by the time it was finished I had no doubt! I have not yet read the novella. I might at some point in the future, I’m not sure. The Mist talks about a lot of stuff, with monsters, and blood being the least of the interesting subjects. Seriously. And even though, it was an interesting study of human nature under stress, the part that really stood out for me was TWD’s Melissa McBride’s small part in the beginning, and end. I’m not sure if you’ve seen the movie/read the novel, or not, so again WARNING BIG FUCKING SPOILER COMING. In the climax, Melissa’s character is shown riding off in an army truck with her kids in tow, while our protagonist has shot his kids, and three other people who stuck with him through the shit-storm. There were only four bullets left, and so he did not shoot himself. Yes, that’s brave. You want to know why this incident is important to me? The thing is it isn’t; at least in isolation. At the beginning of the movie, Melissa’s character asks the people present in the store, to help her reach her kids. Nobody obliges. So, when she’s about to step out, on her own, she says, ‘You’ll all go through hell for this’

And through hell they did go through. I’m not sure if it is in the book. I hope it is. Because it is one of those things, that you can not really plan when you are writing your first draft. It is the sort of thing that happens, when you’re editing the draft, and it seems like one of those awesome things you could do.

P.S. I haven’t really written anything fresh for the week. Heck I haven’t even typed out the parts I have written on page. There is a reason to it. It was turning into a bit of a job. I had sort of begun to not want to do it. So, this is I don’t know an unwanted rest. Also, SURPRISE! (Because it was in the title, but not in the post. Too lame?)

Moving On

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

So, the blog I was supposed to start later, is up, and running. Its been a good month or so here, and while it was great while it lasted, I got paid.

Let me explain that.

I had a job, yes, had a job and with the first salary I got, I paid for the address. Nothing more, I mean I could have but that would have prevented the posting stuff up there, so I didn’t. It didn’t matter. At a further time, it very well might.

That is what is important, I guess to get it all going, a minimal approach to blogging where all you need to do, at least initially is to get stuff out of the door, get the blood pumping. I think that is happening right now.

I guess I can’t stretch it anymore. Check it out, yeah?

FSoL: That's How We Celebrate Jobs!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

FSoL: That's how we celebrate jobs!

So I graduated this year. Back in June I think, or that’s what the certificates will mention.

There is this tendency though of people getting kicked in their butts once they get placed, or on their birthdays, or because it rains, or sometimes without no reason. All that is needed really is four people willing to pick up the person, and hold him in mid-air, while simultaneously kicking the said person’s butt. Quite an art!

The tradition/event is usually acronymed as GPL, which stands for in Hindi Gaand pe laat, which translates roughly to boot on butt, it certainly does have a ring to it, don’t it?

Most of the events end just with a person(s) with a sore butt(s), but sometimes like it happened with me, they end up with a great story to tell. A story title, ‘How I ended up in the hospital a day before my exam, on my birthday’. That has a ring to it too!

We Are All Inspired!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I was doing this thing on, and with First Time Novelist, where I was posting stuff related to writing in general. At the end I’d put up a postscript stating my current progress on the novel. This is that post.

There is this theme of generalisation that does go with post of this sort, something that I have an issue with. I don’t like generalisations. It just reduces all the conversations, the discussions, the complexities to a singularity, a generic statement. It sort of undos all the good work.

Anyways , no work of ours, is absolutely ours. I mean pick up anything. We are taking stuff from others, mixing it with with some of our stuff, and presenting the product as our own. I guess our short life-spans, short, yes, as a race make it inevitable that none of us will be able to put a full-stop to the work we are doing. It will always be continued, modified by somebody else after we are dead. It just is. Take for example the work our scientists do. It is all a collective effort, even inside teams working on the same project, and then the work of one of the teams may be cited by another team. Thats just how it is.

There was a moral dilemma I was facing a couple of weeks before. I am writing a post-apocalyptic something; something because you know less than forty thousand words makes up a novella, more than that a novel. I am sure about the current classification, which for all purposes is a novella; I ’m on the eighth chapter, and I’ve maintained on average around two thousand five hundred words per chapter. The dilemma I was facing was this: How do I ensure that what I am writing is, I don’t know original? You know mine? I can already see themes from Stephen King’s The Stand, or AMC’s The Walking Dead appearing in parts. I mean how can I say this is mine?

There was this conversation I was once having with my friend back before I had begun work on this thing I am doing right now. It had centred on the walking dead. I had told him that zombies as they were, were just a prop. We watched, and loved to watch TWD not because of the zombies, I mean yeah all the blood, and bashed heads was fun, but we were not watching it for that! We were watching it for the men, the women, and even the children. We were watching it for the people. We were watching it for their struggles, their stories. Because, at least to me, it was an interesting example of how people could behave in a lawless, society-less society.

And this was what I thought about when I was facing that dilemma. Actually, I thought about the damn vampires!

I mean, we are all continuing something, when we decide to write something, which has already been described before. But then, the phenomenon does not remain important, or of much value, in such a scenario. And yes, in my story, my people are, well, my people.

Wait, does that make any sense?

P.S. If you have been to the about page of the blog, you would have noticed, that there was supposed to be a post on Friday, which did not happen. This is that post. I guess I’d try to be more punctual. Peace.

P.S.S. I love postscripts. If you’ve faced similar dilemmas, I would love to hear your story!

The Benefits of Living With T1D

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

It was a fine morning.

I was on the hospital bed having just been told that I had diabetes. That was a couple of years ago, in the month of January. I was scared. Life had changed, and how!

Two years later, I kind of feel its been a blessing in disguise. A lot of stuff has changed for the better.
The reason for this post is though a question I came across on Quora. So, I looked up for like fifteen minutes in the Diabetes topic, and could not find the damn question. Basically the question was about type-1 diabetes, and how the asker’s friend’s mother did not allow him to play, because the friend had T1D.

This is a part answer to the question.

I eat well : As a result of the broad food-ban that followed, I curbed the amount of fast food, carbonated water I used to drink. Fruits sort of became the norm.
Live well: I started working out. Though it’s still an on-off thing, but it’s better than anything I had managed in the pre-diabetic days.
I sort of became the darling of the group: Friends don’t let me work anymore, and even though it does irritate me at times, not carrying stuff when everyone else is, is kind of fun!
I discovered yoga: Yoga used to be more of an off, than an on thing. That changed. Now I at least sit for ten-minutes of meditation. It does at a minimum make the morning better.
I ’ll probably live longer, and healthier: Obviously I can’t state this for a fact, but all the aforementioned changes should contribute to a better me.

I can’t really think of something awesome to end this, probably I should end this with a promiscuous ‘ Knowledge is the key!’

Five Seconds of Life: 1. The Trip

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

So here’s how its going to workout I guess. Each week, on the first day I’ll post a five second video. I might or might not add some text to it. That will take care of one out of the three days when I need to post something fresh.

This video is pieced together by taking out one-two second clips from the minute-long shots I took during the ascent from Dehradun to Mussorie. Sadly the trip could not be completed, the scooter I was on skid, and my friend’s chin was gashed by the fall. His fingers, and palms received a similar treatment but that happened after I fell over him. Damn scooters!

Anyways, the trip, even though was quite eventful, it sort of served its purpose. The ascent, and descent gave me plenty of time to breathe in the fresh mountain air, lungfuls of it!

We had tried the ascent twice, the first day it was raining, and landslides had made it impossible to climb further, the next day shit happened. I guess I’d be ending it with a few pictures. To travelling!

SIde-helmet view

Day1: In the midst or rains, and blurry lenses

In the clouds

That’s Ganga in the backdrop, and boy she was wild that day!

Rivers through the mountains!

The logjam!

What Makes Me Happy?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

[youtube=http://youtu.be/04QJUpHi040\]

Yupp, that’s me!

This was going to be a Hello World post, the second one in as many months, but Monday never happened. I started another blog a month back, and it was going pretty well, but then my first salary came.

A bit about the video too, I guess.

I started a new course on edx a while back, and while the course is still to begin, the people asked me, and the rest of the class, to compile a video: ‘What makes you happy?’

The topic is close to heart. I did a post on the topic a while back, and my views haven’t changed much. Smaller things still make me happy. Writing new stuff makes me happy, music makes me happy, working out, rains, a nice cup of tea. What else could you need?

I Lost Me

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I was at a bad place today. Sorry couldn’t talk.
Oh!

I write about myself. I can’t help it.
Anything I write even if it is about an alien race in some distant corner of the universe, I’m writing about me. Yes. That’s how it works. We invest ourselves in whatever we do. A small part of us gets transferred to the blank paper, the empty canvas each time we leave something on the paper. This is not a nine to five thing, this goes on and on and on and on. We live our characters’ lives. We feel what they feel We see what they see.
I saw a great TED talk yesterday by Sting. He talks about how he started writing songs again. He says

When I started writing about others I realized I was writing even more about me!

One of the previous chapters proved particularly demanding, that I needed to begin this post, but as I tackled it, I forgot about this post. Apologies if this seems half-baked; it is.

P.S. On the seventh chapter, lots of stuff to write.

Why Should I Read?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

We’ve been taught from a very early age to look for stuff when we read, you know stuff like morals, summaries, questions, answers. I remember being taught poems in Hindi, my mother tongue, the language I was most comfortable with. Taught, yes. I remember being taught the meaning of each word, each line. The funny thing is poems, and all art for that matter is not bound, physical in its nature! It’s all-encompassing, transcendent sort of stuff. And it is upto you the viewer to derive the meaning of it. Its like that only. I’ve often been surprised by what people thought I meant to say in my poems. Sometimes they think of stuff I could not have thought, and yet I wrote it! Art is beautiful that way. And yet, I was taught poems, and stories and other stuff. We did not have the freedom to give our own answers, the answers mind you were dictated to us. Literature was taught as if it was history!

I was lucky though that my English teachers were not like that, or maybe they were all accommodating enough of a little kid who wanted to write his own answers, his own paragraphs. Some of the latter teachers had even encouraged it. I guess that was all the creativity I could get out at that time. There is one thing none of them told me to do: reading. I started reading very late. Very late. I grow jealous of those who’ve been reading since their school days. I guess it was partly my fault too. I was too happy reading the curriculum books again, and again. Perhaps the only kid who knew all the stories even before a single class had been held.

Ah! Good days.

This post is not about that, even though it was good remembering them days. It is about this question that my friend asked yesterday.

“Why should I read?”

He said pretty simply that whatever he did was motivated by what he got out of that activity. What would I get out of it? Inspiration? Maybe, but he was not inspired by people, and anyways I could not have told him to read so as to gain inspiration. My point to him, and I guess to all of you too is we don’t need to do stuff to get some stuff in return.

I read just for the sake of it. I read because living just one life isn’t enough. I want to be born, live, and die with each new book I read. I read because it’s fun. I read for a lot of other reasons too. Some of them involve looking at how others write, techniques, how to build up momentum, how to tell a great story. I read to travel through space and time! Beat that science!

But inspite of all this, I am not really looking for anything when I start to read a new book. I read a book, because; no there’s no because.

Flow

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

“1991 is as far from you as is 2030”

It has been a week since I wrote something for the blog. It has been a particularly tiring week this. Both with the literal and the non-literal scenario. The story is finally going fine, but not without its hiccups. It was a week full of deciding which way the story should go. And when I finally was more or less decided with what was going to be the general direction, the troubles began.

What I do is tell stories, and if I were to talk to somebody, my friends, my family or even a random stranger on the street, and tell them what was in my mind, I’ve already told my story; I can’t do that again! I experiment with this once, on Wattpad. I began with a story, was some fourteen chapters inside, but then I couldn’t continue. This post, get feedback, continue-system of writing works for some, and quite spectacularly so I might add; but not for me. Also once, it’s out there, later on if you want to change something in the beginning, you can’t. Because as I said, you never know where the characters take you.

Flow, becomes important in these cases. Telling stories that is. I get that when you’re stuck at some point it feels like a better option to continue at a future point, and believe me at that point everything in the future seems so awesome. But once you make the jump, you can’t go back to where you were. It’s sad, but true. It has happened to me already once. And I had to dump that story, and start afresh, just because I was struggling with describing the protagonist and decided to get back at the problem, after chasing something else in the future. It doesn’t and it didn’t pan out.

It is important I guess, to struggle. No matter how long it takes, or how hard it gets to continue with the flow. Finish with the current circumstances before going on ahead; because once you’ve made the jump, you can not go back.

I had similar desires in the past week. The story was stuck, and the ideas I had for the future were far more appealing. Still are I think. But I could not leave it unfinished. I could not let it go with just one chapter left between now and the future. I think I did right. I’m on the fifth and last chapter of this leg, and I guess it’s turning out great.

P.S. Chapter Five. The timeline is pretty much screwed now.

Good Days, Bad Days

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There are days like, let’s say yesterday, when everything seems to be falling into place; the characters seem to be doing stuff on their own. There seem no boundaries, no restrictions to the world you’ve created. Once you start writing, the words just keep flowing, naturally and seamlessly. At each point in your story you see multiple ways to take the story forward and still know which one would be the right one.

And then there are days, like let’s say, today, when nothing seems to be going your way. You are simply stuck, and can’t think of even one possible way out. Everything you write seems like trash. You feel like erasing it all somehow, and start fresh; but at the back of your mind you know, you can’t. It took so much of effort to walk down this one path, and there were no other paths in sight.

Read that again, and do notice the plural use of the word ‘day’.

I stopped writing at a point yesterday from where I could see multiple ways out, lots of stuff to write about. But today, when I began writing again I could not think of a single paragraph that gelled with what I had written. It is all seeming rubbish, and so I’ve taken this sort of break from writing to write about the problem. I’m not sure if it will work. It has, a few times though.

Even if it doesn’t I will write something, maybe not a thousand words, but I will write. Because I know that even if I have to crawl through a mile of shit, smelly shit, I’ll find my redemption at the end.

I guess its important to remember the alternate nature of these things.

P.S. Chapter Four. A major, unexpected change in approach has left me stranded.

Why Planning Is Important, but Irrelevant

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I like having a faint bit of predictability in my work. a faint bit, though. I like knowing how things are going to pan out, sort of like knowing the destinations, even though the paths may vary. It is not a hard and fast rule this. Many a times I have ended up with almost the opposite of what I wanted to do. Still planning in advance helps.

I have already talked about how I reached the figure of fifteen chapters and three parts for this book I’m writing. It helped, really it did. It helped getting the first couple of chapters underway. It helped knowing that I had to finish it in four days. It got a sort of momentum going.

Beginnings are difficult, they always are, that is when friction is at a maximum. If you’ve read elementary physics, you know what I’m talking about. When motion is about to begin, that is when the opposing forces are at a maximum, but once the motion actually starts, static friction ceases to exist. And stiction is one of the really bad(good) boys.

SO yes, all the planning helped build momentum, and got me through difficult parts. But then something else happened. Almost a collapse. I realized I could not, and perhaps should not include the second part. A third of my planning had just been flushed, also making sure that the rest of the structures were reeling too. That should have made me drop the idea; or put it on the back-burner. Believe me I’ve dropped stuff for less. A lot less.

But to my surprise, that did not happen. I was in a great rhythm. I had established the characters, and now they did not need me. They were going ahead on their own, creating their own stories. That I think is perhaps the best thing that can happen to a writer.

P.S. Somewhere in the fourth chapter. Cruising. Till the time I need to plan again!

Poems

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I had at one point, and quite correctly so I might add, decided that I will not be posting any shorties or poems here. And why not? All that stuff needs time, time to think, to write, and to edit. In short, time that I can’t invest in these as I pursue the ultimate goal, I guess, of having a book ready in the next two months or so. This delay, this thinking period is what put me off blogging on the previous blog. The delay just made me more resistant I guess.

The time I devote here, is really scant. Maybe, an hour or so at max. Really, at max. I think about the topic in the morning, and I write about it during the day, minutes at a time. Sometimes, I’d get a really brilliant thought, while I’m writing stuff and then I’d drop this and start writing something else.

But then, something almost magical happened a few days back. Really, magical. Because whenever I write a poem, it is from start to finish in one go. And I don’t think I am the one doing anything then. It’s like somebody is whispering the words in my ear, and I am just writing those words down. That is how most of the poems start. Magically!

But that’s not how most poems end. By the time I am halfway through, the voice, it stops whispering. And then I find myself alone. Looking at the stuff which is on the paper, and thinking, really? What now?

I wanted to talk about ‘Who’ll fight my wars?’ because it happened magically. I have never been able to write poems when I wanted to. On demand. That is why I really respect poets. How can you think of that stuff, that beautiful flowing stuff?

I was sitting at my desk, doing some costing, and then, a though came to me: ‘What will happen if all the soldiers on all sides of all the boundaries decided to drop their weapons? Will the leaders pick up the dropped weapons? Will they be able to risk their lives for **their **cause? And that was exactly when the whispering began. What was supposed to be a peaceful, white poem, came out all dark, and bloody.

My friend even commented if I had been recruited by some terrorist faction?

But then, as I said, I am not in control when I am writing poems. And frankly, if I don’t have a pen, and paper when the whispering begins, the magic will be gone; the poem will be gone, perhaps on it’s way to find someone who has a paper and a pencil!

P.S. The second chapter was finished after utilizing the two-day grace period I have kept at the end of each chapter. Chapter Three is truly underway. And it’s going good right now. Must be around the two-thousand word mark. Cheers!

There Was This Boy in School

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There was this boy in school,

his name was Yatin.

It was a long time ago,

this, almost a decade or so.

We used to run, really run;

not on a playstation, or an xbox,

we did not have these back then.

All we had was running,

loads and loads of it,

in circles, in lines,

zipping in and around,

we ran and ran!

There was this game we played,

Chain-Chain it was called.

The boy whose turn it was,

would try and catch the rest.

Anyone he caught, would run along,

and they’d try to catch the rest.

And so it went,

till all were caught.

The first one caught,

would be the next one to catch.

We would run, and run;

and run some more,

till the bell would ring.

There was this boy in school,

his name was Yatin.

And he was the only boy I could catch.

I would run, and run;

run harder still,

but the others ran too fast,

like little rats,

from one place to the rest.

No matter how hard I ran,

he was the only one I could outrun!

And so, each time I looked,

I found only him,

And no matter how hard he run,

I would still catch him!

It was a day,

like any other day.

I was on the ground that day,

looking around,

as it was my turn.

I ran, and ran,

and ran some more,

but I could not find him!

But no matter how hard I ran,

they ran harder still,

like little rats they ran.

There was this boy in school,

his name was Yatin;

And yesterday was the last day I saw him!

Dealing With the World Cup

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

After a month long tournament, Germany came out on top with a one-goal win over Argentina (or Messi, if you prefer!) Oh! and in case you were in a cave in a remote island somewhere in the Pacific (or the Atlantic) I am talking about the football world cup.

I love Germany. I do.

My allegiances in football are affected more by the coaches (Mourinho!) and less by the players (sole exception: Ronaldo) or even the club. Being loyal to a club, any club is quite absurd to me, given that I am in India not in the UK, Spain, Germany, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Football in India isn’t that big yet. I hope it will be soon.

I love Germany.

They have got an elegant way about their football. The passing, the moving forward; it’s all so beautiful. I have been a supporter since the 2006 World Cup. The one that happened in Germany. Surprisingly enough the other team I support happens to be England. Though my love for them happens to be a more sympathetic, pitying sort. I mean you host one of the biggest football leagues in the world, and still your national football is a joke. Sorry not sorry. They should be up there, among the top four teams at least.

Talking about football is fun, but I guess we’ve had enough already.

The thing that I really wanted to talk about is the affect it had on the writing. Not too good, I regret to inform.

I have a job, a nine-thirty to seven-thirty job. And so the only time I get to type (and I say type because I wanted to say type; I write all the time, whenever I get the time) is sometime till eleven at night, when I sort of do have to sleep.

The World Cup messed with that.

The matches were telecast in two slots here: the earlier one started around nine-thirty and the later one close to one-thirty, in the morning; which I hope you understand is bad.

The typing suffered, and eventually so did the writing. I guess in the end it all comes down to prioritization. And I think I will be talking about it sometime later. Till then.

P.S. I wrote this post around a couple of days back, but since I had already utilized one of the contingency days(I have two for each chapter) I could not post it earlier.

P.S.S. I can I think happily report that the second chapter is done, and I seem to be picking up some pace with the third one.

Who'll Fight My Wars?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Who'll fight my wars?

Who’ll fight my wars?
Who? Who’ll fight my wars?

You.
Yes, you!
Remember what they did to your brother?
Your mother, your sister?
They raped her; them.
They raped them,
Burned them alive.
All while you watched!
Scared, afraid, from afar,
From the crowds;
Afraid that they’ll burn you too!

Not anymore, no!
Don’t be afraid anymore.
It’s time you struck fear,
In their hearts, homes, cities, nations!
You, yes, you!
Pick up the gun,
Anyone.
Or the bomb,
Go on!
And burn their houses,
Rape their women and children
While they watch;
Scared, afraid from the crowds.
Afraid, yes, afraid!

You, yes, you
Will fight my wars!

Can’t you see;
The God in me?
I’m his voice,
His hand.
I see his will.
‘Fight’ He says
‘Fight for your rights;
And the rights of your people!’
‘Fight!
For our place in world is in danger!’
‘Fight or Perish!’

But fight!
I command you.
Fight!

Burn cities and towns
Kill each and all;
Don’t think!
I’ll do that for you know;
You are my son nw, my righteous flock!
I will take care of my own.

You will go to heaven!
Bravery and a just cause
Don’t ever go unrewarded.
Bravery, and a just cause!

What is just?
My wars are holy, just.
Fight! Fight through hell down here,
For heaven once you are gone!
Fight! For there’s no hope down here;
But death and hurt!
Fight! For there are angels up there;
Angels, and milk and honey.
Fight my wars for me, son;
For I am your God,
And you will fight my wars.

Why I Do Not Write Long Stuff Here!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Because if I did, I won’t.

Blog, that is.

The more appropriate question, I think would be: why put a word limit on what you write? Sticking to a word limit when you’re writing a novel make sense. There’s a certain length it has to reach for it to be called a novel; also once you’ve written it the long process of re-writing it begins. During editing the work, words, sentences, and sometimes whole paragraphs will be stricken off. It will be better t have some surplus at that time. Also, you already know how much I love symmetry!

But when it comes to blogging, when you say something like ‘Alright this stuff needs to be at least five hundred words in length’; you’re actually going against the idea of blogging. Blogging is not about restrictions, far from it in fact; it’s about spontaneity. It’s about ideas, thoughts, views and none of that can be bound. Because when someone (even yourself) asks you to write what you feel about something within a certain word limit, it’s journalism; and we’re not journalists here, we’re bloggers. We have our own sets of ideals and ethics. It isn’t the other way around, is it?

There is another angle to it. The so-called ‘interest span’ of the current generation of readers is on a bit of a decline. Really! Read the reports! I can speak of none but me. So, I’ll speak of me.

I do not like reading long blog posts. I don’t. Because once I have scrolled down to see how long the post is, you’ve lost me buddy. But don’t worry not everybody is like me!

P.S. It’s not like I don’t read long stuff. I do, but then they are usually around three hundred pages long.

P.S.S. Stuck at the three thousand word mark!

Success/Failure

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

It is too early to be thinking about that. Though, if you know me, you know given the way things are going I’m confident of a happy ending. I’m optimistic that way. And hopeful.

Also I was thinking about the blog. There’s so much to do here at my new job you see. So I was thinking about my blog, precisely I was thinking ‘Why would anyone sane be following my blog?’ ‘Why would anyone be interested in the ramblings of someone who isn’t qualified, certified even, to be giving about advice?’

The thought came after a couple of people followed the blog a couple of days back (Thanks Timothy and 1SIGFRIDSSON! You people are awesome ) and another couple liked Calculations! (Jacke and James Thank you! You guys are awesome too!) I’m not sure why they did what they did. Really I don’t. I can only guess, maybe they liked the post, maybe they liked the blog, maybe they liked that I was writing about writing, or maybe they had some other reason. As I said, I can only guess. But one thing I can say for sure: it felt good. Really good. It does, when people you don’t physically know, come out of the blue and like what you did.

So where was I? Ah yes, why would you follow this blog?

Why indeed?

Because whether I succeed or not, you’d get valuable insights and lessons from my enterprise. Frankly, it’d be more beneficial for you if I failed because you know nothing teaches better or more than a failure. You’ll know what not to do.

P.S. I sincerely do hope you won’t be rooting for that though.

P.S.S. Seriously people don’t.

P.S.S.S All these blogs are pretty awesome. Jacke’s blog is seriously awesome!

P.S.S.S.S Some three thousand words in.

Title Matters. Really?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Shakespeare once said something about names once, quite famously so I must add. Something about names not mattering. And I have mostly agreed with him. The keyword here is mostly.

Most of the times I’d finish a piece, and then I’d think about the title. Think. Oh wait, I don’t think about a name, ever. This holds true when I’m talking about the other cases too, where I do believe names matter. Is it getting too confusing? Let me explain.

Case A:

Most of the times, when I’ve finished a piece I have no idea about the name. I do have some idea regarding the theme, the soul of the piece if you will. And so I’m not really thinking about the title it just comes to me.

Case B:

But that’s not how it happens all of the time. Sometimes all I do have is the title and nothing else. Sometimes, when I’m having troubles all that it takes is for me to name the piece and somehow magically, I’m able to see past the hurdles at the finish line! Just like that! A swoosh of the damn wand!

This is what happened to me quite recently. The challenges that I was talking about in Calculations. I was having trouble keeping the story taut, trouble imagining the characters, their actions, and the situations they were in, when suddenly I named one chapter in the first part. And as I did that, everything fell into place. Just like that! A swoosh of the damn wand! You see I had tapped into the soul of the damn thing. I now knew what this particular chapter was about. What I want my reader to feel as he goes through the chapter (what he feels eventually, is entirely a matter of perception; and another post sometime). And so I had a foundation, a solid foundation to build my monument on!

P.S. Some couple of thousand words into the second chapter. Pace is good. Cheers!

Calculations

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I love symmetry. That’s the reason why I needed to have a total of fifteen chapters in the book, divided into three parts. I love symmetry, and that is why when the chapter count for the first part came out to be five, I decided without giving much thought to the following chapters that it will be a five chapter per part book.

Now, I am struggling to keep the storyline taut.

Along with all that symmetry also came the realisation that if this were to be a two month (or thereabouts) venture I will have to chalk out some sort of timeline. And so I did sit down and chalked it out.

Some simple arithmetic and a bit of imagination later, I came to the conclusion that each chapter will be devoted a maximum of four days. One thing gave me a bit of a respite though. The daily word count that needed to be achieved hadn’t shot up. In fact it had come down by a couple of hundred words.

Update: Work on Chapter 2 has begun in earnest.

Do What You Want To!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

“Whatever you do, make sure that you are not doing what your father, mother or society wishes you to do because you don’t want to end up where you don’t want to be”

I was talking to a friend the previous night, and as I said this, I realised the fallacy of the statement.

I hate predictability. Because you just can’t be sure, how the following moment enacts itself. It’s all probabilities.

Maybe this, maybe that.

Never this or that.

So, as I said what I said, I realised she couldn’t be sure that the place she ends up being would be not to her liking. Maybe she doesn’t like something right now, but that is not to say she won’t like the same thing after a year.

But it was as good as advice as any. I say this because I face a similar dilemma.

What it is that I should do? I enjoy writing, I know I do. But do I have the seriousness to go with it? I know it won’t pay well, so I’m looking for a job elsewhere too. I want to work core, but I’ve been advised to join the sprawling IT scene in India.

I came across an excellent quote today. It said, “It’s not what you do once in a while, it’s what you do day in and out that makes the difference”

It is a great quote really. Sums it all up beautifully in a single sentence. Why I need to write daily. Why I need to set regular targets and beat them.

Meanwhile, I have prepared a brief overview for the book and written down the first chapter. More updates will follow.

Day TwentyFour: Sport

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Day TwentyThree: Parallel

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Day TwentyTwo: Parallel

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Day TwentyOne: Sentinels of the Border

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Day Twenty: Fog

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Day Nineteen: People

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Day Eighteen: Metro

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The streets of Chandni Chowk, Delhi.

Day Seventeen: Tarmac

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

On a highway to hell?! Or to heaven?!

Day Sixteen: In Death

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

In death, he gets shitted on by pigeons! And well, not many of us get a statue.

Day Fifteen: Voice

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

At the Golden Temple, Amritsar.

Why did we invent language?

To diminish boundaries, or the other way around?

All religion is serene;

It’s we the people, who’ve sort of forgotten

Why we created religion in the first place.

It’s us, always been us,

Who downgraded one religion, or the other;

Ours was always the better one.

We fought wars,

We conquered.

Day Fourteen: The Hungry Man/Dog

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

He looked hungry.
He did.
But he had no money.
He could not buy.
He could not eat.
And so he sat, dejected at first
Then he grew in hope
As he saw others just like him.
Maybe worse.
Hope.

Then came the man, the big man.
He bought a pack of cookies.
Tasty cookies.
He salivated.
He slowly moved towards him.
It was difficult.
But hunger was worse.
And so he moved, and then sat
On the man’s porch.
He sat, looking. In anticipation.
The big man had the whole pack to himself.
All he wanted was one, maybe two cookies.
He wasn’t asking much, was he?
He was being reasonable.

Ask though he did not.
He sat there, looking. Waiting.
He grew tired soon.
The cookies.
He could smell them.
And so he began wagging his tail.
He did the best he could.
He spoke as nicely as he could.
He did all the little tricks he knew.

The big man noticed him now;
And threw him a cookie.
He grabbed it and swallowed it down.
There was no savouring the taste.
Then something happened.
He got another cookie, and then another.
The big man must be in a good mood today he thought.
Jumping around. Eating all he could.
Soon, others came. Others like him.
They had smelled the cookies.
There was some competition. But no fight.
They were all hungry.

There was one last cookie left.
The big man held it in his hands.
It was almost gleaming.
Others had left.
This one was for him. The last one.
And so he stood. Waiting.
The big man threw the cookie down.
And just as he approached it;
The man kicked the cookie, away from him.
He rushed not sure what was happening.
But the master was faster.
He kicked the cookie again.
And again. And again.
The big man was laughing. And kicking.
But he did not care. He wanted the cookie.
It was his.
And so he kept playing. Running.
Getting there just in time to see the cookie getting kicked off again!

Day Thirteen: Fall

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

My infatuation with the university campus knows no bounds!

Day Twelve: The Lord in the Mountains

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

He’s gone; the Lord
He has left.
He’s in the mountains, alone.
He’s not looking down, nor up.
Not right or left.
He’s looking inside. Looking.
He’s smiling.
He’s sad, and angry. But not happy.
He’s smiling, the Lord.
He has left.
He’s in the mountains.

Day Eleven: Washed

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Day Ten: Faces

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Day Nine: Reflections

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

What do you do when you see your reflection;
Not in the water, or a mirror either. But
In a person.
Its almost like seeing a ghost.
What do you do then?
Reach out?
Try to grab it?
Talk to it?
Or do you scamper off in your closet? Scared.

Day Eight: Martyrdom

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

They died here that day,
Died.
They did not do a noble deed,
No. They were not martyrs,
They were victims. Of some general’s desire
To implement, to enforce, to scare.
They were not martyrs.
Had you told them, they’d be killed for gathering in the bagh
They wouldn’t have arrived that day
I think.
I wouldn’t have had at least.

Day Seven: Questions

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Is life all questions and no answers?
And do the answers even matter?
Aren’t questions all that propel us?
Make us get up in the morning and strive; harder and fiercer
A hope that there’ll be answers at the end of the tunnel.
But there’s no answers anywhere,
And that does not mean there’s no hope!
There’s hope. And love.

Day Five: The Girl With the Bazooka

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

That’s what you do on HOLIday!

Day Four: The Transporter

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Day Two: The Lone Patch

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There was a time when it was all green here,
That time is long gone now,
There’s all but green here now!
Civilisations are born past, skulls, murders and cries I know,
Those cries, those skulls, they do have a purpose you know.
Purpose? you say.
Purpose, yes.
To fill you with guilt, sorrow, remorse;
But there were no cries, when the green was murdered.
There was, we were all just too blunt I guess,
We chose to ignore, face the other way.
When will their cries reach our minds?
When will we face the death?
When will we take note of the skulls?
Perhaps tomorrow.
Perhaps never.

Photographic Memory

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

My first memories of being captured, on a photo film that is, consist of me being rushed to the terrace, followed by a change of clothes and a brief touch up, which is followed by introduction of two more kids almost the same age and then one of my brothers clicking the picture. That was around a decade back, more or less. How times have changed!

The first camera dad bought was a Kodak. It was silver-grey in colour with one of the fancy shutters, drag it to the left and the camera lens will present itself. It came with a tripod, which I somehow never managed to fasten to the camera. There was this timer option which, well in those days, was not common. There was no zoom option however. You couldn’t waste the reel on pictures of sunflowers or bugs or drops of water, either. Each reel meant thirty two pictures, thirty five if you were lucky. Hence each frame had to be perfect.

I don’t exactly remember the year when the camera was bought. I must’ve in the fourth or fifth standard at that time. Can’t be sure! And hence, like every 90s kid it fascinated me! As did the TV or the radio or those game stations we had. Ah good old times! I was as I was saying intrigued by it, also I wasn’t really allowed to touch it. I had once opened the back compartment that housed the film, destroying a good ten-twenty pictures in the process. So yeah, there’s that!

How times change!

Fast forward to the turn of the century, or sometime around that. Say hello to digital cameras with their megapixel ratings, lenses that extended past the width of the cameras, crazy zoom options. Times changed and how! The Kodak was dead, my sister had dropped it on her Goa trip and well sand did some stuff which I wasn’t able to deal with. I had by now established my superiority in all things digital or mechanical or electrical. Next we bought a Sony. Since then we’ve bought a couple more of the Sony digicams. The one I currently own is a DSLR.

And that, right there brings me to the party philosophical question.

Granted that the quality of pictures has improved, granted the ease with which you take the pictures has also improved. But haven’t we also lost some stuff. That excitement when the camera was brought out has vanished. That anticipation over the trip, that excitement, that preparation for the perfect pose, it has all gone! Nobody says “cheese” anymore! If it’s not perfect you simply erase the previous file! Phones have cameras! Facebook is filled with “photographers” showcasing their “photographs” which usually involve a watermark which goes like this ” photography”. The photographs well they usually involve some bugs, some plants, some birds, some animals or some stuff. I’m not saying its all bad, irritating yes.
The novelty has gone missing. That I do think is bad. If you ask me to go back to the photographic films, I won’t, but there are times when I miss the good’ol times!
Oh! And on that note do check out “Sajal Photography” !

Wait, that can’t be right!

Writers Are

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Writers are magicians; and inventors of time machines, and a lot of other stuff too. Writers are gods, notice the small ‘g’. Writers are gods, creators of their own worlds; own universes. We are not bound by space or time for that matter. We are also liars, great liars. We turn believers into non-believers and vice-versa.

I was reading an interview of Mr. Quentin Tarantino a few days back wherein he talked about “bringing literature back to film-making”. I was impressed.

I was reading this book by Carol S. Dweck: ‘Mindsets’; my friend who had lent me this one had a lot of these self-help books. I am not that big a fan. So, yeah I was reading this book and you know out of the blue I realised something. This market, the self help books market that is, is a pretty big one; and even though they are all talking about different things they all seem to make sense. It was then that I came up with a postulate explaining the phenomenon. It goes like this: they take a fact, a simple basic true fact, then they build their whole theory upon this one simple basic fact; this one truth. Now since we know that what we began with is inherently true, we concur that whatever is being built upon that is also true. And that’s why the book you’re reading always seems to make sense. Confused? Take a deep breath and read it again.

This is also how great fiction writers operate I believe, creating great characters, and vivid scenarios. That brings me to the other stuff I wanted to talk about. We are all so different and yet so same, so damn same!

The last chapter of the book, ‘The road less traveled‘, deals with this subject. Something about a collective conscience of the human race. It says something amazing. It says each generation adds to this thing, this collective conscience and we all draw from it. Not as efficiently as desired, but still. As an example consider a normal response to any threatening situation. How do we know how to react to the said situation? How do we know we have to get of the way of a raging bull or truck or car or elephant or well you get the zest, don’t you? We do so by drawing from this collective conscious, we move because after getting thrashed enough number of times, some one at some time must have dove out-of-the-way and that reaction would have been registered in the consciousness.

This is how characters connect on some level when we are reading a work, I think. Or maybe not. Its your pick really. We are what we choose to believe after all!
Oh and lastly, writers are assholes. Most of them atleast. Break one’s heart and you’ll know! Or have a fight with one and don’t forget to check the creativity with which you’ll be killed off on the next novel!

Happy New Year?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

“Why do we fall Bruce?”
-“So that we can learn to pick ourself up!”

—The Dark Knight Rises

So the year ended and another began. I’m not sure if there’s anything to celebrate. But then that’s how I feel about almost any holiday. I meant festival. Holidays are fun. The ones which don’t involve getting out of the pad. So yeah the year ended. And I believe I’m actually five days late. In my defence I had been trying to come up with a poem. You know something to commemorate the event.
I’ll tell you about the theme. It was supposed to be about falling. I am not sure if it was the black and white wallpaper of a person in free fall or just the quote; but I was fixated to the idea. Couldn’t quite let go. The result? I’m five days too late.

Happy New Year
As a wish I think its obnoxious really. I mean why wish for happiness? Its widely over-rated, really. Happiness is momentary, a sort of destination, a goal; and if you continue obsessing over the destination, you neither enjoy the journey or the destination when you finally reach it. Always seems to fall short of expectations!
A better wish? I have one, though its a bit derivative.

“ I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.Make your mistakes, next year and forever. “-Neil Gaiman

So yeah, run, hit a rock, fall, pick yourself up, run, fall into a damn pit this time, but climb up, and run again till you hit a damn wall or reach a cliff or something similar and when you do, break the wall, jump and fly! OK, maybe avoid jumping off a cliff! Do something, live!

Oh and in case you were wondering what will I be doing this year; I’ll be challenging myself a bit!

I Deceive

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I deceive people with words all day,

I lie,

I tell them to live, to die one day!

I deceive people with words all day!

Who am I?

What am I?

A bin? A dump?

Good? Bad?

Am I God?

Mind is all that matters,

Mind is what drives, decides, brings you down!

Mind is the soul, the heart of man!

Mind is the friend, the enemy of man!

Mind is growth, mind is failure.

Mind is birth, death, destruction.

Who am I? What am I?

Am I God?

For I teach control;

Or a mere man?

For I help, I guide.

I deceive people with words all day!

I lie.

I tell them to live to die one day!

I give them hope, assurances.

Life is beautiful,

People are beautiful.

They live, to die someday.

I live, broken, beaten, scarred

I loose myself in them each day

I live to lie, to deceive, to die one day!

The Morality Factor

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

“The Empire is deteriorating” says R. Daneel Olivaw to Hari Seldon in ‘Prelude to the Foundation’. Not in the exact same words I think, but I’m pretty sure about the zest.

I think the same applies to us. Not so much in a word-to-word fashion as in a metaphorical fashion; after all that story was set many thousands of years into the future on an imaginary planet.

Daneel’s issue was with the scientific slowdown, the decline in the development of newer technologies or that’s how he illustrates his point. I on the other hand have my issues with the morality of the society, the civilization in large.

An event happened which triggered the thought. I mean the thought was always there, this particular event cause enough force to actually make me write. Then as I cooked up the title to the post, I couldn’t help stuff with similar theme so to say. And hence, here are the three events/discussions.

Event A:

I was late. It was raining and Delhi in rains is a bitch: the traffic that is! The rest of the parts are awesome. Okay maybe the clogging is not awesome!

I had to get to the substation at which I had done my intern to calculate my attendance. I had messed up a few things, and hence the rush. I had decided I will take the Metro from Vaishali, a decision I was to regret later because of the number of people who had the similar thought.

Two middle aged women were walking rather slowly ahead of me. When you are in a rush, everyone and everything seems to be happening in slow motion. Hence, when another woman who was sitting at the entrance called the women towards her, I took the chance and overtook them. I had slowed down a bit myself too, and hence I could make out the reason: something about this woman not having cash to go home.

This is a classic method used by cons around the place for getting some sympathy money out of the willing population. Well, I usually am not willing and hence I picked up speed soon after. This happened right outside the entrance.

A few moments later I stepped inside and onto the escalator. Once on it, I realised the deterioration. My mind started making up excuses then: She was a con; I was/am in a hurry and so on.

This was also when I came up with the title: ‘The Morality Factor’

This was also when I realised, how much we have deteriorated as a society.

This was also when I realised I should go back and get her a ride back home.

This was also when the escalator reached the second floor and I realised no more.

Event B:

A few days later, I come across this post by a person on CNN, where she mentions her harrowing experience on her trip to India, my nation. I am moved, I also remember my trip to Agra a few days back, before Event A; the primary reason behind this post.

Agra is famous for a few things: the pagalkhana (mental hospital), the Taj Mahal, and Peda (a sweet dish). The only reason I was going was because I hadn’t been on the Delhi-Agra Expressway yet; well at least the whole of it. I had previously been to the BIC.

It was the Independence Day, the fifteenth of August. I was waiting in line to get inside the Taj Mahal premise. The line was long, and had bends at multiple places. When I was in the inner queue, I was surprised to find the bend alongside the one I was in to be empty. Surely, people hadn’t just vanished. It was just then a couple of females, foreigners passed and it was also then I saw men not moving, but clinging on the railings looking at these women.

I felt disgusted. I felt sorry. I felt the degradation.

Later, my driver exclaimed, pointing at a group of middle aged men clicking pictures of some Asian girls: “Yahan ye log yahi dekhne to aate hain!” (These people come here not for the monument but for ogling at women)

I felt disgusted again. I felt sorry again. I felt the degradation again.

Event C:

This was supposed to be a two event discussion, but as I reached the end, I realised I just couldn’t end the discussion about morality, without mentioning the world as a whole.

It’s weird really that breakthrough technologies are invented because they are supposed to have or have military applications for one nation or the other. Our history is filled with such examples; the web is one such example. The amount of money we enjoy spending on devising new and innovative methods to engage in man-slaughter is really quite bizarre. I wonder if any man in a position of power will ever think about the waste or if he’ll be allowed to do something about it!

As I was thinking about the degradation, I could not help but think of the current mood in the nation: the pre-election-who-gets-to-rule mood. I believe in a united world: the pros are just too many and too awesome. As I was thinking about my country, it somehow made me realise that our civilisation as a whole is in a developing phase: just like my nation.

I wonder where we are going.

I shudder at the thought.

No Pressure, Really!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

We are different; we’ve been wired that way. How we think, how we respond to situations defines us. And hence, what might work for some, might not for some. It’s plain genetics.

Wondering where I am going next with this?

Like usual, here’s a slight recap:

The first three years of my time at one India’s prime educational institutions have culminated into utter absurdity. For those who are having difficulty in understanding or absorbing what I just said, sample this: one of the prime benefits of good higher education in this country means or rather is measured by the salary you get when you get placed. No it’s not knowledge, really! But then again, I do not intend to say I learned a particular great deal much but just am not eligible for placement. That too, might not be entirely my fault; remember when your professor analysing your research paper states that you need to buff up on the numericals, even though your project was not at all a single bit about that; you should, at that very moment get a hold of yourself.

Okay, enough of this education v/s knowledge thing.

Maybe, some other time, not now.

Alright so, I’m not getting a job it seems, and well survival IS one of the prime-most urges that we as humans are capable of, so I kind of need a job.

Next up, sometime in the months of February-March the next year, there is going to be held an examination; this one is called GATE. Many of you might be familiar with it. This particular exam now seems to be the next make or break thing for me. It feels as if I’m back in the JEE times. JEE again is another examination conducted by the same bunch of people. That too is one of the toughest exams on this planet perhaps.

So yeah, it’s around five or six months left for me to prepare the entire syllabus I haven’t somehow done brilliantly enough. There was this line I came up with a few days back (I keep coming up with these little things to sort of keep the self motivated), it went something like this: ‘In order to succeed in JEE, you need to prove to yourself that you’ve wasted the last three years of your life, more or less’

Enough with the beating around the bush, none of this has anything to do with the so-called recap I just gave, in fact the first few lines I wrote back when things were seeming a bit bright. It was back when I had posted a couple of posts, a little quickly given the rate at which I usually operate.

What I had wanted to say, back then, before all of this, was this, the following that is.

You must have, my fellow blogger, been through some pieces explaining the healthy ways to blog. Most of them were or rather more or less similar. The points which they stress on are mostly logical enough. But generalisation can be a bad thing, and hence, when they say blogging regularly or with routine is beneficial; despite of the fact that they are speaking logically and are in a way correct (I mean, posting regularly is obviously going to get you a regular and good following) but then, posting regularly in itself is a complex task.

There is no point in talking about mundane stuff; I mean nobody (well at least not me) would be interested in what you ate today!

Quality is something which cannot be compromised! And hence, if you are too stringent regarding the routine you are bound to feel let down when the numbers are not there despite the effort.

Kurt Vonnegut talks in his book ‘ Timequake’ about the presence of two sorts of writers in this world: those who write stuff in any order it comes to them, without too much discretion and then later on they go through all of the stuff and pick out the good stuff while deleting the rest; the other type, which he calls ‘bashers’ write stuff one syllable at a time, and unless they absolutely nail it, they do not move forward. He says women mostly belong to the first category, while men to the other. I wish the distinction were this simple; call me an eighty per cent basher.

So yeah, it can take me a while: a day, a month, an year perhaps before I come with the exact words I need, and hence following a time-table might just not be my thing.

He also talks about: equality, the economic aspect of it. You know equal wages to all kind of thing. I don’t think such a society is achievable or even desirable. I’ve been meaning to write something on the topic for a long, long time now.

Someday.

Perhaps!

Why I Need to Blog

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

A little background might help here: I have been on a sort of leave from the blog, and no it was not self-imposed or disciplinarian in any sense. I just had a bad time, physically; and then there was the all familiar: inertia.

Even after deciding many-a-times to implement this habit, perhaps to blog with at least some sense of regularity, I wasn’t actually able to achieve any: regularity that is. So, this is me, trying to persuade myself, trying to inspire, stimulate myself by justifying blogging to myself.

Now, that history part of the dialogue is out of the way, let’s concentrate on the whys!

Reasons to blog:

I enjoy writing

I do, kind of like to write; create situations, characters, stories! But then, I am currently working on two independent and ideologically opposite projects. So, there’s no less or absence of writing here. Also, the fact that it’d soon be the beginning of placement season and preparations are still wrong overdue doesn’t help the matters.

Hence, just the fact that I enjoy writing alone, won’t help the matters I guess.

Discipline

All right, the fact that my life currently is not panning out as I had planned led me to think. And when I think; which I’m almost always doing, I come across facts (okay, not facts, mere observations), observations which are not usually favorable. So, this time I realized I was lacking in discipline, and well, it was one of the prime reasons for me to consider blogging regularly and one of my chief weapons against inertia.

Escape from stagnation

The projects that I’m currently working on involve sitting for long times, thinking about characters, story development, history, other than the actual writing part and hence, I need to blog. To escape from the sameness of it all, to explore new ideas, new thoughts as I blog on!

Continuity

To maintain, perhaps, a sense of continuity as there are days: many of them in fact, when I don’t write a thing; partly because I’m wondering about the story-line, partly because of inertia, partly because of other assignments.

Interact

And, finally to interact, to communicate I need to blog; because after a while there are no new comments, no new faces, just the familiar set of people who follow the development of a longer project, but when you blog there’s a chance to interact with new sets of people with almost each new post.

Interests vary, and you never can be sure, what might stick with whom!

So, here I am in need of communication, some fresh interaction. Feel free to join in, I’d be more than interested in knowing your reasons to blog.

The Perfect* Road Trip

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Source: Google Images

“Traveling – It leaves you speechless, and then turns you into a storyteller” – Ibn Battuta

Traveling to me, and perhaps to countless many, is not as much as about a destination as it is about the act of getting away; the process of reaching the destination, the journey undertaken – the great adventure. Traveling is so much about the people one meets and the stories that one hears; these stories, these people form the experience, the whole act of going out, traveling for me.

I believe each and every person has at least one extraordinary story in them; and as such a single lifetime might not suffice in bringing them to light, to have them heard: the stories told on a bigger stage, to a broader audience.

I was away from Indiblogger for quite some time now, perhaps half a year or so; yesterday, while going through my mail, I happened to at this one particular mail; one with a pretty simple subject: ‘The Perfect Road trip’. I was intrigued to say the least, and hence, I clicked on it. Ambi Pur had asked me to describe my idea of a cool road trip, giving me a chance to escape into freshness even if for the time I imagined my trip.

Perfection is boring.

Perfection is non-attainable.

Perfection is relative.

Those determined to achieve it, end up frowning at even the slightest of discrepancies. Since, it is relative, what might be close to perfect for me, might not measure up to someone else’s scale. Hence the following is a description of my idea of a Road Trip.

“The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page” – Saint Augustine

Destination & Route:

Source: Google Images

Destinations don’t matter as long as the journey is worthwhile. I have always wanted to travel all across the country, from the frosty hills in Srinagar to the Goan beaches; from the Great Rann of Kutch, in Gujarat to sipping the famed Assam tea; from the Bodhgaya temple in Bihar to the backwaters of Kerala. The list is endless; I could go on and on and on.

As Miriam Beard quite aptly said:

“Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”

It’s not just the famed tourist spots that hold attraction though; in fact commercialization at most of these centers has made me just a bit uneasy perhaps. I would rather enjoy the silence of the valleys, the music of the birds, the motion of the clouds and the speech of men I meet than stand in lines to click pictures of Gods!

The Car:

The wide variety of terrain that would invariably be encountered in such a diversely geographic state as India would force one to opt for a SUV. That, obviously, is not to say that I would have chosen anything other than this monster of a vehicle.

Presenting: The new generation Mercedes Benz G Class

It boasts of a 3.0 litre V6 Diesel engine which provides a powerful torque of over 500 Newton metres and ample power reserves in any situation.

Source: mercedesbenz.com

Need I say more?? 😀

Yes?

All right, here it goes:

Source: Google Images

Companion:

I was confused initially, as to whom to take along with me; there were three options:

With parents

My father believes in a simple philosophy: if you’re here, see every damn thing you can, try out everything that tourists are supposed to try out. Oh! And the fact that you’re travelling with the family means another thing: Dad’s paying!

With friends

It does not matter where your destination is, it does not matter how you are reaching there, it does not matter whether you have any cash on you – as long as there are friends with you, they take care of it all: the journey becomes prime, something to be looked forward to, something to be cherished for life.

Alone

Who doesn’t want a little time away from the world, the crowds, the faces, the tensions of life? It’s just you and your thoughts; the world suddenly begins to seem like a great place to live.

******“One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.”** – Thomas Jefferson

I hope that makes clear the choice I made.

So, the Car is fuelled in ready, the stuff is packed, and in the back. I switch on the ignition and am ready to go out on what I’d describe as my idea of a perfect road trip. But something seems off, I’m not sure what it is, but there is definitely something missing.

Source: Ambi Pur India

And then, it hits me: what good is a car (even a Mercedes) without Ambi Pur, the perfect companion for long or short trips alike. The one thing you can count on to make sure your journey is pleasant, worthwhile. The one thing to transform your car (no it won’t magically transform a Maruti into a Lamborghini) it would instead transport you to a whole new dimension of freshness, each time you sit in your car.

Installing the Ambi Pur air freshener in my car, I pull up the car windows and get ready for the journey of a lifetime; to meet new people, new challenges, and new stories.

“Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard

________________

This post is published for “The Perfect Road Trip” by Ambi Pur and Indiblogger.

P.S. I really want that S4 😉 😀

A Little Something Called Inertia

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Inertia (n): A tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged

I missed this place.

It’s been a long, long gap and I hadn’t planned for or wanted any of it.

Inertia as I remember it was (still is) the tendency to resist motion, change and hence whenever I thought of returning, thought of writing all I could manage was the thought, nothing more.

Inertia.

It pulls you, makes you stagnant. Any and everything you manage seems futile, worthless. The fact, though I think remains that once you’ve managed the force, the momentum for a considerable duration, it ceases to function, begins to give in.

I missed this place; though I did not quit writing, adopted another place: “Wattpad”.

I wrote (still am, more correctly, I started with) a fictional series, titled ‘The Infected’. Well, if death and apocalypse is your thing, you might find it fun.

These past few months were tough, with me not doing so well physically.

I think, a lot. Sometimes I obsess.

Like most of the human population; failure upsets me, it sets my mind in motion.

Discipline , or rather the lack of it was what my brain diagnosed as my problem.

To get myself disciplined I had decided to challenge myself. The challenge was simple enough: manage to write something for the blog, each day for thirty days. Along with it were other tasks, other tasks required for accomplishment of other targets. It seemed like a brilliant plan, only it never made past the drawing board.

Inertia.

Well, I still do think that was a correct diagnosis, I still do think the exercise might help and I can and am hoping this time it will make past the drawing board.

Why?

Because once you’ve managed the force, the momentum for a considerable duration,inertia** ceases to function, begins to give in**.

Stolen Mint

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I looked up,

empty faces looked down upon me.

I tried to look away,

a castlesque house, an oversized vehicle;

two in fact, looked back at me!

‘Bad photoshop’ I quipped,

‘Home & car loan’ – the ad read;

‘Bad ad’, I shut my eyes again!

I tried to remember something,

couldn’t quite put a finger on it!

Smiled at the sad, rather expressionless faces;

Smiled perhaps a bit for self!

I shut them eyes again, knowing very well

this’d be the last of the naps I’d be getting this morning!

Life has become such; of late

holding bars, looking at faces, looking for faces!

Life has become such of late;

future, the thoughts of it always seem to be crowding the brain!

It’s a mindless scramble this,

a scramble for jobs, placements, salaries!

‘How do you feel on your birthdays?’ he asks.

‘Fucked up’ I reply.

Clearly, this wasn’t what my pal was looking for, as an answer.

Too late now; ‘Bad memories’ I continue!

I can see it in his eyes;

he wants to talk, talk about her;

and so we talk!

I now remember that something I was thinking about earlier.

‘Anya!’

There’s always this yearn, this wish;

just to see her, not necessarily talk, just look at her!

And hence, during this particular stretch,

there’s this childish want that maybe, today, I get to see her!

Today was one such day.

Looking at that ad,

There wasn’t anything in particular

which could’ve triggered the want

yet, here I was, hoping!

Amidst all that; the helplessness, the want, the anticipation

A part of me took it’s turn;

Quite suddenly, out of nothingness,

And said, ‘She doesn’t even use this stretch anymore, you fool!’

I look at my friend.

He is sitting here, alongside me,

staring into nothingness.

I put my hand around his shoulders.

‘Hey! Go watch Little Manhattan today!’

‘Yeah, yeah, seen it ten times!’ he says.

‘You’ll always remain my first love (Anya)’, I say.

He smiles, I join in!

Daily Post: 1984 (Of Emptiness and Vastness)

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

“You’re locked in a room with your greatest fear. Describe what’s in the room.”

Fear is a psychological phenomenon, it’s all up there: in the brains. So, if and when I get thrown into a room and the door is closed behind my back; there’d be two things I’d be afraid of: infinity and void.

It’d be poetic to say I’m not really afraid of anything in the world but the fact is there’s probably a million things in the world I’m scared of. For instance, there’s snakes, bugs, tigers, predator, alien, freddie, jason, etc, etc, etc. But well fear towards them is generated on a more instantaneous (face-to-face) basis. Each one of them is particularly dangerous and I’d be shitting my pants if I was locked in a room with one. That said, none of these would be as torturous for me as being locked off with myself.

Emptiness, void is scary. Nothingness automatically puts creativity in charge. So, yes I’d be scared of me. I’d be scared because soon after (being thrown in) there’d be a realization: a realization that this door could remain closed forever. That in itself is enough to drive any man crazy and boy when the mind decides to start playing it’s tricks!

Infinity is the other thing that’d be scary I guess. A room with no boundaries, no walls, no seeming end would provide just that little bit of hope that would keep one up, so to say. There’d be no sense of direction, time: the only assuration would be the ground beneath the feet!

This ends my description; description of my fears; how about yours , eh?

Mistakes We Make!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

We make mistakes, quite often than not; mistakes with people I mean. Lack of conversation is the most prominent one. There are many reasons to it. I’ve written earlier about one, expectations, that is. We expect people to behave a certain way and when they don’t things go downhill from there on.

Where do expectations arise from?

We see people in our molds; what we don’t see is our mold fits us and only us. Comparing one man to other is just wrong, wrong on so many planes. It’s a common mistake which I, for one hope all of us make; not because it’s a good thing to be making the same mistakes all over again, but because I do this.

In my circle, I’m the only person connected to literature, not exactly though, but it’s a good approximation nonetheless. So, when it came to making plans for the upcoming Jaipur Literature Festival, I as expected went ballistic. It was the last year repeating itself all over again. I for a moment, failed to realize none of them had the slightest interest in literature. I for a moment wanted them to be me; or at least a part of me.

Nobody Woke Me up, I'm up Any Ways!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Ok, doesn’t exactly look like this!

Here in [Delhi](http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=28.61,77.23&spn=1.0,1.0&q=28.61,77.23 (Delhi)&t=h "Delhi") winters have finally arrived, and I happen to have a hot cup of coffee waiting for me back at the desktop table. Hence, this will be short; though the coffee won’t be the only reason keeping this one short.

So, the exams ended a few days back; practicals will continue till the twelfth. Also, the hits on the blog have reduced to single figures. That’s explainable, no fresh posts here and hence.

I’ve been busy.

The other reason, I referred to earlier as to why this one will be fairly short, is this. This post is not about anything I want to talk about; it’s rather about me wanting some advice. I’ve been busy. Did I already say that? I think, I did, yes!

Change, just for the sake of it can’t be good, ever; but change for betterment is not only good but also inevitable at times. I’ve been thinking about changing some stuff around here for quite some time now. The menus, layout, the works.

I’ve been busy with practicals. I think I said this earlier too.

And finally, and more importantly, I’ve been busy doing what I love, writing fiction! 🙂

This is where I could do with some advice.

Web is huge, I mean it is HUGE! You are always bound to find some audience. That’s agreeable. What I’m not too sure about is whether there’s any substantial audience for fiction on blogs. People do download e-books, there are reading/writing communities; but still.

I looked around. I found ‘Smashwords‘ and there was this other site, I was already a member of, I’m not really remembering it’s name currently. I have more or less zeroed in on ‘Smashwords’, but I’m still to reach absolute surety.

So, here’s my question, finally: Should I go for Smashwords and publish my first ever e-book, or should I hold back as this is a sort of fun-longish-short-story ?

Oh crap, the coffee!

Wake Me up, When November Ends!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The thing with rumors is, they can be true some times.

The one doing the rounds these days is regarding the end semester examinations. It goes somewhat like this: ‘End-sems start November 16th’. Hence the need has arrived to go into hibernation for the month, half a month in pre-exam pressure, the rest in during-exam pressure!

And the thing with pressure is, either it makes something burst or reduce or move or whatever. Writing requires; rather does not require pressure situations, and hence, the hibernation and no NaNoWriMo, I was planning to jump into it this year around once I’d got a wind of it, but once I got to know it was to be held in November, I realized it has to be put on hold for another couple of years.

There is not gonna be much posting during the time, though I think I’ll try to finish at least one of the seven stories that are stuck since a month or so, the ones stuck for longer, I guess will need to be dumped once the hibernation is over.

So. I guess this is the Goodbye time! 😀

Be back in a month or so!

In Your Dreams!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

How often does the following happen to you?

You go to sleep
After a certain time period you wake up, distraught. (the said time period varies from occasion to occasion; from minutes into the sleep till the very end of your sleep cycle)
You find your specs, or simply get off the bed (depending on whether you have Myopia, Hyperopia, or none)
Grab hold of your laptop/tablet/diary/pad and start typing/jotting down immediately with an unexplainable cheer (even if you’re off killing someone in your writing)

I find, quite helplessly in fact, myself in the above scenario. The result is usually a beginning to a story, a half-written character, or, if I’m lucky/sufficiently-driven a complete piece.

I’ve noted, inspiration usually strikes when we’re least expecting it to; with our guards down; in my case, when I’m fast asleep, floating amidst the many possibilities of dream-space.

I’d be in one of those scenarios/places (my childhood home, some relatives place, school, college, moon, mars, etc.) indulged in totally harmless stuff (well, not exactly that) and then suddenly, out of nowhere, the landscape would alter and I’d find myself in a particular enactment of some scene. Then, someone will hit the play button, the whole charade would be set in motion; characters would start delivering dialogues, I’d get a hold of the plot (in partial) and then, I’d hear a voice (my voice). It’d usually something on the lines of the following, “Dude, this needs to be written down”. I’d soon realize I have to wake up; to which the other part would say, “Oh C’mon! Not now, we’re actually enjoying this; aren’t we?” This part usually ends up on the losing side though.

There’s also times when a bitter me ends up staring at the empty paper/screen wondering, ‘What was so awesome about the idea that you had to wake up from a supremely awesome dream sequence?’

Today was one such day. I had slept at 15:00 hrs, at around 16:30 or so, I got up; inspiration had struck! In the dream sequence I was at my grandma’s place, fooling around when suddenly, the scenes changed a multicultural group surrounded me. My relatives had vanished. We started moving out when suddenly I tossed my katana and said, ‘Oliver, you’re up! Everyone else, secure the perimeter’. It had all the effects camera panning, slow-motion and stuff. This was when I heard the voice, “Dude, this needs to be written down!” What I failed to figure at that time was that I wasn’t a comic-book illustrator or a movie producer. It’d have been cool if I had been one of the fore-mentioned; I ended up checking FB, twitter, my blog, freshly pressed, and then writing this post up!

Of the times, something productive has come up, Lost! and That face among the faces, come to mind.

How often do you end up with a master-piece at your hands up and away off a creative sleep?

The Gita, Religion and Dharma

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I’m into the Bhagavat Gita.

There was a realization, like always; which led to it. It was not a time-specific realization or for that matter an event-triggered realization. It was a rather general realization, something that I had thought over more than once earlier. It involved religion. During the recent Assam riots, I was having one of those ‘me’ moments during which I got to thinking about religion, faith whatever you wish to term it; more specifically I was thinking about Islam.

Here’s a question for you: ‘What do you call a person, who doesn’t have much knowledge regarding a subject and yet, he decides to get into a debate involving it; gets into condemning it; gets into trashing it? ’

‘Ignorance’ is one of the terms that pops up; ‘foolish’ is another word, this one an adjective for the particular person. It was in these moments I decided, ‘Okay! I’m going to try and educate myself before I go on a bashing spree; I realized it’s better not to be a foolish/ignorant person’. In that moment I also decided before venturing into other faiths I should perhaps get some idea about my religion firsthand.

I couldn’t have read the Vedas, or the Upanishads! (Sanskrit/pure Hindi coupled with the time I could afford to devote tilted the decision away from them) Frankly, these great books hadn’t even been in contention back then, it was the Gita all the way. I had remembered the Gita from my childhood memories, involving my grandma reciting the shlokas (verses), day in and out! Of course, I hadn’t cared for the text much back then; all of my concern was centered on the colorful illustrations, featuring the Lord and other prime characters of the Mahabharata!

There was another reason; the Gita was perhaps the only text I could get my hands on without generating much of a fuss from father’s side. And boy, did that go as planned! Father threw a bit of a fit that day! His point, ‘you’re not in your old age that you’re getting into the Gita and mukti and stuff like that’; which I might add was in a way, justified. I though had not bought the Gita for that purpose; I considered it to be a teacher regarding living life in a better manner.

I’m into the Bhagavad Gita.

All that I’ve managed is the introduction part of the Gita. Till date, a few myths have been done away with, a few interesting concepts have popped up. The Gita is a commentary by the Godhead, Krsna; he taught it to Arjuna; and from him it has been passed through generations. Also Krsna is not meant as another God, he’s just a reference for the eternal, omnipresent, all existent God. The Gita is not a Hindu text, Hinduism came later; Hinduism, like Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, etc. is a religion, a faith, and it can be changed. There is a lot of other concepts like karma, etc. which might be the topic of further discussions but this particular post concerns ‘ sanatana dharma ’!

Sanatana-Dharma

I quote, “Sanatana Dharma refers, as stated previously, to the eternal occupation of the living entity”. Sanatana signifies eternity, sanatana-dharma refers to the eternal occupation of the living entity. Every religion in human history has a beginning; each can be traced to a founder, a time during which it gained exposure.

I quote again, “The English word religion is a little different from sanatana-dharma. Religion conveys the idea of faith, and faith may change”. By its mere definition, sanatana is different from religion. Religion signifies faith, and faith may change. A Hindu may convert into a Muslim, Christian, Jain or so on. Sanatana Dharma is related to each individual in spite of his allegiance to any particular faith/religion. It refers to that one activity that is common to all; serving others. Take a second and think about it.

The one thing common to all humanity; rendering services; whether it’s the mother serving his child or vice-versa; or it be an employee serving his employer, the examples are numerous. Why do we fight then? Why are mosques demolished, bodies burnt, nations subjugated? All in good faith, huh!? 😀

India is a great nation, a multi-cultural nation. I remember what my history teacher used to say, ‘Before British Raj, there used to be peace and brotherhood between Hindu and Muslims; there was sanatana-dharma. Yes, Hindus had their Gods, Muslims their; but faiths were respected; ideas were respected.’ Divide and Rule ended up being more than just an excellent administrative move!

We are all allowed to have faiths, celebrate occasions but I guess our dharma has its own importance, eh?

Oh and I would like to end this post with the following lines,

_“Hare Krsna, Hare Krsna; Krsna Krsna Hare Hare!

Hare Raam, Hare Raam; Raam Raam Hare Hare!”_

What Is the Difference Between Education & Knowledge?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

It was a day, in every aspect as usual as one of my days could be. I was sitting in the metro with a couple of my friends not doing much other than cussing at the ridiculousness of the syllabus, the job scenario, the fact that the formidable ghissu batch of 2K10 EEE, DTU/DCE is not being traumatized by its teachers. It was then, that almost out of nowhere a certain individual _sat next to a friend. Then began a series of discussions between the two of them; I was neither a spectator nor a participant in them as I was at the time busy with ‘A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ The journey continued, soon we were at Kashmere Gate, waiting to hop onto the next metro when the fore mentioned individual said to my friend, ‘What is the difference between Education & Knowledge?’ To this, my friend began to reply as I started towards the open gates of the now-arrived-and-waiting-to-depart Metro. Once in, the question really started to bug me know as I went into processing the event. The following post is a result of the _thought process and also something I’ve strongly felt about, education.

Education can be defined as a process, a process at the end of which the individual concerned is more learned than he was before. It should ideally extend over a lifetime as, well there’s always something new to learn!

Knowledge, whereas, can be termed as a sort of end-product, something that an individual possesses, a quality!

Ideally, Education should lead to knowledge and having knowledge should point to the fact that the said person is educated.

That said, it’s a highly imperfect and non-ideal world that we live in. So, let’s talk practical now!

What passes for Education in this country is rote learning, marks, degrees, and finally jobs! Yes, along the way, there are bound to happen people who don’t follow the norms; but they are far too less! Education is the 12 years you put into the system to graduate from the schools plus the four years (if you are an engineer, like me) you put in to graduate with a B.Tech degree, plus any post-graduate courses you went for!

What about Knowledge then? Knowledge is born out of curiosity, of a desire to learn, of a desire to implement! Knowledge can belong to either the theoretical domain or the practical one; but there’s one basic underlying requirement: it must stick! Knowledge can’t be the formulas that were forgotten, along with the questions and answers once you step out of that examination hall! 😉 😀

Now, here’s an elementary question, how much of the knowledge you gained was curriculum granted, so to say?

I do remember (quite fondly in fact) my tenth boards score; ask me about my twelfth board score I’d flutter; ask me about the college scores till now, I’d start by laughing and then follow it up with a “No comments!!” I’ll give you a reason for this behavior here. In the tenth I still do remember I scored the lowest in Social Sciences, which during my time and teaching, consisted mostly of rote learning (the new text books in this respect are vastly more interactive and fun, kudos to the NCERT people!) All the rest was not so much rattafication as was this particular subject. The twelfth standard had just two subjects English and Physics, to some extent, which did not require rote learning; rest others including even Mathematics stood in requirement! 😀 😛

Don’t get me started on the college curriculum. What passes for education in this country does not allow for much creativity, for creation to happen, for aspirations to be born. This is not the case always, though; exceptions are bound to happen, but as mentioned, they are far too less and far too in between.

So far so good; what about this knowledge thing then?

Knowledge is born out of the moments that make an individual wonder about the what, how and when. Knowledge is amassed in the numerous moments that follow the said moment of wonder. Knowledge is what one cherishes, flaunts without deliberation. Knowledge is what is applicable, sharable!

It’d be nice to witness a day when education and knowledge flirt with their ideal definitions, expectations!

How Would You Like Your Fiction Served?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I love** fiction**** !** I enjoy reading fiction; I love writing fiction.

Why?

Fiction, grants freedom! You are provided with an empty canvas to paint on; voids to grow colosseums from. There’s so much of everything to fiddle with! Both the imaginable and the unimaginable find a level pegging here.

I love fiction!

I take pride in my ability to experiment with different styles of story-telling, whether the readers get the meaning I wished to convey is a different matter altogether. After all fiction is never supposed to have just one gist. Each person is free to look at the picture with his own set of glasses, find his own meaning, paint his own picture. So, yes even though many a times I have to poke my head out and tell them, “I meant this! You’re seeing it the wrong way!” At others I’m, quite frankly taken aback (and happily so) by the interpretations received.

There are many modes of narrative, characterization, description, introspection, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Here’s a brief description of the styles I’ve messed with.

P. S. I’ve studied English literature only up till my 12th standard, and hence there may/may not be the use of proper names for the styles!

Linear mode: The story is narrated as it happens, in real time; with introspection and retrospection at times to make the reader aware of the background details. The thing with this mode is that the reader feels like he’s part of the action! I don’t really like this method that much; though it gives the clearest idea of plot, and hence is easily understood.
The Mash Up: Different time lines, places, narrators are all put in, at one go. The latest example would be that of Barfi! This is a fun way to write a story but it gets challenging to make sure that the reader is able to keep track!

There may also be messing up of timelines but same narrator and other combinations, I’m leaving them out here, for space’s sake.

Based on who’s narrating, there can be a few modes, though I’ve used only three of them.

1st person (I/We): The story is narrated from the view-point of a central character. Examples would be Chetan Bhagat’s novels. Feelings and in-mind dialogues are utilized with aplomb!
3rd person (He/She): The story is narrated from a neutral point of view. It is one of the most commonly used forms and provides a lot of freedom. Description of surroundings, timeline, etc. is favored.
The Mash Up: Alternating narrators are utilized to take the reader through the story. There’s a movie named ‘Vantage Point’, which utilizes this mode quite nicely.

I understand there exist many, many more modes and narrative styles. I also appreciate that many of these overlap each other as in there are no hard-drawn lines.

I look to continuing my affair with these styles and modes!

A question: Which one of these styles do you enjoy working in most? It’d be nice to know of new modes to experiment with, hence, if you’ve got something to share, please do! As for me, I enjoy The Mash Up! 😀

Cannibal!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Another wave of soapy oceanic water crashed against the jagged spiky rocks. It was the end of town limits, end of earth, beginning of ocean. You could almost always find warm water livestock stuck in the rocks, but you never could catch any. This was the nature of things around the house.

The house that rest on top of these rocks found balance via, a combination of timber and concrete. The house was old; it was used as a look-out shelter during pre-independence era. There were a few reasons for it. Primarily, it was so because of the fact that it was surrounded on three sides by these rocks; the last side could be accessed only if you were returning from town.

These days a certain Badri Narayan was the sole occupant of the house. It was speculated that the ground was profane and Mr. Narayan was some sort of a male witch; but none of the speculations could of course be proved! Most of it was probably false and was in place because of the remote location of the house and the fact that the owner of the nearest tea stall aspired to be a successful writer in Kollywood and hence enjoyed telling stoppers-by about his encounter with the unseen, the unheard, and the eerie in and around the God-forsaken house.

The fact that Mr. Narayan seldom got out of his house and whenever did, wasn’t exactly friendly, or for that matter even happy (none had seen him smile) did not help the matters. Come to think of it, nobody had seen him talking to anyone except the postman, who, in spite of how-so-ever he hated it, had to go to the house twice a month. It was hard to imagine someone in relation to him. To know that there was actually someone writing to him was hence, certainly overwhelming. The first of them arrived on the 13th of each month; this one was a money order. The other one was a normal letter; nobody had any slightest clue as to the contents of this letter. It was almost like clockwork; maybe the rumors were true after all!

____________________________________________________

Vishnu was new in town. He was an employee in the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. His job included transfer to some random town in some district of some state; working out the logistics of installation, reporting it back in and then wait till part of the cost estimate reached his hands after considerable deductions. Then came the Gram Panchayats , they also demanded a certain part of the estimate. Finally, with whatever was left, he always managed installing a certain version of what was actually planned and also getting away with it. Then; another town, another estimate, another version. This time it was here, Podikatakapuram.

Vishnu did not particularly like this place. One, because it was his second straight visit down south and he being a typical Bihari was not too fond of the cuisine. Second, because getting away with doing nothing down here was comparatively more difficult down here. It all seemed to be a terrible waste of his time and energy. Add to that, the fact that only Telugu cinema was played in the local theatre and all the channels on TV were either Telugu or dubbed in it.

He was not really welcome any place except the local municipal department; but then he was not too fond of the place. He wanted to get out of here, quickly and hence, all he used to do was get up at eight am sharp and get on with the field trips. Half a month had passed since he had requested for the funds, yet there was no reply till date.

The weather was fine that day. He got an idea. He had heard from his driver about the house, the supposed profane grounds and the man. He thought, Why not!?

It's Teacher's Day!!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

And then she said, “You’ll be the first one to answer the questions tomorrow”
There was a bit of a smile on her face.
I looked at her with all the resolution, a 10 year old me could manage, “Yes mam!”, I said, wiping off my tears.

– To all the wonderful teachers I’ve had.

The Living Sounds

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Ripples of waves travelling through a medium seemingly so very empty; basic yet prevalent. Nature speaks through sounds, all sorts of it. Long before the dawn and long after the dusk of mankind sound will linger. Instruments will be conceived, notes written, music produced; sounds will endure.

One of the fondest childhood memories revolve around a particular kind of sound. I used to live in Laxmi Nagar in those times. During the summer times, all sorts of merchants used to visit the lanes and bylanes. They all had their own characteristic voices, styles of luring their customers. The flute sellers were characteristically melodic in this respect. On a bamboo, they’d sort of place the flutes as if they were quills of a porcupine. With this bamboo placed on their shoulders and a flute to their lips, they’ll move around the lanes; the Pied Pipers of their own little Hamelins! Some would play Bollywood tunes, others just some other tunes; both had quite a hypnotizing effect on me as a kid.

I had purchased a flute from one such seller. It was a wonderfully colourful little instrument. I never got good at playing it! Yet whenever I see a young one struggling with one, it never ceases to bring a smile to my face!

I also own a wonderful little harmonica to call my own. Again I never got to learn how to play it as all around me, I could only find wanna be guitarists struggling; not as much with the instrument, as with impressing girls with their skill. The day I bought it, I couldn’t stop playing it. Sucking in and blowing out through the holes produced a whole spectrum of sounds. It sounded so ‘holy’, so warm! I felt so calm, so uplifted, so happy! That is the power of sound, of music! Music, again is not just notes, it’s everywhere; all around. Instruments are just means to producing/reproducing sounds. I am a big music enthusiast and hence an obsession with sounds can be termed all right! A quote to sum up my addiction will be a fitting climax:

“** If in the afterlife there is not music, we will have to import it ****”**. ~Doménico Cieri Estrada

Zombie Land

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The biggest contribution, the hugest impact, (positive that is) that we, humans (as a race) have been able to have on the world in my view is MUSIC. Apart from that, there’s nothing that will live through; it’ll all just fade, decay and eventually die. There’s been wars, great wars; massive buildings, big ships, rockets, missiles, huge telescopes, fast cars, bullet trains, supersonic jets, bridges, television, some really glorious cinema, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. None of that will stay. We’re an imperfect lot, done more damage than good. The way I see it, we’re just another milestone on the evolutionary road. Whether or not we’ll survive swings on a needle’s tip, so to say. Come to think of it, nature has its own way of balancing out things and with each passing day, I feel more and more inclined to believe that the human race is more likely to perish soon, or at least most of it.

An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, the humans evolved from apes; I suppose a more intelligent, evolved race is long overdue. How that will happen is the more exciting part as it requires, well, the most speculation.

There are many alternatives to it from let’s say, the massive destruction from a meteor/asteroid or a nuclear bomb to the comparatively slow ice age. But then, many of these scenarios are equally and highly unlikely. And then, there’s the Uncertainty Principle. It would have sure been fun talking in detail on each one of them; like for example, how a nuclear bomb would not only remove a particular are from world map, but also trigger climatic changes resulting in an extended winter, a nuclear winter, stretching over a time period considerably long enough to freeze out more or less every living tissue present on the planet. But no, this is not about all that, maybe later; this one, right here, right now is about Zombies/The Infected/The Walkers!! Oh yes, it’s happening!!

The word Zombie rings a bell somewhere, doesn’t it? Slow/fast moving, flesh munching, can smell alive meat from a while, respond to even the slightest of sounds, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. As a movie buff, and having been a fan of zombie-bashing viz-a-viz, The Resident Evil franchise, Zombie land, and some more zombie-based games/movies; there has always been one particular common element which always got me interested: ‘How, in every movie, while most of the population gets turned some people always end up in the non-affected category?’ (There are exceptions to this, like 28 Weeks Later, the latest one being The Walking Dead)

Let’s leave that to the writers/movie-makers to ponder over. Anyways, I guess I was again traversing into non-related category. Here’s how I think it’ll happen (It’s factually from a season on Discovery Channel). Imagine at one of the busiest airports a virus gets introduced, also the virus is air-borne. The virus could be something that incites aggression/violence/sensory abilities/hunger. It’d be virtually impossible to stop the spread and it won’t be easy to isolate it either. By the time they’d know what they’re dealing with; humanity would have suffered its biggest calamity till date. There could be variations as to how it’ll all go down; but it’s as good a speculation as any!

Governments and Regimes, the world over are busy planning and re-planning solutions to their till date non-existent tipsy-bitsy problems/scenarios. Nobody seems to acknowledge that we’re on a clock here. There’s no surety over what might happen tomorrow! I wish I be alive by the time nations unite; some friendlies from outer space contact us! 😀 But for that to happen, leaders need to unite, leaders need to share, and boundaries need to be bridged! Because pooling the resources is the only way the race can survive. Otherwise, we’d be the next chimps!

Time is ticking away! Tick-Tock! Tick-Tock! Tick-Tock!

Lost

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

There’s light.

It’s bright.

I’m standing in a row. It stretches from one infinity to another. I mean, I think it does. You’re not supposed to peep. So, all that I’m able to see is a head, the back, the back of the legs. I’m not sure if the person standing in front of me is alive.

I don’t know if he’s dead; I don’t know if I am.

‘Anybody? Anybody?’, I scream.

The voice is lost; somewhere inside. I’m not supposed to speak either, I think.

Is this a dream? Or, am I dead?

The Ranchos and the Silencers

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

So, the results came out a while back.

Though, there was a bit of surprise involved yet it might prove to be the best thing to have happened in the past four semesters. It was bad. But then, it got me thinking, thinking about the Rancho s and the Silencer s.

The Silencer s, well, they exist and that too in numbers. They get the grades, should be getting top-notch jobs. The same group might then go on to buy the Lamborghini s and what not! But what about the Rancho s?

3 Idiots was a nice movie, but well, in the end it was just that; a movie: fiction. I don’t think Rancho s can survive in this great Education system of ours. The novel in that matter, was closer to reality.

Ah! So long from writing, and this is my first blog post! 😀

Life’s funny!

The Foragers

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I’m woken up by the loud knocks on my cabinet door.

"Oh, c’mon people, I haven’t slept for the last 36 hours", I say to myself.

I have to comply though, and so I do.

"No one breaks protocols here", says Gen. Rawat. He is at the door, a minion in tow.

"Yeah yeah, I remember" I say. I am too groggy to care about protocols and niceities. "So what got you up here?" I say.

“The Fuel Regeneration Unit is facing some problems. The Chief Engineer...”, he says, “tried to fix it up, but to no avail. The machine just would not start.”

"And this could not wait a couple of hours?"

The general does not say anything. The minion's face betrays me. He clearly can not fathom anyone talking to the general like that.

"You are aware of the timelines?" says the general.

“Give me a minute. I need to change” I say and shut the door.

Welcome to my world**.**

I am Harsh Kumar, the second-in-command, on board, The Voyaguer . Our great race has been reduced to just a few of us, forced to live as a scavenger race. Our leaders were just not competent enough to foresee the dangers of an ever-growing arms race. Well, someday, somebody was bound to press the button. And they did.

Some of us had prepared for the worst. And so we survived.

“What's happening here?” I say.

“Not much, the injection system continues to operate at sub-optimal levels.”

“You do remember we have a timeline, do you?”

“Yeah, I do. And, as if, that’s not enough those maggots just wouldn’t give up….”

“Hmmm…”, I smiled away. “As if you were born adduce…..”

Sometimes, sitting in a lone corner of my cabin, I think “Why couldn’t they see the obvious ? ” “Why couldn’t they give peace a chance ..?” But, a man in my position is not allowed to express. So the thoughts just get buried. We were currently positioned at XA8EE041, not exactly positioned, our target had been the Planet XA8EE042, dubbed “Blue Marbel”, but technical failures had forced us here since the last year.

Though the civilization down there was still in a dormant stage, yet they had an uncanny knack of continuing their endeavor. It is their this characteristic of which I’m a huge fan. And perhaps, that’s why we’ve been ordered not to reveal ourselves. Just to avoid the possibility of repeating the massacre of Oracle. My father used to tell me about this massacre in which we lost thousands of our men and women. In the end, we had to run, but the loss had been incurred.

I was forced back to reality by the loud wailing of the siren.

“Emergency . All officers report to station. This is not a drill. Emergency……”

“What’s the status ”?

“They just crossed the critical elevation limit . I would say they’re going to land !”

“That can’t be! Previously, they returned…… ” I just couldn’t find words. “How come they find about us ? ” Maybe all this while they were just pretending. I had no time. I had to make a decision.

“Prepare for evac. Code 97. Now”, I screamed.

“But….”

“Just do as I say ……” “We don’t have any time to kill”

“What about the operation module ? ”

“Don’t worry, We’ll be back …”

C1: “ Hey wat’s that spot of light there ?”

C2: “Don’t think too much. Must be you’re eyes playing tricks”

Both laugh.

C2:”OK. Now, let’s get the job done.”

“ Preparing touch-down in 3… 2… 1… ”

C1: “I’m going to step off the LEM now”

“That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

J&K- Territorial Problem or Causality Dilemma?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

3rd July, 2012

The Hindu published the overview of the report submitted by the J&K Group of Interlocutors in May, 2012; it’s criticism and their clarification for the so called misinterpretation by the critics viz. Samajwadi Party, JD (U) etc and various religious groups referred to as ‘azadi’ groups. The report basically provides several opinions as to how the Kashmir issue could be solved. The report seems it might be instructive rather than suggestive.

Although the crux is starting an informed debate on Kashmir. The editorial was written by Radha Kumar.

eOn April 30th 2010, in the Macchil Sector in Kupwara, three porters for the Indian Army from the Rafiabad district were killed by the Indian Army claiming them to be Pakistani militants in order to claim a cash reward for the same. On June 11th, 2010 a protest was initiated whereby, it is said, buses were burnt and the Indian standards for protests were well met by the young protestors. The police had to subdue this curfew using teargas that killed a young boy aged seventeen years old. This led to another protest, then again a young boy was killed, causing a merry go round of protests and young kids dying. It is quite mysterious as to how the same mistake is made and the same outcome is then generated by young people who are ever desperate to find new ways to support a cause.

So, it might be prudent to say that it was set up, a part of covert operations of Pakistan intelligence agencies, as the Indian Intelligence Agencies did claim.

People were killed, maybe secret operations were conducted, the police did its job which maybe messy.

The government of India answers to this problem with a Group of Interlocutors who would come up with possible ways and methods to resolve the Jammu and Kashmir in a peaceful and understanding way. The Central Government appoints these ‘peacemakers’ on the 13th of October, 2010.

Although a month before, Prime minister states he is ready for any dialogue with any group who did not espouse or use violence. They took a delegation to Kashmir and suggested ways to overcome this problem and an amount of $11000 was offered to the families who lost their children in the protest and freed all the students who were imprisoned during the protest. The students, of which some maybe a part of the Pakistan Intelligence Agencies’ covert operations, were released. This might question the credibility of Indian Intelligence claims, but nevertheless is continuous with the kindness and calm India is known for. Also, all but one of the 110 families accepted the money, in spite of the threats from different organizations for accepting money from the Indian Government.

Indian military messes up, people of Kashmir protest, Indian police and CRPF mess up protests, Indian government cleans up, then people of Kashmir accept Indian Government’s supplies and then Indian Government sets up a Group of Interlocutors to find peaceful ways to find a solution.

After a Pakistani invasion in 1947, a king signing over Kashmir to India for military support, three wars, eleven UN revisions of policies to demilitarize the area, several curfews, in the end it just ends up like the story of the hen and egg, which came first? There are many problems to twist this tale. The two versions to this problem : Pakistani and Indian, has evolved from a problem to be sought to a causality dilemma as to who is right for achieving or wrecking what?

Control?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Control.

What is it?

How do you define it?

Can you actually ever, be in control?

Answers. Life is but, a quest for the answers to some questions, some trivial, some not so.

All your life, control, is one thing which you wish to achieve. Days, months, years of planning, one small distortion, and it all falls down in one big rubble.

Consider an example, since I’m a student, I’d like to keep it to a basic level.

Consider the first twelve years of your student life.

All the labor, the sleepless nights, that toil, all of it to be tested during one particular interval.

You’ve given it your all, you scored an impregnable 95 in your pre-boards; but, days before the actual examinations, you catch a disease, or are in an accident, what happens of all that labor?

So, all this while, when you were in control, you weren’t actually in control! You were under the impression that you were in control.

The Illusion of Control.

Life becomes pretty simple, if you shed this illusion.

This obviously is not to advocate passivity. No! This simply knocks out the result-oriented methodology to life, to work, to problems; reinstating the path-oriented methodology; which, in my view, is better of the two.

All this points to the happy way of living life. Yes, again, something, you can relate to me!

I’m an advocate of happiness, life’s too short to hold grudges, worrying too much, about past, about future.

When you realise, that there’s not much in your hands, all you can do is work; things get simpler, really simple. The solution to most of the problems, are usually simple, very very simple in fact, something I realised a few days back!

Last words, shed the illusion. Live it full on! And don’t forget to say, with the roofs down, Where’s the party tonight?? 😀 😛

The Code

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Prologue

** May 3, 2012**

“We have target in sight”

“Keep track of him. Don’t lose him at any cost! We need the bastard!”

They knew. RAW knew. He had not been able to lose the tail. He knew he did not have much time. The file had been passed on, today he had the pass key to it all; all known aliases, safe houses, agents, bases, cover-ups, all the tiny details of RAW’s nearly 45 year history.

He was panting as he reached his place; quickly he turned on his laptop. He had the host program ready; all he needed was to type in the code.

“We’ve lost sight of him. I repeat we’ve lost sight of him”

“Get me some eyes in there damn it! Sierra1,2 anything?”

“Nothing here!”

Kumar had to take a hard decision here.

“Get in there. Now! Secure the area. Hold him! I need him alive.”

It was late. He was spewing foam from his mouth by the time they got to him. The code had been forwarded. Not to the desired recipient though, that would not have been possible. He had counted on his agency to track it down though and that’s why he had typed in the kid’s email id.

Location: Unknown

I opened my eyes, I had a feeling they were shut for a momentary period which, was quite a satisfactory explanation given the fact, I was standing amidst a brewing storm.

The place seemed empty; it had a ghost-town like vibe about it. The air velocity was constantly picking up; the weather was constantly worsening. And then, it started raining. I started running for cover.

An empty coffee shop became my refuge. I now had a little time to think and well, I realized I live in the NCR region and such a thunderstorm, in these parts, around these times; well, presented a highly unlikely scenario. And as realization hit me, so did the lightening!

I woke up!

Frightened!

I was strapped unto, a bed of some sort; bare, the cold touch of metal brought down some shivers.

“Oh! You’re back! Welcome!” a deep husky voice sounded in the dark room.

Immediately after, a bulb shone right above me, drawing a scream from my side! It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the bright light. I opened them again. A man stood right over me, loosened tie, collars rolled up; I couldn’t quite make out his face. He was looking down upon me.

“So, ready to pass the codes!?”

“What? What codes!? Who the hell are you?? Where am I?”

“You forgot? Here, it’s me who asks the questions!”

Saying so, he went into the dark and was back with something, a box.

“So, the codes!”

“Look! You are mistaken! I…..”

I couldn’t quite complete my sentence; he had rotated the dial; I was being fed electricity!

May 3rd, 2012

** Delhi Technological University, New Delhi**

“Avengers dekhne chalein?” I asked Saurabh.

He darted back, “Dude! Less than a week to go for exams!!”

“There’s a 12:30 show in G3S! C’mon mate!” I flashed my Blackberry! He immediately grabbed it! I could see it was working!

“Anyways, we’re free for the day! C’mon mate!”

“Alright! Text the rest of the gang!” he said toying with my phone!

“No need! BBM hai na!”

He smiled sheepishly, “Not now! I’m checking my account!”

Minutes later, we were all in my friend’s i10, on the way to the theatre.

The BB in my pocket vibrated, I took it out; there was a mail.

“Hey man! Do we have something like an invisible email id?”

“What? You high or something?”

“Check this!”

I forwarded my cell. Saurabh opened the mail.

“Man this is weird…. Crap! Your phone man! It’s dead!”

“What!?”

I looked at it. Fumes were rising off it!

I left, soon after. I needed to get to a repair centre.

Location: Unknown

I had passed out again! As I came back to my senses, I had a better chance to grasp the surroundings.

It was a dark room, mostly; only a single bulb shone in the room. Right underneath was the bed. To the right were a bunch of stairs, which in all probability led outside. Besides the bed, there was a table on which rest a bunch of tools; most of which had already been tried on me. They had thrown me into one of the few cages to the south of the whole setup, right underneath the steps.

I had to get out, had to warn Saurabh, the police perhaps. Something big was going down.

He was back. The torture resumed. His questions, my answers! None of it mattered anymore! I felt he was enjoying the torture. A few days went down in the same routine.

I remembered now, I couldn’t quite make it to the repair centre; I was picked on the way. Since then, I was being held captive, constantly being pestered for that one thing! That feeling, that feeling of not being sure whether you’re gonna wake up next morning; I’d had enough of it; and so, and so I killed.

His cell was kept on the table, I made sure I grabbed it. I made it past the goons guarding the front entrance. I dialed Saurabh’s number.

“Hello!”

“Hey man! It’s Arunabh. I’m in trouble”

“What? Where are you man?”

“I don’t know!!”

“Any landmarks? Anything?”

I realized, that bastard had a smart phone “Wait! I’ll call back”

The phone’s GPS told me I was in Karnal. I called him back.

“Karnal!”

“I’m coming.”

** May 12, 2012**

** Delhi Technological University, New Delhi**

“And then, I called you….”

“You didn’t tell the cops!?”

“No! I thought first I should talk to you”

“Let’s go to the cops! Right now!”

“Not that! The day my cell broke did you see anything?”

“Yeah! I told you! ‘C4N2219’ And then it went all crazy!”

“OK! You be safe! I’m going to the cops!”

“Well, I’m coming.”

“No! You’re not! They don’t know about you yet! It’d be better if we kept it that way! Car keys!”

“No man! This is some serious shit! I’m coming!”

“Keys!!”

He had to give in, seeing I was not bulging.

It was not long before I reached the police station. I was at the entrance, when some men blocked my path.

“Come with us!”

They were plain-clothed men, quite different from the ones I’d been with since the last week; yet I wasn’t quite in the mood.

“I’m sorry; I’d have to say no to …..”

All I felt was a pinch.

My head hurt a bit, I was feeling dizzy. I was sitting on a chair. It seemed as if I was in some friggin’ cop show! A large glass pane was staring at me; someone entered from the door on the adjacent wall.

“I’m sorry we had to move you in this fashion. All the inconvenience is genuinely regretted!”

“What do you want me to say to that!? Huh?”

“Well, I expected a similar reply”

He threw some photographs on the table.

“Do you recognize any of them?”

“Who is asking?”

“Oh! Introductions are due. I’m Kumar, RAW”

He flashed a badge, with RAW inscribed on it. Since I had no prior interactions with these gentlemen, I didn’t quite question the gentility.

“I understand you were held captive for the past week or so. And we believe these men were responsible. So, can you identify anyone?”

“This one! He was the one who picked me in the first place. Rest I don’t know.”

“All right then! Did you tell them anything?”

“Like….”

“The code you received in your mail. It was a one-time self destruct mail; it contained a code which is of great national consequence! We’re quite positive that it was opened, that’s how they got to you in the first place”

“Yes, I opened it.”

“So, the code!?”

“Where am I?”

“You are in a secure location! You are safe, don’t worry! Now, the code!”

“Look! I’m not exactly sure as to you are what you claim to be….”

Just at that moment another official barged in!

“Look kid! We don’t have time for this! It’s a crazy situation and we need to deal with it. Quick!”

“I’m not saying anything! I want to go home damn it!”

“What? You know how much danger you are in? How many agencies are after that code!?”

“No! But I’m not giving you any codes here!”

He looked away. He went out the same way he came in, the other official in tow. A while later he was back.

“Fine! You’re going home. Kumar will accompany you there. You give the code to him. Two teams will be deployed around your house. You are advised not to get out, till we have the situation under control”

** A few hours later**

I was home, finally. Mum & Dad were out.

“The Code!?”

“It’s ‘C4N2219’!”

“’C4N2219’ All right! Don’t get out! We’d inform you when it’s all over.”

Kumar left.

I powered up my laptop. There must be a copy of that mail in it.

Epilogue

It was something he had done with my mail last year after he’d accidentally deleted all the read ones. Now, whenever he received a mail, a copy of it was automatically saved in the auxiliary storage on the server. He opened his mailbox. The one on top was the one he wanted to see. He clicked on it.

A pop-up opened up on the screen. The screen turned black. In the centre flashed the code ‘C4N2291’; momentarily after, he saw an overheating message pop-up, his laptop was down.

His telephone started ringing. He went up to it. The window next to it was open, he closed it. He picked up the phone.

“Hey! It’s Kumar! It’s over!”

“What? So soon! I mean how….”

He heard the glass breaking. Nothing thereafter. A bullet had pierced his skull.

Kumar heard the sound too; he also heard the thud of Arunabh’s body falling. He spoke slowly in the microphone, “Get in there! Take care of the body, surprise me!”

** No loose ends.**

“Oh man! What an ending!!!”

My roommate started jumping. I was puzzled.

“What??”

“Dude! You should have a dekko at this dude’s blog! He’s amazing!”

My roommate was flashing his newly bought GlaxyS.

“It’d be better if you concentrated on the EMFT exam that is tomorrow!”

He had been like this for quite some time now. Whenever there was no hope left he turned this way; movies, songs, docs, and what not!

“Ho jayega yaar!” he said, and returned back to his internet; while I returned to my miseries!

This post is published for Indiblogger’s ‘Internet is Fun’ sponsered by** Vodafone**

Inverse!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

He was scared, wary, of his mother; who if disturbed in her sleep would definitely give him a good whack!

Currently, he tried obstructing the light originating from the candle with his hands.

He tried to put off the candle again.

_______

“Mom!”, she screamed.

Jennifer came rushing, “What!?”

“I swear I’d just lit the candle!”

“So?”

“It’s put off again!”

_______

Us Against the World!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

As the world stood crumbling,

Ashes, fire, smoke, dust!

I looked at her,

the face; damp, beneath all that soot!

This is the end,

of the dreams, the hopes, the world!

It ’s us against the world,

It ’s us against the forces!

The ground shook in it ’s stillness,

The skies crackled, stormed, shouted!

It was her hand in my hand,

for the strength!

It was her face, amidst chaos,

for the calm!

This is the end,

of the dreams, the hopes, the world!

It ’s us against the world,

It ’s us against the forces!

A sharp explosion, a mushroom of dust;

Fires; touching the skies, lighting the night!

She turned to me, in hope!

Her eyes damp, red!

I pulled her close to me,

She shut her eyes.

For a moment in violence,

I found serene!

This is the end,

of the dreams, the hopes, the world!

It ’s us against the world,

It ’s us against the forces!

“ It’ll be allright!”, I lied!

She tilted a bit, kissed my lips!

Just at that moment,

the sky lit again!

In a flash, it all came crashing down,

the hopes, the dreams, the world alike!

It ’s us against the world,

It ’s us against the forces!

That Face Among the Faces!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

I looked up, at the blue sky

Took a moment, to let the aura fill in

Then moved in, through the gates, faces, barricades;

It all smelled nice, it all felt bright.

A whole myriad of faces, filled with laughter,

Hidden under paints,

It all seemed shallow, so pathetic!!

Someone, prominent, adorned the podium,

He spoke with great passion, great charisma!

All were awed, oh so struck!

They gaped at him, feeling so prudent!

It all seemed shallow, so pathetic!!

But then, it happened,

Pure magic! Pure coincidence!!

Struggling through masses, for a better vantage;

Instead I found someone else!

Under the shades of a majestic one,

With crossed legs, specs on head,

She sat jotting down little thoughts!

I stared, and stared, and stared, and stared;

Oblivious to the people, the speaker, the nature alike!

That strand of hair, which irritated her eye,

Those dark eyes, that flicker of nose;

That pen cap, badly bit!

She sat there, oh, so lost!!

Yet in her, I found familiarity!!

‘I’ve seen you somewhere!’, I repeated in mind;

Quickly dismantling the lameness in it all!

I thought again, putting a strain!

I’ve seen her, yes! In the train!

I remembered now! Imprinted in my head,

Pretty vivid! Her name, and age!

The details had brought some smile back then!

She had sat next to me,

The specs had been on the eyes back then,

The copy of ‘Brave New World’ had her notice!

I had wanted to say, ‘Hey! Hi! Hello!’

But had content with a blank face instead!

As I stood there, ruminating the past,

She came up to me with quite some haste!

‘Hey! I’ve seen you somewhere!’, she said;

‘Oh! Yes! Hey! In the train’, I said!

‘Anya!’, she said, drawing out her hand;

‘Sajal‘, I said, reaching for the same!!

Scared I Was!!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Scared I was,
that day my bicycle lost it’s supports;
afraid, excited, free.

I remember that I threw as you let go of the bike,
and the one after that,
when I caught you smiling!
Scared, for sure I was; but then, it changed!

Scared I was,
that day in third grade;
after all, failure was new to me.

I remember scrambling through the faces,
through the disappointment,
only to get sucked in the vortex some more;
till you put your hand on me.
I remember that smile, that ‘all right, champ!’
Scared, for sure I was; but then, it changed!

Scared I was,
that day she left,
scared, angry, sad, crying!
And I remember you,
still, strong, steady in the storm,
waiting, as the savages marched on!
Scared, for sure I was; but then, it changed!

Scared I was,
that day in the infirmary.
I was going to be fine, I knew;
it was you, for whom I was worried!
Scared, for sure I’ve been often;
but then, things have changed, I have changed!

What Is Justice?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

So, what is Justice?

How, how do you define it?

And, what separates it from Revenge?

These were a few questions that sprung to my mind as a result of some time spent thinking on issues other than the assignments and projects. The Indian Constitution imagines a judge to be competent enough to be handing out ‘judgements’; but again would you consider sentences spelled out by any competent authority to be equivalent to handling out ‘justice’? Or, if you won’t then would anything done after that not come under revenge?

So, what is Justice?

Well, whatever it is, it still evades the hundreds, whose families were butchered; wives, sisters were raped; whose homes were burnt! It’s been a decade since the violence erupted in Gujarat yet, no respite for the victims seems to be in vicinity.

“Move On!!”, is what members seeking justice are being told more and more often, but well, is moving on ever so easy? Do these scars dissolve so easy? No, they don’t! But more important than that is the question, whether they should be trying to move on. Should they quit their efforts to garner ‘justice’?

This is exactly where I had hit the pre-described dilemma!

What is justice?

And would a non-capital punishment handed out to murderers/rapists be satisfactory or even ‘justice’? If you believe in the penal code, your reply will be an affirmative one else…

“ Rape, is when a woman is stripped and burnt alive”, was how a nine year old explained the word to the Hindu Columnist, who wrote today’s editorial “ The battle against forgetting”.

The answer was something which only a kid could provide and that makes me wonder, what would’ve happened of the kid, to have witnessed something of such gravity; a gruesome act, at such a young age!

As the event closes to being a decade old, the whole nation looks up to the judiciary; many would want the victims to turn numb, walk along, bury the ghosts; but well, is that really something the nation needs? Shouldn’t the Constitution stand it’s ground and provide the minorities the same ground it promised them back in the ’50s?

The Longing

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

“If we are to be together, we’ll surely be…”

November 22nd, 2025

00:30 am

New Delhi

I looked at my watch again, it struck half-way past twelve.

“Twelve-thirty .. Hmm…”

It was any ways a bad time to travel, and more so for a woman, in this notorious city, famed for it’s high crime-rate against women...

“Must be thirty or so”, out of sheer habit, I concluded…

“Even after so many years… some habits die hard!!”

I got up, and strolled towards her. A chill went through my spine, “Damn! It’s cold!”

A puff of vapor left my lips as I opened my mouth, “May I sit here?”

She looked up, her eyes; she looked painstakingly similar to someone I knew, once held dear!!

“Hmm…”

She was on phone with somebody.

“Ma! Ami prothome sune niyache! Chinta karo na! Saurav amake pick kore nibe!!”

“Mothers!!”, I thought.

“Huh??”, she was looking at me.

I realised, I had actually spoken it out, “Oh! Nothing!!”

“What’s with me and Bengalis!!?!!” , this time I made sure, it was in my mind only.

“Ma..! I’m hanging up. I’ll talk to you later…”

I decided to start up a conversation, frankly, just for the sake of it.

And, like always, I blew it

“Hey! So, you a Bengali!!?” “(Crap!!)”

“Mmm…”, she tried to smile, “A.. Yes!!”

“Winter does something to my, machinery”, I tried to crack one, pointing at my head… “Shit! Shit! Shit! From bad, to worse! Great, keep it up, uncle!!”

I could see, she was trying real hard to come up with a response, but I, me, myself 😛 😛

________________________________________

July 3rd,2013

New Delhi

Her results were out. She had gotten into Xavier’s.

Couldn’t they have established it in Delhi? I mean C’mon, DU is here, IIT is here, then why not Xavier’s… 🙁

She was to go this Friday, I, it was hard to imagine being without her.

Imagine, actually doing so! Crap!

All this time, I had acted, ‘adult’; but not anymore!!

I could not pretend any more.

I called her up.

“Hey!”

“Hmm…!”

I could make out, the excitement in her voice.

“So, how’s the shopping going..?”

It felt as if I had just pushed the button which was to initiate the self-destruct of some dam. Well the dam did break!

“I picked up, two of my favorite bags today. Then went to Delhi Haat…”

I lost it somewhere. Frankly, the only reason I had not asked her to stop; was, as it was she who was speaking. She, her voice, her sweet, husky voice; I could almost endlessly keep listening to her, it didn’t matter what she said; I was just happy listening.

“Now, you say something. How was your day?”

“Usual. You say na. Kuch bhi, accha accha!!”

“What happened, you sound… You all right, na!!”

“Yeah! Am fine.. It’s just you won’t be here, na…”

“Listen! That doesn’t mean…”

I hung up. Removed the sim and broke it down to bits.

______________________________

July 4th, 2013

New Delhi

“Dad! I’m going to Dalhousie, with friends!!”

“Thoda aur jaldi bata deta!!”

“Please, abhi nahi..!”

I left.

November 22nd, 2025

00:40

New Delhi

“Ahh… It’s pretty late; maybe, I could drop you somewhere…”

She picked up her purse, opened the zip, her hand went in…

Pepper spray!!?! 😛 😛

“You haven’t changed a bit”, she said, taking out a piece of paper from her bag.

A bell rung somewhere in my skull, “A highly unlikely scenario, yet quite possible”

“Hey!! I can see, the day-dreaming part is still there”, she was looking, rather staring at me, with that piece of paper thrusted towards me.

I need some air!!

“Anya, told me, you refused to keep it..!”

“Shit!! You’ve got to be crapping me!!!”, I was out of words….

“Aaaa….”

“Keep this”, she dumped it in my chest pocket and got up.

I followed suite, “Wait!! This can’t be happening”

“Well, it is!”

“Hey wait!!”, I grabbed her hand. She stared back, her eyes, like always, said everything; I had lost the right, and perhaps, deservedly, so!

She slowed down her pace, I caught up.

Silence

“So, how’ve you been?”

“Good! You?”

Getting formal, are we?!!

“Fine!! Waise, yahaan kaise? I’d have imagined, you’d be in Mumbai”

“Been here for a while”

Silence

“So late into the night, kahaan ja ri ho? C’mon I’ll drop you..”

“You did your part long back. Don’t worry, Saurav is coming to pick me up”

Something, somewhere, inside me, was smashed.

“So you guys, are together?”

She just gave a wry smile. I managed my answer.

“I…. How to say this… I’m really sorry about….”

She cut me short. “It’s been a decade. There’s no point chasing ghosts”

A horn sounded from behind me, a black accord, stopped by. It’s window rolled down. She got in.

She left…..

___________________________

July 8th, 2013

New Delhi

“Anya had come… twice or thrice, said it was something important. Maybe you should call her….”

“Hmm… Dekhta hu!”

“She left something for you”

“Who?”

“You know what, you’re an a****le”

I frankly didn’t care anymore.

She took out a piece of paper from her bag.

“What’s this?”

“Khud hi dekh lo..”

“I don’t want this!!”

“Do suggest, as to, what shall I do with it?”

“Return it to the one who gave you this!”

I was acting weirdly rude, and well, quite frankly, it was totally unwarranted..

“I’m sorry! Really! Just that, this ain’t a good time..”

“I… Look whatever is wrong, you two should sort it out.. It’s hard to see you guys like this…”

I couldn’t bear any more of her, in spite of her being right.

I left, again.

___________________________________

October 24th, 2013

Mumbai

She seemed happy. I couldn’t muster up enough courage.

What will I do?

What will I say?

What excuse will I give?

Those lines had propelled me till now, but now I was developing cold feet.

Still I had to talk to her, after all Delhi to Bombay is a costly affair…! 😉 🙂

“Hey!!”

The expression on her face turned grave.

“It’s me! I’m alive!”, I wanted to say, but well that again would have been stupid. I waited a while for her to say something, anything; but nothing came out. She started moving.

“I’m….”

“Ashna….”, a voice called out from behind me…

“Who the….”

She stopped.

“Hey!!”, she said.

“Hey!!”, he said.

“Saurav, this is Atharva!”

Out of sheer habit, I stretched out my hand.

“Hey!”, he said.

“F*ck You!!”, I thought; “Hello”, I said.

He shifted his attention to her, “We’re late, we should be off!!”

I was feeling like a f*cking statue.

“Will catch up with you later mate…”

They left.

I stood grounded.

____________________

November 22nd, 2025

00:52

New Delhi

I opened the letter again. All I could focus on were the last two lines.

“If we are to be together, we’ll surely be. But not now, Not yet.”

“I, I waited for you dear; I waited. God knows, how much I’d longed for this day… But it seems…”

A tear came off his eye and dropped into the night.

“It’s time to leave now”

I left… for the last time possible….

_____________________________________

November 22nd, 2025

00:55

New Delhi

“How many times have I told you not to travel so late… This city is not safe, and you know it, better than me”

“I know! I know! Keep your eyes on the road…”

“Who was that man with you?”

“Atharva…”

“You.. You found him? After all these years… I had told you, na… one day…”

“He.. I… We both couldn’t…”

“No.. No.. No.. Don’t tell me, you didn’t…”

“He thought I had married you…”

“What? Why didn’t you…? You both are just…”, he took a sharp U.

“What are you doing?”

“There has been enough of this…. No more of this inflated ego!”

They were late, I had already left!

Why Do I Like Shruti Hassan?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Why do I like Shruti Hassan?

It was just one of those normal, routine struck days in my life, when I stumbled upon a very depressing yet intriguing fact. Well, as I just love sitting idle and thinking, I was doing about the same, the only thing different here was that I was also in the mean time, waiting. Not waiting for a hallucinatory girlfriend, but for my order. I was sitting in a ‘dhaba’. I was looking at the traffic on the road lost in the brightness of the sun and I was thinking, Why do people like people?

Why do my friends like Megan Fox? For obvious reasons.

Why do my friends who are girls, like SRK? For Obvious reasons.

Why do I not like SRK? For Obvious Reasons.

Why do I still go and watch his movies? For obvious reasons.

Every liking has a pretty obvious reason. PRETTY obvious. Now, I came over to the depressing part of the whole notion, “Holy Lord, I don’t like any actress or actor! I never have any preference.” If the ‘acting’ is good, I like her, if not then liking is prohibited. Simple as that.

Why do we have preferences anyway? This was the intriguing question that slithered through my spine. If one has a liking for Megan Fox and you ask him why, he would say, “She’s hot man.” If a girl likes SRK and ask her why, she would say, “He is cute.” Liking has a reason. A reason, that you will detect just in a period of nanoseconds. You don’t have to know about her history or orientation, you just know you like her because she is “HOT.”

Now, you prefer to like someone. Cool. But how much do you follow him/her? You download her wallpapers, listen to her music or watch her movies, reply to every tweet she sends on twitter, hope that someday she would reply etc etc etc. This is just like when you were a kid and that girlfriend you had with whom you would play “ghar-ghar” and you would follow whatever she does.

Preferences portray about your taste as a man or a woman. What kind of person you like? What are your inclinations towards your future partner and what expectations you have from them and also makes you forget all the love tangles and hassles you have had in your supposedly miserable lives.

How can we know what you actually are? It can be rated on the basis of your liking clubbed with the basis of your following.

If you like Priyanka Chopra and follow her on twitter and have read her book, you are likely to be a student inclined towards Humanities and your preference of a girl is likely to be someone more life like and simple, but have crazy hormones.

If you like Megan Fox and follow her avidly, you are likely to be inclined to the artistic field and your preference of a girl is more, modern, radical and giving more preference to ‘interpersonal or intrapersonal relationships.’

But if you have a preference that Megan Fox and Priyanka Chopra are s!@# hot, and you don’t give a s!@# what they do on twitter or watch their movies from your external hard disc and imagining things, then you are a f***ing perfect, “Engineer”.

Then I decided that I shall try and not ‘fall’ under such a category and I started to develop a liking for Shruti Hassan. Why? She is witty, intelligent, beautiful, sexy, ignorant, independent, hard working, driven by passion, multi tasking, single and she is bloody brilliant. She has this exciting tinge of pulling the earth away from under your feet in her character that is truly admirable in a woman, as it makes them look quite independent and strong from a ‘liking’ perspective. So, I started watching her movies and do all the other stuff normal people following her will do and expect.

‘Following celebs’ is not such a good phrase. It actually defines, ‘liking people’ for a reason, a reason which you find beautiful and satisfying. Some say, you falsify yourself by following or so to say ‘worshiping’ people, as they put it. But that is what makes us a human, makes us search for the beauty in our faith, even if it started with something unacceptable. To modify, “I like Priyanka Chopra because she is hot to I like her because she is bubbly and life like” or “I like Megan Fox because she is smoking hot to she has an extremely composed voice, she doesn’t sound like those high-pitched loud mouthed counterparts.”

This is how life rolls, liking is a part of it and it is the one that adds the essence to life, your maturity, your vision nurtures and beautifies it.

Just the Two of Us..!!

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

“Need something to write on. Suggestions..”

“What do you wish to write on??”

“Anything you wish for, apart from perhaps ‘Russian revolution’ “

“Some love story, Te Amo types “

“Hmmm…. Toh, meko kisi ki love story toh sunao…”

“Lemme get over with the comparative government class”

“And, the potential dropped to zero, by the time you reached the 20th house”, the professor chuckled; another pathetic attempt at cracking a joke.

The class tried to laugh. Couldn’t even manage a crackle!

My cell beeped.

“Hey! Class over?”

“Yupp”

A while later, ‘The Who’ started playing their ‘Baba O’ Riley’; a clear indication that somebody was calling me.

She appeared, wearing that beautiful smile of hers in that pink attire.

“Hey!!”, I exclaimed.

“Hmm…”, was her reply.

“Wrapped up your day??”

“Yeah! Got the library card and ID updated…”

“Hmmm….”

Silence

“So, you came up with a story to tell??”

Silence again…

“There??”, I enquired.

“Hmm…”, she replied in her sweet husky voice; my sour day seemed to have just been made; “I’ve got a story to tell….”

"This one’s about a sweet gal and a MAD guy…"

“ Their’s was a formal introduction; work, being the only connection. The guy, had immediately fell for her smile. Numbers were exchanged, then a few SMSes and FB chats later, they grew from colleagues, to perhaps, friends. Months passed, the World Cup forged them even strongly together . Their lives inter-dwindled into each-other’s. The guy fell for her, correction, falling isn’t the correct word; rather, he rose, rose from the pettiness of everything. Love makes you see, beauty even in the smoke running out of exhausts!!

The only fear, the guy ever had was that he’d lose her; perhaps the only reason, he kept from her.

“What’s harder to deal with; the fear of losing something beautiful, or, the regret of having not done something?”

The gal chose the latter; “You’d always be afraid of losing one thing or the other”, she reasoned.

The guy got his answer, and even before, his brain could give it another re-go, his heart had already filled those words in his mouth.

Awkward, the proposal was as he took pride in being a writer. The fumbling words did not exactly help the cause either.

“If we’re to be together, we’ll surely be! But….”

The guy didn’t require an answer, as his was not a question; it was an affirmative sentence.

The colleges resumed, they got busy in their respective fields. Things were normal, they talked, shared, laughed together!!!

It was during the break period that she received an SMS.

“Need something to write on. Suggestions..”

“What do you wish to write on??”

“Anything you wish for, apart from perhaps ‘Russian revolution’ “

“Some love story, Te Amo types “

“Hmmm…. Toh, meko kisi ki love story toh sunao…”

“Lemme get over with the comparative government class”

She then called him up, and told him a story.

The time had come.

“I love you”, she said. “

“Toh, kaisi lagi story Mr. writer??”

“Sounds familiar….”

“Surely should sound familiar, abe sale uth ja ab toh, the torture is over.. ”

I could make out my friend’s broad smile and his hand movements…

“Aj Friday hai… Yayy Yayy…!”, he said.

“Aww…! Man!”

Don’t cry

Don’t raise your eye

It’s only teenage wasteland

It was ‘The Who’, playing their ‘Baba O’ Riley’; a clear indication that somebody was calling me.

She appeared, wearing that beautiful smile of hers in that pink attire.

“Hey!!”, I exclaimed.

“Hmm…”, was her reply……

🙂 🙂

_The story is also published at The Indian Fusion. Find it _here

Stranded Isle

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

The sea has a story to tell,
Even in all it’s calmness…
The palaces that stood, oh, so firm once,
Even they, find themselves in ruins…
The sea has a feeble memory,
Impressions fading, in remembrance…
A case of constant change,
It’s face, a never-finished masterpiece!

In all her opulence, she stands there
Facing the sea, staring at the horizon,
Embroiled in a typhoon, she finds herself;
Arms inter-dwindled, eyes moist…
Another gust, a little fury,
The strands of her hair, end up adorning her face

Another string of waves, touch her feet,
Her corpse won’t move, nor her soul…
Those footprints left behind, Utter a cry beneath them;
Gliding towards them, holding those in hands,
Slips through her the acute pain!!
She stands dry, washed in the once, sanded palace…

A new dawn!
A new beginning!
A great new bout!!

She looks up, a feeble smile now adorns her lips…!

Here I Stand

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

Here I stand,

Among the ashes, the ruins, the fire;

Among fallen heroes, sunk egos, butchered heads!!

The Phoenix must rise!

The mortals must bow..!

War begets war, but not the peace of mind!

The path has been long, tiring, painful..

Of which what remains is nostalgia.

Those who once had souls in them,

War and not I, drew them out; turning them to corpses!

This was not my pick, still I abhor it!

You! The feeble, mere, You, is what is left of the vast;

I, the burning, crimson, Me, is what turned of the void!!

I for one, did not want this!

You, for sure, did not plan for this!!

Fate! Cruel, brute, bloody fate!!

Look of what is left, of your world, O Mighty Man!!

Look for the reaper, run from the beast in me!!

But, you won’t run; Ego or valor, can’t make out really..

Shining blades, heavy armors, flexed muscles…

The war cries filled the air soon,

Metal clashing against metal,

Metal tearing into flesh, blood spilling, feeding the ground!!

You tried to fight, I must confess; but try is what it ever was!

It ended as was meant to, in a flash, the blade did it’s part,

As did You!

War begets war, but not the peace of mind!

I for one, did not want this!

Was It Blood or Water?

sajal@sajalchoudhary.net (Sajal Choudhary)

“Mmm…”

“Mmmmm…”

The touch of something rough, slipping over my neck; distinct.

Hissss……

The sound of that rough touch, approaching my ear; distinct.

“Ahhh…. Shit….”

The reaction, was, well clockwork; I shook off the creature, my eyes were shut, too numb to respond. I felt the chill of the underlying stone, piercing my spine.

Was I dreaming? I felt my skin, bare flesh, not a shred of cloth! The warmth, distinct.

I tried to grasp, nothing but empty spaces met me, I had no other option.

I dared to open my eyes.

I could feel the lashes separating, the pupils dilated; nothing. I was stuck. It was pitch-dark. My breath scared me.

I struggled up, my head hit the ceiling; I fell down, down onto the floor, in a tub of water.

Splash!

Light!

I gasped for fresh air.

Somebody grabbed my tresses, and pulled me back.

I could hear whispers. The pitch increased, quickly; I recognised a few voices, voices I had been hearing for the past few weeks. The language was an issue, but I reckoned the seriousness of the matter, being conveyed. I was at the centre of it all.

I tried to gain control, to get a hold of the surroundings. A light shone over my head, another one right in front of my eyes; I was feeling dizzy. I could hear the beeps. Apart from the two light sources, there was one small window on the right corner, bolted; a beam of light shone in and fell on the automatic positioned nicely in the hands of the man holding guard. He was not alone.

The light in front of me, was now turned off, I had my seconds of respite. The room was filled with low indistinct murmurs; the man who had been speaking calmly, turned into a beast now. The echoes filled the room. The last thing, I remembered was metal to my skull, I was falling.

“Aaaaaaaaaaa…………”

The height seemed never-ending, I was falling through empty space, I could hear voices; nothing was clear.

Splash!

I fell in the tub of water, my head hit the fiberglass. I was feeling dizzy. The water was warm. I got out. Stones pierced my flesh. I had to walk. I started in a direction. I was blind. I couldn’t touch, couldn’t hear, couldn’t feel!! Yet, I kept walking.

The mind, is a powerful tool; it can imagine in broad daylight. It is working when you’re sleeping, working when you’re up, working when you’re partying; working when you’re peeing.. It never rests!!

You give it a white frame to draw on, it’ll draw those endless mazes, beautiful landscapes, wonderful sculptures, great designs, structural marvels and what not!! You give it a dark frame, it’ll bring out your biggest horrors; unimaginable, pure; you’re unfathomable secrets, everything will be out in the open, the irony being, even you won’t be able to see them, yet you will!

I was scared. I did not deserve this.

“Let me out!!!”

My voice left my throat, touched my lips, but couldn’t even reach my ears! I started running, my feet were bleeding; hell! I didn’t care! And then I hit something, someone, I don’t know! It was furry, warm; and then I fell!

I was falling again, through heights, empty spaces, oblivion!

Splash!

Light!

It was open! Sun light hit me, my eyes hurt! It were the same people. I could make out the camera in his hands. Again, language was an issue, but this time, their faces looked bright; or was it the sunlight?

The same procedure, I tried to get a hold of my surroundings, the AKs and Kalashinovs, were still very much prevalent. The lead was taping a message. I looked around. I saw someone adjacent to me, his head was covered with a rag. Children, men were all watching.

“Abdul!”

A small kid was the centre of attraction now. The old man said something in his ears.

The lead kicked the man down, he lay on the barren ground! The kid went up, the lead and the old man in tow. The lead passed the blade to the kid. The kid looked up, grabbed the man’s hair, pulled his head up. The shiny blade touched his neck now.

“Noooo…..”

His screams led to a gargle, as the blade swiftly tore through the ligaments and then through his vocal cords; blood, red, dark, spit in the air, onto the ground. Blood is the best of fertilizers they say, but I wonder, if it’ll be of any help to this land; desolate, barren!

I was numb, scared too afraid to scream; hell! Too scared to respond.

Metal, hard, cold; the touch of it on my head, sent a chill down my spine. I was not defiant, I had surrendered to my fate.

I did not hear the bang; the noise produced when the trigger is pulled, gun powder burns, and the bullet is accelerated through the barrel with it’s mark in sight; I felt metal piercing the back of my mantle, passing through my brain, creating another crack as it left my holy mantle for the journey ahead!

They say, your whole life flashes in front of your eyes, when you’re close to being dead. They haven’t been able to explain it till date, neither would I be able to; but it didn’t happen with me, or maybe it did.

I saw her, my love, my wife; that rain, the ring, the kiss. This was my life, all gone in a moment.

I was falling, falling through heights, it seemed years had passed and I was still falling, at last I hit the bottom.

Splash!

I fell in a tub of water; wait, no, it never was water! It was blood!

Sajal Choudhary - Longform

Thin on the Outside Fat on the Inside

Love is Love

Extinction Was Discovered

Hanko Midsummer Picnic

What Savya Wants

What does Savya want?

Vacations and Noticing Things

A note on the anthropologists

State of Play June

Read More Books

About Apple Sports

CITCON 2026 Helsinki

About CITCON

The rules of CITCON

About the events

1. How AI Impacts Team Dynamics

2. Hands-on AI frameworks speedrun

3. Your AI platform is missing 5 things

4. AI learning

5. Is true ownership dead?

Wrap up

The Problem with Current

The Fazer Experience

Wheezing past the cradle

Birdsong

Seeing the Crown Bridge

City Biking Through the Summer

Vibe Coding April Meetup

1. "From Layoff to $9K/Month: Lessons from Building and Selling Mobile Apps" by Steven Phuc, indie developer

2. "Vibe Coding Without Losing Your Edge", Johanna Wäänänen, Founder, Systemic, PhD Researcher

3. "The Job of Product Designer in the Age of Al", Lassi A Liikkanen, PhD, Director of Product Design and Insight, Qvik Ltd.

HUG April Meetup

Reproducible Developer Environments with Jumppad - Robert Barnes, HashiCorp

Future of the Helsinki Hashicorp User Group meetup

The Four Diseases Leading to Slow Death

Celebrating Formats

Devops Finland Meetup

The space

Dangers in Kubelet permissions / Martti Leppänen, Director of Platform Engineering @Hoxhunt

Terraform Blocks You Don't Know / Lauri Suomalainen, Head of Cloud Development @ Teamit

Azure and Friends April Meetup

Digital Sovereignty on Azure by Jari Lietzen (Nordcloud)

Bicep Console by Teemu Tapanila (Mallow)

One More Thing About Doing Yoga

New Things

1. I replaced Net News Wire as my RSS reader of choice and installed current in it's place.

2. I replaced my keyboard. Say hello to Nuphy Air 75

/five things to share

1. Anthropic essentially bans OpenClaw from Claude by making subscribers pay extra by Jay Peters

2. Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny’s Podcast by Simon Willison

3. This even smaller credit card-sized e-reader has one tragic flaw by Andrew Liszewski

4. What Are the Routines of So-Called Super-Readers? by Kelsey Rexroat

5. For $200 more, you can get a MacBook Air by Joanna Stern

For Those We Love

/five things to share

1. Live-service games are such a mess even Fortnite is struggling by Andrew Webster

2. Apple is testing a standalone app for its overhauled Siri by Andrew Liszewski

3. More qualifying for free daycare

4. Apple Maps Might Start Showing Ads

5. OpenAI Discontinuing Sora AI Video App

Nothing to Say

/five things to share

1. I'm OK being left behind, thanks! by Terence Eden

2. ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’ by John Gruber

3. Starfield is coming to the PS5 and getting a pair of major updates in April by Andrew Webster

4. Windows 11 is finally getting a movable taskbar by Tom Warren

5. Grief and the AI split

FAUG Zero to Hero Meetup

Opening by Sakari Nahi

Data by Vesa Tikkanen

App by Jouni Heikniemi

Infra by Jukka Koskelin

Security by Jussi Roine

Spring in the Air

/five things to share

1. What do coders do after AI? - Anil Dash

2. Software Bonkers by Craig Mod

3. “This Is Not The Computer For You” · Sam Henri Gold

4. About the Macbook Neo