Tabula Rasa

Every year I take up a set of challenges to see if I can expand myself in a new dimension. Most interestingly, in 2017 I challenged myself to try out two new things every week so I’ll have a 100 new things to look back at the end of the year. To keep myself accountable I kept track of the things I did for the first few weeks and by that point it had become a habit. It was an interesting experiment to see if I can come up with genuinely new things to try and open my mind up. I lost track of the number of new things I tried but towards the summer I found myself to be more impulsive and open to new things than I was prior to this experiment. Even if I didn’t do a hundred new things that year, I think the purpose of the experiment was achieved. I’ve done several things since that a 20 year old me would never have thought possible—ranging from going on a solo trip to Europe, to finding creative ways to put my money to better use.

2018 was a bust in terms of me coming up with challenges for myself. This is mainly because it has been a really busy year. December is almost done and it almost seems like I haven’t stopped working since January. I should pause and take more breaks. I think this has been the learning from this year. I did not attempt to write much at all because my stream of consciousness mode of writing has taken a hit thanks to how chaotic my attention has become. I’ve not had clarity of thought for several months now, what with being constantly exhausted mentally and physically.

However, there have been a few wins this year—small and big.

• As part of life doing its usual Spring cleaning, I made new friends and lost some. I’ve found people who are willing to spend hours together in my presence without getting put off by it.

• Around the end of last year, I resolved not to follow the news too closely. I’m at a point in life—geographically and politically—where me being actively involved in current affairs has no bearing on how my life turns out. So I stopped consuming news, except for whatever catches my eye on Twitter. To be honest, I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything besides the constant sky is falling rhetoric that the news seems to make me feel. Lots of time saved that can be wasted in other endeavors.

• I figured hacking my brain into being more determined to solve problems without giving up has been a win. I would like to do more of that. There’s a one step approach I take with problems that I do not want to solve, I follow structured procrastination. If I don’t want to solve a problem, I store it in my ‘I’ll do this when I’m avoiding something else’ stack. Before I stash it there, I pop it if it already has something else and pick on that problem. This idea of substituting one problem I want to avoid with another I want to avoid equally, and producing an illusion of (limited) choice has been a great way to trick myself into doing things that I don’t want to do but have to do. One example was choosing among doing my taxes, making a spreadsheet with a finance plan for 2018, and folding my laundry—all three of them important, perhaps not to the same degree, nevertheless important.

• I tried tracking everything I read—books, articles, long-form. Around June, I realised that I didn’t care about the things I bookmarked. So I made it a point to stop bookmarking things unless they were educational—like a programming specs, or some documentation that I know I will refer to in the future. I figured that if I don’t have the inclination to read something right now, I probably would never get it. This is not a hard and fast rule, as I’ve earmarked things for reading while I’m flying or for when I finally hit the bed. But the thumb rule of read now or never has been working quite well so far. To that end, I purged my Pocket queue and did not regret it.

• Instead of making my attention span work for what I think I should be doing, I turned the problem upside down and started doing things that my attention span agreed with. I haven’t watched very many movies this year, nor have I read that many books. Mainly because I’ve been constantly preoccupied by thoughts and people, and sometimes, thoughts of people.

• I would certainly like to read more this year. 2018 was a bust in terms of reading. I read may be 15 or so books. Nothing at all in the second half of the year that’s memorable enough for me to mention or write about. I stopped tracking my Goodreads goal, I dropped a lot of books. I kinda let my monkey brain dictate what was and wasn’t worthy of my attention. I think that’s a terrible idea and that I need to bring more discipline into my routines. I bought a ton of books this year, and I’ve calibrated how much time and energy I should spend on work. So here’s hoping that the post I write one year from now would involve more books and less disappointment.

• I might have found the person I want to spend the majority of my time with. This might be the biggest win of the year.

Besides the things above that I really would like to continue doing, I want to spend this year hacking my habits into making myself more productive. To that end I want to focus on reading, having more open and conversations of quality. On the personal front, I want to improve my chess this year. So I’ve set myself a goal of playing at least 100 hours of chess this year. That’s less than an hour a day, and I think I can achieve that. I failed miserably at my running goals for 2017 (yes 2017!), so I’ve punted it to 2019. Let’s see if I can meet my 300 miles of running for the year.

If you’re reading this, happy new year. Let 2019 be the time you spend with the people you most love, and the things you find most interesting.

Hapax Legomenon

It is that time of the year in the Pacific Northwest when the day has more hours of sunlight than darkness. It so happens that, around this time of the year I suddenly feel like I have more clarity than I did all year round. Sometime this week, I turned a year older. This is likely because of the illusion of wisdom that comes as a result of turning a year older. But, I credit it to the fact that—for better or for worse—I spend a good number of hours in the first week of May thinking about the learnings and mistakes since the previous May. I also come up with new mistakes to make—or learn from, depending on whether you're the glass half full or half empty kind.

Hapax Legomenon is a Greek phrase which means that (word) which occurs only once—within a context. It is an extension of the Zipfian distribution which in turn is a specific instance of the Power law. Hapax Legomenon is a linguistics term, but I'm going to go ahead and apply it to life. There are infinitely many experiences, a gamut of configurations any given day can take. But I posit that a large number of us share a large number of mundane experiences—going to work, doing that assignment, paying those bills, losing money on that stock. Hapax kicks in rest of the time. There's a small number of us seeking out unique experiences, and if you're one of the fortunate you're going to have experiences nobody else has ever had, and nobody else will.

Low expectations help me easily top the experiences of one year the next. This past year has been nothing short of incredible. As was the year before compared to the year before that. This morning a friend asked me how my birthday went. My response was "Met some friends. Drank some beer. Ate some cake. Can't complain." Aside from summarizing my birthday, it was a succinct summary of how my year was. I met some wonderful people, visited a ton of great places—7 countries in Europe!, got an opportunity to eat and drink some incredible food and drinks, and overall made significant adjustments to my social circle and well-being. Then again, all of these are easy to do one better in. I could meet more people, try more kinds of food and drinks, and of course travel to more places. But the interesting part—and perhaps the most exciting part—is that there are many other dimensions in which I can accumulate and experience new things. So much so that, even if I don't do any better on the things I did this year, it wouldn't feel like a step back when I look back at the end of the year. In fact, next year might bring with it a realization that none of this matters—a phase I'm in for a few months every year—which would result in the null hypothesis; No one experience is different in a statistically significant measure from the others, any observed difference is likely an experimental error. So what's the answer if it is indeed an experimental error? Go live the next year of your life and repeat the experiment. Tweak some values, introduce new variables, go back to the damn whiteboard. Live a little. Like the famous song goes, I'll try anything once.

Heart Shaped Box

Thinking about death, especially of someone who I've had the pleasure to interact with, and in some cases grow up even, always leads me to this quote about death by Lemony Snicket.

“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”

— Lemony Snicket, Horseradish

"When did I last speak to this person?" I've had to ask myself this question about half a dozen times in the last couple of months as I bid adieu to a handful of folks, near and dear. Nothing wakes you up to your own finiteness like death that strikes too close to home. I've grown from a person who's very attached to the family into someone who has learnt to accept that over time one chooses the people that matter in the long run, and that most, if not everyone besides immediate family, do not make the cut.

That aside, I've shared and am sharing a journey with people that did and did not make the cut. And that matters. There's always a small story, a tiny shoe, or perhaps a quick high five that can't be replaced. And that vacuum, however infinitesimal, remains.

I know there will be fewer and fewer moments I'll spend thinking about them. There'll come a point where I'll have a final thought about a person and I'll not realise that I'll never think of that person ever again. It will be in a year or in ten, but the day will come. 

After the day has come and gone, there'll remain a portion of my existence—or whatever signifies it—like that box in my grandma's place that nobody knew what was inside of, representing this person whom I never again will spare a thought for.

What's strange is just as sure as someone never knows when they'll die, they'll never know when they'll make the transformation from a memory to a thought to a box on the shelf. Or whether they'll make the cut. I think I'm a story, a memory, to someone.

Perhaps I'm just a box.

Hashtag Goals

It has been nearly 18 months (72 weeks if you're a new parent) since I started working as a full-time Software Dev. Though this is not my first job ever, this is my first job after graduating. It has been an interesting ride so far and I enjoy coming into work. But as with anything, there are days when I'd rather be doing anything else. My enthusiasm to come into work is usually a function of what project(s) I'm currently working on and more often than not, it is a function of what stage my projects are in.

I've observed myself to be an enthusiastic person in general. I go full throttle on anything I do because, why not? Since I started at work, all my objectives -- both short term and long term -- have circled around work. Last year, I set several annual goals for myself. Among those, the one I considered most important had to do with me doing meaningful contributions at work. Though it is great to have objectives and goals at work, I've since come to realize that it is very important to detach my life's happiness/satisfaction quotient from my happiness/satisfaction quotient I use at work. It is difficult to draw that line, and it sometimes is impossible to create an emotional barrier between work and life. Sometimes there's little I can do to stop a crappy day at work affecting how I feel afterward. There have been times when I've had a terrible Friday at work which ended up ruining the whole weekend. Likewise for personal issues creeping into work. There is only so much I can do to stop a personal issue affect my workday. These usually balance out and a healthy work-life balance brings about that equilibrium. It's something I've learned by experimenting, reading, talking to my colleagues and friends.

What I realize when I look back is I've constantly optimized my life for being more conducive to making progress as fast as I can at work. This is great and has proved useful in aligning my objectives at work to what I desire in life. Progress here doesn't refer to climbing the ladder at work. It relates to simpler things like getting better at writing code or at communicating ideas. There have been weekends where I've obsessed over how I could make this tiny thing at work that will improve my team's systems thereby earning me recognition or accolades or simply a pat on the back from my manager. These have been meaningful metrics to me which I've optimized my days/weeks/months for. But when I look back, I realize I've been chasing local optima all along. Though some of which contribute toward the bigger picture, chasing local optima has left me blind to long term progress in life. Call it quarter-life crisis or what not, I find it difficult to digest the fact that I let existential dread be existential dread and not something I should act upon.

I see people around me who are goal oriented/driven. It is very inspiring and I aspire to be one of them but it doesn't always work for me. I like goals. I like when I achieve them, look back and feel good about it. Yet, I don't seem to be driven by them. I struggled to find out why I was doing well with certain goals while others only received reckless abandon. I started 2017 with a list of I wanted to do before exiting the year. One of which was to visit at least 3 new states in the U.S. A reasonable, fun goal. I set out to look for opportunities to travel and around the Memorial Day weekend I visited Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts. I did one better! Another one of my goals were to run a certain number of miles before the end of the year. It saw abysmal results.

Was the reward not enticing enough? Were the goals too ambitious? Was I simply not good? The answers to these questions eluded me.

It was then by happenstance I learnt about what's known in criminology as the Broken Windows Theory. In the 1990s, inspired by James Wilson and George Kelling, the formulators of the theory, Rudy Giuliani, the then newly elected Mayor of New York City started implementing the learnings from it.

The theory goes like this: A broken window signifies neglect. It draws attention from the wrong kind of people. Vandals gather and they tend to break more windows. More broken windows signifies even more neglect. Graffiti starts appearing, drug peddlers start using the place as a rendezvous. What started with a single broken window results in a neighborhood becoming a 'bad neighborhood'. To someone who passes by the place after a significant amount of time, it would seem as if graffiti appeared out of nowhere. It would seem as if drug peddlers and vandals drove people away and claimed the peaceful neighborhood as theirs. Wrong. It all started with a broken window, and the gradual doom spiral goes pretty much unnoticed.

The broken window here is just a metaphor. Rudy Giuliani was hell bent on eliminating broken windows. He made it clear to the NYPD. He made sure there weren't neighborhoods labeled as bad neighborhoods. Graffiti was cleared overnight. Vandals punished. Homeless people were confined to shelters. Litter was not collecting anywhere. Broken windows fixed.

It is possible that you'd have come across a lot of things ruined by a single broken window. More often than not the problem doesn't lie in fixing broken windows. It stems from the first broken window going unnoticed.

Technical debt is a result of a single broken window.

Procrastination is a broken window. That single cheat day? Broken window. You better be sure that there are going to be more.

I've been reading Robert O'Neil's The Operator. (A fantastic book. It starts with what made him become a SEAL, goes into his life as a SEAL, eventually ending with him encountering Osama bin Laden face to face and shooting him down). Almost everything that people who are going through military training learn is about discipline and being orderly. Discipline is the most important lesson one can learn in life, and is perhaps the hardest too. Why do you think there are courtesies in the army? The trimmed mustache, the neatly shaved head. Why do you think the first thing you're asked to do at bootcamp is to learn to make your bed? And do it religiously everyday? It gives a window of opportunity (pun intended) for a broken window to creep in.

I realized me chasing local optima, forgetting the big picture, and not acting on some of my important goals that could eventually shape my entire life, all boiled down to me not paying attention to broken windows. I started fixing broken windows.

There was a short period of time this year when I went to work super early (like 7.30ish). It was so amazing that by the time my colleagues rolled in around 10/10.30 I nearly had a day of work under my belt. I could then laze around and work slowly till end of day and yet complete a day and half's worth of work. What's better? I could leave earlier than everyone else and have a whole evening to myself. It was as if 24 hours had become 48. It didn't last long. A single day of sleeping-in became two, a weekend or two came by, then it was entirely forgotten. When I look back I realize that the single morning of sleeping-in was the broken window I'd neglected.

I came home this evening and cleaned my room to an extent I could on a weekday. I washed and dried by bed linen, changed my pillow covers, and did everything I could have done any weekend. The fact that I could have done this any weekend was the one making me procrastinate and neglect it. No better formula for failure than "It's right here, I'll do it some other time."

Did I just write a 1000+ word post to brag about the fact that I did my laundry? Perhaps. But that's a broken window that's no longer being neglected. I think fixing one after another is my next course of action. Find them, fix them. What's even more important is not let any of these break again. Isn't that the challenge? I'll gladly chase this local optima in the coming year.

Deepavali

I wrote this sometime in 2015 around this time of the year. Time embellishes a lot of things. I was probably bored witless during every Deepavali back home but here I am several thousand miles away from what seems to be an unusual amount of rain, even for Deepavali week, and thinking those days were the best of times. May be they were. I have strong reasons to believe they were.

I don’t know if I’ve ever imagined a background score for different time periods in my life, but if there was one, the months of October and November every year would feature symphonies carefully constructed to match the sound of firecrackers. I was pretty crazy about those - I’d usually ask for more crackers instead of clothes, or something like that. Now I’m smart with money and would probably not settle for a Rs.10 packet of bijili.

My Deepavali had a routine. Every year I spend the previous night at my grandmother’s place, wake up before the sunrises, brush, light a firecracker (because it is the rule), wait for my turn to get oil applied in my hair by my grandmother(without it getting into my eyes - she was particular about that), shower, have some sweets, and back to my earnest mission of elevating the world’s noise pollution levels. Before that paati will force me to have a small sample of deepavali lehyam - a concoction which is probably the greatest enemy my taste buds have battled. It is sweet and sour at the same time and extra spicy. She will bait me with the wide variety of sweets and of course, crackers. I would have no choice but to fall for it.

That was my routine till 2009, after which there was a significant deviation from the usual - most important of which was the fact that it was no longer my grandmother’s place. And I no longer was interested in firecrackers. May be it was the routine, or god forbid it was my antics to unsuccessfully avoid the devil’s concoction, or may be it was just paati, that made Deepavali what it was. In a few days, it will be six years since Deepavali stopped being any of these. It became just another holiday when more time was spent watching meaningless advertisements on TV with an occasional bout of Solomon Pappaiyya.

So many things have changed in the 6 years that passed. And, for some reason, for the past few weeks I’ve felt like I should write something about her. May be it is the season.

Come Tuesday it will be Deepavali, and as I’ve been doing so, out of routine, for the past 6 years, I’ll carry on with my life, only I won’t do the things that made Deepavali what it used to be.

May be this year I’ll take that oil bath, remembering to ensure the oil doesn’t get into my eyes.

Atonement

The West Wing has several memorable episodes, scenes, and dialogue exchanges. So much so that I can't really pinpoint a single scene or an episode and say, "yes, this is my favorite!" However, the exchange between President Bartlet and his staff about Yom Kippur made a deep dent in my mind. In that particular scene, he shares what someone had told him earlier that day about asking for forgiveness. On Yom Kippur, we ask for the forgiveness of God. But before that, on Erev Yom Kippur or the eve of Yom Kippur, we ask for the forgiveness of others we've harmed, sinned against -- common folk, friends, family, and people who would be friends and family otherwise except for this one incident you wronged them. You cannot ask for forgiveness for the sins you committed against God before you ask for forgiveness for the sins you committed against your fellow beings. This, he shares when they're contemplating how to share the news about the death of their children to the parents who'd lost them. It is very poignant and at the same time, wakes you up.

This scene plays in my head every now and then, for no rhyme or reason. And it always leaves me wondering how life would feel a little less heavy if I ask for forgiveness more readily, or think twice about how I'd have to live with something before doing it. I recently had a conversation at work about why refusing when someone asks something of us is almost reflexive. Similarly, defending, justifying, or worse shifting blame is mostly our first line of defense and later comes asking for forgiveness; almost as a plan B if plan A of getting away with it doesn't work out.

This is where walking in someone's shoes makes all the difference. If for a moment, we imagine ourselves to be in their place, would you have wronged someone in the first place? Would we hurt people? Would we say the things we say that ends up hurting people? Perhaps not.

Today is Erev Yom Kippur.

Though I don't believe in a superior being, I do like the philosophy of the day of atonement. If you think you're one step away from salvation and are seeking the final forgiveness for all your sins, you'd better do that to the common folk first.

I think it is important that I ask for forgiveness from everyone whom I've sinned against -- ranging from my kid sister whom I've hurt one too many times, for fun and, occasionally, in anger, to every individual who at some point felt that I wasn't giving them a fair treatment.

I'm going to make some calls and write some emails today. I may never receive someone's forgiveness for they may not feel I deserve it. But, I sure would feel better knowing that I'd taken the step. Knowing that would make things in life feel much less heavy.

Zero Days

I'm not a very disciplined person when it comes to working. Leisure, on the other hand, I'm very disciplined about. I have devised several ways to make myself feel adequately productive even on my most sloth-y days. One of which is the concept of zero days. It is not some new novel concept that I came up with one morning. It is practiced all over the world in various forms, and not necessarily known by the term 'zero-days' but in spirit, they're all the same. For instance, take Seinfeld's productivity routine, or the inspiring story on Reddit that received a lot of attention.

In my case, I try to make every day a non-zero day in terms of professional, or personal fulfillment. To avoid zero days I do things that help me progress with one or more of my goals. Of course, as a prerequisite, I should set goals for my life. But that's simple. I could do it on the day of. I don't need an elaborate new year's resolution master list to pick goals from. For instance, this post is a result of me trying to avoid a zero day.

Things that I consider goals are pretty simple to achieve.

• Did I do something meaningful at work? Fixing a bug, making progress with a feature, or just doing a code review is enough for me to consider my workday as a non-zero day. It might seem like I put work above all else, but statistically, I am bound to work on any given day than not. So I like it or not, work plays a non-trivial role in determining how my day is spent. I like to be on the good side of the fence when it comes to work. The fence being, the call on whether or not one is supposed to love work. The good side being, it pays the bills and it keeps you happy, so it doesn't matter.
• Did I have a meaningful conversation with someone I like? This could range from my parents to friends to anyone in between. It is very important that the person be someone I like. This is because I've had several meaningful conversations with strangers. For some reason, it is easy. There is no baggage. But with people I like, however, the conversations are mostly mundane. I try to somehow escape that grind. I find it very satisfying if I have conversations about life, or politics, or anything that doesn't involve me simply getting to know how their day went or them, mine.
• Did I make progress with my hobby? Like The Joker says in the Dark Knight movie, I'm like a dog chasing cars. I just do things. I pursue several hobbies at any given point in time. I may not take significant strides toward getting better at any of those but I still consider them hobbies. Perhaps, my hobby is just pursuing hobbies. I digress. Right now, I try to write something coherent, learn to play something on the guitar, go out and shoot pictures, or simply read. Some of these are easy and others relatively hard, so I try not to fall back on the easy option frequently enough to hinder any progress I'm making with the harder ones.
• Did I learn something new? This is hard but very rewarding. I've come to realize that there is so much noise in my life. I spend all my waking hours connected to the internet. I don't take social media breaks or go on tech-detoxes. So it is hard for me to learn new things or feel like I learned new things because the signal to noise ratio of the content I consume on a daily basis is so low. So, at the end of the day, if I remember something I learned that day I feel good about it. The frequency of such days is, alas, not so great.

Though this sounds like a self-help post, it is something I thought I should write about. This post, which started as something I planned to write to break out of my zero day, ended up being something I did on a non-zero day because I'd already made progress with one of the other things.

Hope you have more non-zero days than zero days in your life. If you feel you start seeing more zero days, then come up with new things that would make your day non-zero.

Nineteen Years Later

Whether or not I like it, the Harry Potter books and movies have been a significant part of my life since my early teens. I got into the series later than many of my friends; considering the number of people I've had the chance to discuss Harry Potter with, I got into the series much later than most people. However, I was all caught up by the time book six came out so I was there, with everyone else, to experience the magic of waiting for a release and reading the newly released book on day 1. Don't even get me started on the number of fan-fictions I read before book seven came out. Let's just say it's an uncomfortably large number. The book ends at a point of time that marks nineteen years after the Battle of Hogwarts, with Harry's child getting ready for his first day at Hogwarts. That day was September 1st, 2017. That part of the world that still hangs on to Harry Potter celebrated this in a hundred different ways. That said, this post isn't about Harry Potter. In fact, this is like every other post of mine -- about nothing in particular.

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This day, to the six-year-old me, would have been nineteen years later.  I would be lying if I said I remember what it was like back then. What I can say with certainty is that to the six-year-old me, nineteen years later looked nothing like what it actually ended up looking like. I'm in a country I hadn't figured out much about back then. I'm employed doing things that weren't invented when I was six. The company I work for was four years old when I was six. Due to the fact that our body's bone cells are constantly replacing themselves, every twelve years, the human body gets a completely new skeleton. Akin to that, nineteen years later, I'm living a life that a six-year-old me was not even aware of. If I met that kid on the road today, I would not recognize him. That kid may not find me interesting or cool, or worth noticing even.

A few years pass, and that six-year-old is a teenager. The life that I live today has some vague similarities to what the teenager had in mind. The kid had learned to use a computer, knew what software engineering was, and just because he knew Bill Gates and Microsoft, he wanted to become a Computer Engineer. The kid made his dad's job easier by teaching him to use Excel Sheets and amazed his mother by looking up grammar rules on the internet. They, however, did not like the fact that he was deeming the phone unusable while he used the dial up connection to leave scraps to his friends on Orkut (what an archaic sequence of words!). To that kid, nineteen years later was a life in America. Because he had figured thanks to his cousin that one could go to this fantasy land that is America for higher studies. What's sadly not true is that the teenager believed that nineteen years later, he'd be a few inches taller than what I am today. Sorry to have disappointed you. Also, that girl you were with? Nope, not anymore.

A few years pass -- late teens. College. New friends. America seems more real. Another girl -- only this time, I know for sure, she does too. To this young lad, nineteen years later was a life that had no geographical constraints like the teenager had. Somewhere with a job and a roof over the head. Nineteen years didn't seem like a long term to plan for. The fact that nineteen years and some chump change was all that he had seen in his entire life notwithstanding. Perhaps all teenage dreams follow the theme of Chekov's 'Lottery Ticket'.

A few years and a few thousand miles later, some of the dreams come true. First flight, second, third, and even the tenth soon followed. Grad school, not higher studies. Starbucks. English with an American accent. An American education. Large classrooms. Cars. National Parks. Arizona sun. The west coast. These things featured in none of the nineteen-year plans. The twelve-year human skeleton cycle I'd mentioned starts to look very believable. For this young man in his early twenties, nineteen years later involves a lot of unknowns. This young man doesn't know which city to dream about or which job. He doesn't know who is going to be around. He's been told who isn't.

A few more years later, another new city. New friends, on and off. Summer is a thing to look forward to, and not just a label. It actually looks different from the other times of the year. Lots of new music. Beer. Trivia nights. Hiking. The six-year-old kid didn't know hiking was a thing, neither did the teenager. The undergrad would have laughed if he thought the future involved reading more books in a day than the number of people he'd talk to. The grad student thanks time for keeping him afloat and carrying him off to the shore. This exercise was more for me than it was for you to read. Through this, I now know that none of the nineteen-year dreams resembled the reality when the day actually came by.

For this guy, nineteen years later looks no different than today. Perhaps some more certainty would be nice.

What is all the fuss about Independence Day, anyway?

I'm unsure if it was 2005 or 2006. A childhood friend and I were going to attend some quiz competition we'd heard about from someone. We were refreshing our trivia prowess by asking each other questions. We came across what was an obscure fact to a bunch of 13-year-olds - "Adolf Hitler, son of a cobbler, tried to be a painter but was turned down by the Vienna art institute." A few hours later, inside Madras' very own Music Academy, a picture with two paintings was shown and the crowd was asked to guess the painter. Cheeky teenagers that we were, decided to let our newly acquired knowledge on the field. "Let's guess Hitler for this one!"

We were right. Still proud of that one, 11-12 years later.

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Every year that followed, 2 pm on the 15th of August marked the moment when the Indian National Anthem reverberated around the majestic Music Academy main halls; brimming with people full of energy -- six-year-olds and sixty-year-olds alike - fiercely competing for the coveted stage at the Landmark Quiz.

The first year I attended it was my introduction to the bigwigs of the Indian quizzing circle. As a budding quizzer (who would remain a budding quizzer till retirement from all forms of quizzing...), my pride laid in identifying and identifying with the bigwigs. Swami, Samanth, Udupa, Arul, all of these became household names. This was followed by a decade and some years of being nearly good, and almost qualifying. But all the fun was in just being there, among that crowd. That was my crowd. I still remember one of those times when Kabbalah introduced himself as having come "all the way from Alwarpet" when there were people sitting next to him who'd come all the way from Mumbai and Delhi.

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I'd grown from middle school to high school. First few facial hairs popped their heads out. First board exams. Plus one and plus two - senior years in school that went by as quickly as summer in Seattle. I started shaving. I entered college. I mixed and matched teams. I quizzed with a girl I liked. I progressed from taking the bus and train to taking a two-wheeler to Mylapore. I progressed from going back home and getting dinner to getting dinner on the way back. Progressed from "I should leave at 8 pm to get home on time", to, "It's only 10 pm and the quiz is nearly done?".

So many changes. So many faces. So many new teams, new people, but a few faces remained constant. My friends and I, those that were always only nearly qualified, we were the Barmy Army of Madras quizzing. Though we didn't go all the way to Lords to cheer for a cover drive, we traveled all the way from Madipakkam, and Guindy, and Nungambakkam to cheer for our teams.

All these changes, but what remained constant was the adrenalin rush that kicked in after the National Anthem was done echoing through the hall. The giant clock slides just past 2 pm and Dr. Navin would ask all the first timers to stand up. That rush, that never went away.

Landmark Quiz of my childhood is no more. But I have a lifetime of memories that I would keep revisiting; at least once every year, on the 15th of August at 2 pm.

Cinnamon

I wrote this with Krish Ashok's rendition of Scarborough Fair in the background. Listening to that was what made me write, so I'd encourage you to do the same while reading the post. It was a damp morning in the beautiful American Southwest; reflecting the mood of the day as well. It was the kind of dampness that lasts for a couple of hours after a small shower, the kind that prompts you to shake that low hanging branch playfully when you're walking alongside someone.

I had to leave in a couple of hours. It wasn't sudden, it was an eventuality. After all, I didn't belong there.

But I'd made up my mind before the big move that home is where the heart is, and my heart was here in this small university town, removed from light pollution and the sound of the freeway. I was in a house inside which you can hear the neighborhood creek if all was quiet. It was straight out of a tourism brochure or, perhaps, a postcard.

It was Fall, the season of colors. Just as the season begins with vibrant colors and ends with wilting branches and fallen leaves, my weekend had begun with a tonne of hope and was coming to an end, like a book that promises that there isn't going to be a sequel but doesn't quite give you the closure.

It was a Monday. It didn't matter but it didn't help either. I was going to hate this day, and the ones that followed. It was too early in the morning to cry, and I'd used up all my tears the previous night. I didn't quite understand what to do. Like an Olympic diver, no matter how many times she'd practiced it before, she had to do it one more time and this time, it was different. How do I say goodbye? What was I going to take away? How do I capture this moment until the next time? What if there never was a next time?

She was making breakfast, and the house smelled like cinnamon. It wasn't grandiose, it was cereal. But it was breakfast that smelled like summer. To this day, I'm not sure if it was the cinnamon, or if it was her. But when you are out in the meadow, you don't ask questions, you just take it all in. That's what I took away.

The weekend was long past. I was scouring the neighborhood Walmart to find that cereal. I needed to take it home with me, before that day becomes a memory.

I ate Cinnamon toast crunch for breakfast for the next month. Or perhaps longer, I don't remember. But what I remember is that it never smelled like summer, nor did it taste the same. But it was all I had to cling on to that day.

Cinnamon. Until next time.