Far from the maddening crowd

I have come to realize that most of my blog posts are turning into self-reflective ones. On thinking deeper, I realize that I do indulge in a lot of introspection. In a way, my aim every day is to be a more perfect me.

Was I different? As time progresses, most of us forget to examine how we've changed over the years. Thanks to some advice I received from friends, I make it a point to regularly reflect on how I have changed. It is a very interesting intellectual exercise. You have get yourself to remember what you thought, felt and liked and what your mental make-up was at times in the past.

This is where blogging is helpful. A glance at your old posts would give you an idea of what and who you were some years ago in the past. Here is my old blog (or one of my old ones). When I go through it now, I feel silly. If I knew the log in and password to access this blog, I would have deleted it. How different was I? I used to feel strongly about issues outside of me: traffic, programming, cricket etc. It is not that I do not think about all this now but I certainly do not have any 'feelings' about these things; at least certainly not have feelings strong enough to warrant a blog post.

Somehow, somewhere life has come to revolve lesser and lesser about these things. So there is a Anna Hazare. It is not important that I do not know what he is fighting for. It is important that I do not care to know what he is fighting for. He is just an example. There are so many things that are happening out there in the world which I do not care to know more of. I am, for bad or for worse, far from the maddening crowd.

Sometime during those years when I was able to churn out blog posts about all those 'world-ish' things, I remember to have read an article in The Hindu titled 'Rebels without a cause'. I do not remember anything about the article but the title of the article had a huge impact on me. Anna Hazare is a rebel if you want to call him that. And he is surely a rebel with a cause. So are the thousands who flock to meet and greet him and attend his speeches etc.

But for every such rebel with a cause, there must be a hundred rebels without a cause. These are the millions who have an opinion on something they do are not directly involved with. It is like me having an opinion on Ganguly's batting on some blog post. Pointless.

To me, not having an opinion about something is a strong statement. And personally, it means that that 'something' is not on my critical path in life. I am a rat, wanting to remain a rat. All these 'somethings' which people make a huge noise about, do not show up in my racetrack. I can at best acknowledge their existence. Ask me for an opinion and you will get nothing.

Annus Mirabillis

Here we go again, another new year. Happy New Year to everyone. On new year's day, I am prone to being nervous. Somewhere inside me, I have been made to believe that how you start on day 1 will determine what lies ahead. But over the years, this belief has waxed and waned. This time around, I really didn't think about it too much. Perhaps it was because I had grown up and believed in a 'who-the-world-works' or maybe it was just a result of a long bout of tension and sleep shortage thanks to work.

But since it is a new year ahead of me, I think it is a good time to reflect back on life over 2011 and how I can be better and more effective in 2012. There are a few things which I surely want to do this year and I see a merit in putting some of those down.

1. Exercise more often

I have had the dream of being presentably slim for a long time now. This has to be the year I do something about it and make it count. There are two broad ways of becoming slim and staying that way - exercise ad diet. The latter, I have found is significantly tougher and hence I shall stick to exercise.

2. Write more often

I think dreams come in cycles. There can be a whole passage of time where I don't dream of a particular thing and then suddenly it shows up on my radar. Writing is one such thing. I hope to write more and write more often this year. Perhaps take the first steps towards writing a book or something.

3. Better anger management and channelizing negative energy

This has been among my greatest strengths and in my view the most useful thing I have taught myself. It has been over a decade since I have started experiencing the benefits of this. I wish to continue perfecting this habit and hope to lose my cool fewer times this year.

4. Crunch the time between thought and action

Many times, circumstances get the better of me. In large situations (large being defined by the scale of implications of the decisions that are being complicated) I find that I fret too much about the outcome at the cost of losing my objectivity. This is further affected by self-doubt and your gut's lack of confidence on your brain. It is some sort of 'analysis paralysis'. This year I need to get better at backing my logic and judgement and thinking lesser and acting faster.

5. Do something creative regularly

I have been trying this for some time now and find that it helps immensely in reducing boredom. I just need to be more regular; actually regular creativity is almost an oxymoron. Forget it. I know what to do.

6. Read news more often and have an independent world view

My daily schedule gives me little time to read the newspaper and I am left with relying on the Internet for reading news. Thanks to google news being the way it is, my following the news is at best haphazard. I need to correct this. There needs some method to this.

7. Learn to say No

I think it is the most important skill to have in the world.

Apart from these, there are other minor things -- like cleaning my car more often, ensuring my next shirt is not blue, never wearing mismatched shoes, learning to write fast with a fountain pen, etc.

Missing the Web 2.0 bus

Back when I started work, orkut was the rage. I spent a lot of time on orkut. A lot of time. It seemed like the right filler for days full of intermittent work. When you let the machine compile a huge jar file, there really isn't much you can do when the machine is compiling. Orkut filled this gap very well. Given the competitive nature of what I and my close friends were accustomed to, there was competition on orkut too: number of friends, number of scraps, fans etc. I know of people who came very close to screwing up academics (and hence life in a myopic sense) due to orkut. Orkut became a common noun, orkuting became a verb and an acceptable activity.

Orkut slowly gave way to facebook. There were a few other portals (which've been relegated to also rans - Friendster, Hi5, etc.) I was lucky to get early access to facebook thanks to being in a college that was covered by facebook. But I really didn't revel in facebook as much as I did on orkut. I found that it pushed people to be more phony than necessary.

The major difference between your orkut profile and your facebook profile was that the orkut relied on 'pull' in order to get recognition whereas facebook relied more on 'push' for recognition. It was a result of the basic design of the user homepage. Once logged in, Orkut opened to a page with your profile, your friends list and imminent birthdays of your friends. Facebook, on logging on, threw at you updates from what your friends were doing, saying and sharing.

This difference was stark. It meant that one would require different mindsets to navigate the two portals (soon they would become social networking sites) Facebook gave greater returns on pushy-ness, boldness and to an extant blatant self promotion. This came at a time when there was a mindset change in how people perceived the web.

This was around the time when Web 2.0 became a famous concept: when user generated content became the driver of the internet. Facebook fit better than orkut in the web 2.0. Also, let me not take anything away from facebook in terms of user interface, user experience and add-ons.

Close to the heels of facebook was twitter - a brilliant avenue to express, be-heard and self promote in the simplest of fashions. Twitter started a parallel network of connected people in a way nobody could imagine.

I heard of web 2.0 only after it became a huge talking point. Though I was on facebook, I had barely heard of twitter. When you have enough happening in real life, you rarely do look to the internet for excitement. It might have been a paucity of time which resulted in me not spending enough time or putting in enough effort on web 2.0.

I started using twitter regularly a month or so ago. Since then, I have been amazed by it. The design of the entire system is beautiful (I haven't figured it out fully yet) Between facebook and twitter, my vote surely is for twitter. It is smarter, quicker, adds greater value and doesn't damage once's personality as much. There are some simply outstanding people who make twitter what it is. It is almost like a large connected family out there which keeps the place abuzz.

But I have found that getting into the family is impossible (at least I haven't figured it out) And knowing social networks, being a male, out of college, with very few active friends on the network, the odds are stacked against me. Looking back, I feel that I missed the web 2.0 bus. I should have started being active on twitter long ago. But here I am, still searching, still trying to find my feet.

Nari and the weight loss tamasha

The title of this post is borrowed from a recent book I saw at the store. It was titled 'Women and the weight loss tamasha' and I thought a minor adaptation of the title will put things right in context.

By the BMI method of classification, I am obese. I have been obese for more than a year now. 8 kg is what separates me from normalcy and these 8 kg seem like a huge ask. Weight gain and weight loss depend on multiple factors. My own personal experience tells me that the factors that help me lose weight are: exercise, anxiety and diet control.

My battle with weight is something that was least expected. As a kid I was mildly chubby and I grew to be tall and slim. Before the onset of adolescence few would have expected that I would grow in weight this rapidly. Come adolescence, things changed. It was during a time when I really didn't spend too much time playing outside home. Academics was the main focus. I slept, ate, studied and slept again. My photographs taken in this phase of life tell me that I was very ugly looking.

Things changed when I started off in IIT, I lost 12 kg in the first semester. That is 12 kg in 4 months, 12 kg in 120 days meaning an average loss of 100 grams a day. Imagine hacking off a small 100 gram piece of flesh from your body every day! The factors that contributed to such a drastic fall were anxiety (driven largely by homesickness), exercise (cycling around in crazily humid Chennai after living in the cool, dry climate of Bangalore for most of my life) and diet control (lets just say the mess food wasn't all that great).

I have never been able to replicate such a feat again. There was a brief while in 2008 when I had a bout of typhoid because of which I lost a few kilos in 3 weeks. But the 12 kg loss in 2000 still stands as my personal best.

Subsequent to the first semester, my weight started showing a familiar pattern - gradual decline in the months I was in college followed by sharp spikes during the vacation months when I was home. I realized that I had become one of the types whose weight is never constant or within a small window.

When I started work in 2004, conditions were perfect for steady weight gain - home food, zero anxiety at work, coffee vending machine, McDonald's in the Forum mall etc. I think I did start a morning jogging routine but that was scrapped shortly after I started mugging for CAT.

It was only in a short window - between the CAT written test and the day the interview calls were announced that I religiously went to the gym and brought by weight back from a hair's breadth close to 100 kg. Soon after that, preparation for interviews and the subsequent spartan routine at IIMA took precedence over plans of weight loss.

When I resumed work (now in Bombay) in 2008, I wasn't exactly overweight. Lots of eating out was balanced by work related pressure and the tough life in Bombay. I perhaps had mild ups and downs but on an average hovered around the slightly overweight category.

Since then I have never really considered exercise or a fitness regimen. On marriage day, I apparently didn't seem overweight. Phew!

Moving to Chennai I thought would help me start reducing weight but this time, there was no anxiety and certainly no diet control. Jogging and gym never really took off (my excuse being that I'm growing old and hence will power is in short supply)

One of my relatives lost 15 kg in 3 months thanks to advice from a dietitian. I know this is true. But I also know the amount of hard work that has gone into keeping up with the diet prescribed by the dietitian. Imagine drinking tomato juice for lunch and avoiding pappadam etc.

Today I was told that another relative of mine has started off on a diet prescribed by this dietitian. I also got details about how the dietitian charges her clients. It is Rs 300 per kg, payable in advance. So if you want a diet package for lets say 10 kg, you need to cough up Rs 3,000 for her to give you a neat diet with exact instructions. She also changes the diet plan every week and emphases that the plan is sculpted according the need of the particular person. This reduces the chance of someone borrowing the diet plan from an earlier client.

I might not take the drastic step of seeking a dietitian's advice. I know I do not have the discipline to follow a diet or the ability to suspend my tongue's voice. But yes, given that I will be 30 in a year and a few months more, I really need to put an end to this tamasha.

A lean day at work

Today has been a lean day in the office. It is one of those days when I walk in not knowing what I need to get done through the day. There were of course a couple of small things which needed completion, but nothing big enough to keep me busy through the day.

As a result I began freaking out. This happens to me when I do not know how to spend time. Games on facebook, spider solitaire, countless refreshes at google news: all these to tend to get to you.

There is a looming question: how easy is it to live life without a goal? I have found that having a goal, an objective albeit a short term one is very necessary to keep things going. My mind needs something to feed on and most often the something has to come from the external world. During the day, I usually expect it to be in the form of tasks at work. Outside office, my mind expects responsibility, duty and leisure activities.

Where are things today?

It has been quite some time since I wrote last. Not many things have happened but I seem to have changed quite a bit. The biggest change in me is perhaps my poor health and deteriorating fitness.

It seems to be a symptom of a larger issue in the way I live life nowadays: the lack of a sense of stability. There is just a lot of things I am trying to do and ending up being inefficient.

This is not new, but I need to change and change fast. The most important thing lacking in my life currently is discipline: discipline in multiple things in life.

I went to Pazhani Temple this morning. Pazhani is simply a magical place and it has never failed to inspire me to be better in life. I am sure this time it will be no different.