Weekly Notes 3/2026

We’re well past half of January. We’re past Makar Sankranti. The days are getting warmer in Pune. Dhanya is loving her Neorah Accomplish Weekly Planner which I gave her in the start of the year.

I got a lot of work on the scooter done this week. It was difficult to find space to get it serviced. I got the scooter serviced, the annual maintenance contract renewed, and refuelled it. It’s a much more better driving experience now.

The week started with the disappointing news about the failure of the PSLV-C62 mission. I want to write about this but I want to be careful as the speculation around this mission has become crazy.

I did not write the space newsletter for the second consecutive week. I might drop the idea of writing a newsletter altogether and write here instead. I am still thinking about it.

Reading

• On the banks of the Mayyazhi – M Mukundan (Transl. Gita Krishnankutty), I’ve just started with reading this.
• The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron, I’m reading this but do not yet have much to say. I am reading this while writing the Morning Pages, an exercise that the book recommends. This is based on the recommendation of Tim Ferriss and the presence of an accountability WhatsApp group around this practice.
• 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.”
  • “The only group that would unambiguously benefit from deskilling developers would be the technology companies themselves, which could minimize one of their biggest expenses: their employees.”
• Our Algorithmic Grey-Beige World – Om Malik
  • “Today, open YouTube and every single thumbnail looks the same. Shocked faces, specific color contrasts, carefully positioned text overlays. Same voice. Same cadence and energy level. And videos have roughly the same lengths. The algorithm rewards these patterns with distribution and punishes deviation with obscurity.”
  • “My carefully curated list of creators has devolved into sameness. Whether pen reviewers, photographers, music bloggers, history tellers, or science bloggers—it is clear they are praying at the feet of the gods of algorithms.”
• How to fix your entire life in 1 day – Dan Koe
  • Dan presents the theory on how to change your life and then presents practical way to do it by asking yourselves a few questions. A great insight into how asking good questions makes your life better even if does not change it.
  • An X user converted the questions into prompts that you can use to have a conversation about this with your AI agent of choice.
• The X algorithm now promotes more longer content that it calls Articles. I noticed more people that I follow posting longer form content.

Watching

This Malayalam video starts with how Nizar Iltutmish started his journey running away from his Class XII board exams for 108 days. Some of the things he witnesses shapes his interests. He has written 4 books and talks about 2 of them in this video. What he describes are two terrifying practices practiced till this day in Tamil Nadu. This is his talk given at the recently held Kerala Legislature International Book Festival 2026.

The game of your financial life is a lot like Monopoly. Alok Jain of Weekend Investing explains well drawing on the parallels between the board game and your financial life. I really liked this video and gave me a new framework to think about my financial life.

If you don’t watch the full video, watch the parts about his morning and evening routine. He discusses how his morning routine is personal and designed to maximize creativity.

Matt D’Avella convinces you with his cinematic video to ask you to take responsibility for things that are in your control.

Writing

I wrote one blog post about our visit to Katraj Zoo. I have to write about the PSLV-C62 mission failure and about our visit to the Siddhivinayak Temple at Siddhatek this Saturday.