I spent most time this week with work. I ended up not doing anything I expected to be able to do this week.
For the coming week, my in-laws are coming, I am going to Mumbai to get a passport, and I want to take a look at all the things I missed in the last few weeks of engaging with work.
Watched
I believe the title is misleading, but don’t let that stop you from watching this video. My main point is to view the world as a stack of layers. This is what he refers to as wrappers (in a 3D sense). I have unfurled these wrappers into layers to make it easy for you to see.
The biggest risk is taken by business people who connect a product or service with customers. As you move away from the customer, the risk (risk is the wrong word, but no synonym fits better) decreases. We can see this with the changes AI is introducing at this layer. Similarly, the best earning potential is often found at this level, but it also comes with the highest potential for loss.
This made me reflect on which layer I prefer to work in. I’ve found that I might excel in support roles more than main roles. Even when I watch something, I’m more interested in the support character’s work than the main character, who often gets all the attention.
I studied mechanical engineering, which plays an important role at many basic layers. You can’t ship without a ship. However, this doesn’t always create the most value (or money) for the customer. If you are in this layer you feel like you are being exploited. Without it, businesses would struggle. But, without a good or service being sold to a customer at the highest layer, you would struggle.
Money flows down. When you’re squeezed by a layer above, it’s hard to earn more than the person in the layer above you. To earn more, you have to provide more value to the layer above you. The closer you are to the customer, the higher you earn for the value you provide.
Many things can push you to choose a layer to work at. Your circumstances, your attitude, or what you learnt. If you want to earn more, you must learn to be of service in the layer above you.
I did not watch, read or listen to anything besides this. I am hoping to return to a more normal cadence of writing, reading, watching, and listening by the end of the September quarter.
I have been more focussed on work this week. This week was much better for all of us health-wise as all of us were sick in Week 20.
Writing
I did a lot of writing offline. But, I did not get any online writing done.
Reading
I did not get any reading (listening or reading) done.
The rains have begun in Pune, much earlier than predicted. We got caught up in one such torrential downpour on Monday. Other than that we have mostly been enjoying the rains from home or office.
Most of my online presence has been on Instagram. I had wanted to be on blogs, but I have not got a block of time on which to focus and read a blog post.
We are waiting for our kid’s schools to re-open after the summer vacation.
I am expecting next week also to be work focussed. I expect to continue writing offline and do not expect to write online. I am planning to return to the gym from Monday.
I missed posting Weekly Notes 17, 18, and 19. I had daughter’s birthday, and parents visiting in these weeks. I did not read or write much.
Operation Sindoor also happened in the interim. X turned out to be the place to get most information during this period and I relapsed to browsing it continuously in this period.
I also got back on Instagram to try and get some solutions for things around the house.
I have a huge backlog of things to read (especially blog posts) and watch. I am hoping to get off social media and get back to the old web, as planned in the beginning of the year.
In short, we will get back to normal programming and perhaps more blog posts here from this week.
In his post, he suggests that ISRO needs to become Batman, because:
Because unlike most superheroes, Batman possesses no innate powers or alien technology. His strength comes from intellect, strategy, and a secret lair filled with gear he developed himself. He transformed through gadgets, resilience, and vision.
He suggests ISRO needs a batcave and calls the private industry as Robin. So, I wanted to try and extend the comparisons.
I think the Indian Government (Central or State) can be Alfred. The Wikipedia page on Alfred says:
Alfred is depicted as Batman’s meticulous, disciplined, loyal and tireless confidante, butler, legal guardian, best friend, aide-de-camp, …
I think the Government must play the role of a confidante, best friend, and legal guardian to both Batman and Robin. Robin may need more help in this regard now. Batman has matured a bit in this role now.
I think NewSpace India Ltd would be the Wayne Corporation. NSIL should ideally play the role of funding for ISRO and private companies. It should ideally play the role of keeping the flywheel of the Indian space programme going. I felt that NSIL was a more natural place to host the INR 1,000 crore Venture Capital Fund than IN-SPACe.
This whole last week has been lazy. I did not write Weekly Notes 15. I did not write poetry to participate in Global Poetry Writing Month. My practice of writing a blog post nearly every day faltered. And I realised this only on Wednesday.
This was a lost in deep thought lazy. So, this Weekly Note is going to be really long. It will cover the ground for Week 15 and Week 16. This is 7 April to 18 April 2025.
I mentioned in Weekly Notes 9/2025, that I had got rid of social media apps on my phone. This week I have been consuming content off the social internet, mostly reading on my RSS feed. I have also been clicking on the links to see how the page reads on people’s own websites.
Reading
Roam Research had sent out a newsletter post on 6 April 2025, after a long hiatus. I was happy to read it. Hence, when I went on X, I looked for any posts from Conor White-Sullivan, it’s co-founder and found this post from 19 March 2025. These are quotes from that post:
If your AI won’t help you break the law, it doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to those who make its laws.
I read this wonderful essay, Where We are Headed? by Dean W Ball, whom I subscribed to but has now gone and joined the US Government. Some interesting points from that post:
It had a nice introduction of what are agents:
Agents will be LLMs configured in such a way that they can plan, reason, and execute intellectual labor. They will be able to use, modify, and build software tools, obtain information from the internet, and communicate with both humans (using email, messaging apps, and chatbot interfaces) and with other agents.
And some very frightening scenarios:
Imagine you hired a bright junior employee who was willing to work for you for, say, $10,000 per month. But next year, he’ll do it for $1,000, and the year after that, $100. These are the economics of this industry.
There was an important insight as to how to know if your task can be taken over by an agentic AI:
As you go about your day, occasionally stop and think to yourself, “would it be easy to cheaply verify that I am doing this task correctly?” The answers vary, but I suspect you’ll find that the answer is often “yes.” This has implications for what the near-term economic consequences of agents are likely to be.
danah boyd wrote about five attitudes to climate change that talks about the breaking up of the worldview from two opposing ones to at least five complicated ones. The world is certainly more complicated than simple.
I think one of the reasons why I gave pause to writing on the blog was a feeling of being alone in thinking that we need to write blog posts again. Many things I read this week surrounded that theme.
Jay’s post had a lot of thought on this on the occasion of sixteen years of blogging. Here are some that resonated with me:
2015 was a major inflection point. In my memory, it’s the last gasp of the old web that everyone is now nostalgic for. Blogs lived alongside social media platforms. People still clicked links. You could drive traffic to what you were building off platform.
I have struggled to differentiate the blog from other media that look similar but you really know they are not (like Substack). I think Jay has some good writing about what a blog is in 2025.
It’s understandable. Platforms offer built-in audiences, easier monetisation, and the dopamine hit of instant feedback. But there’s a trade-off: you’re building a presence on rented land. You’re publishing into someone else’s box.
A blog in 2025 should be a destination.
I really loved these two lines:
They don’t just distribute—they accumulate. They hold time, build presence and concretise thought.
Each post sits within a web of references, tags, dates, and links—forming a layered geography of thought over time.
Blogs are also enshittification-proof:
The only person responsible for enshittifying this website is me.
With XKCD 3076 (Roads Both Taken), I felt like Randall Munroe also participated in the Global or National Poetry Writing Month.
I also liked his summary that appears in the RSS feed but not on the website:
When you worry that you’re missing out on something by not making both choices simultaneously by quantum superposition, that’s called phomo.
These <big box> stores come into towns, destroy their local businesses, move out when profits start to dip, and the residents are left without a supermarket, grocer, or pharmacy.
Is a similar phenomenon happening in India? I think we are seeing waves of big box retail, quick commerce, etc. happening simultaneously that we don’t have the time to even think about the impact they have.
You can be a creator anywhere on the internet these days, but there’s only a small handful of places where you actually own your own content. Your own website is one of them.
This is a blog post summarizing many of her talks that she gave around this idea.
I loved reading Tom Johnson’s notes and questions about Johnathan Warner’s book More than Words. I particularly liked this insight:
Much of this type of writing (professional writing) is ripe for AI automation.
I am seeing this happening in my workplace and in my work flow.
Jay (mentioned above) has a blog post that looks at various physical AI tools. He thinks that these type of AI tools must have a definite end date. He calls it the Tamaguchi Imperative:
“I’m going to call this The Tamagotchi Imperative: We must design for the end of the relationship.
That means:
Communicating Lifespans: Be clear about how long the model or service will run.
Narrative Endings: Give the agent an arc. Let it conclude.
Gradual Fade-out: Let responsiveness or features decline over time, gently, so the user reboots the model themselves without coercion.
Memory Archiving: Let users export their interaction history.
Succession Planning: Help users move to new models and new personalities with continuity.”
Search engines — the window into the web for many people — top their results with pages containing thousands of words of auto-generated nothingness, perfectly optimized for search engine prominence and to pull in money via ads and affiliate links while simultaneously devoid of any useful information.
Social networks have become “the web” for many people who rarely venture outside of their tall and increasingly reinforced walls. As Tom Eastman once put it, the web has rotted into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”.
Watching
I finished watching The Good Wife. I am now watching the spin-off The Good Fight. I have reached Season 3, Episode 9.
I am watching Bosch Legacy‘s Season 3 as and when it releases.
This book and the sci-fi book this is inspired by are on my to be read list. This tsundoku is now becoming truly unmanageable.
Another book that I have added in my to be read list. Only issue is that I can’t find this list.
This week began with thinking about our New Year, Vishu, about returning to working in hybrid mode again after surgery, my note-making and to-do lists, writing poetry and companion blog posts, and some home reorganization projects.
I hope to return to working from office in a hybrid mode from tomorrow. In preparation, I tried to drive the car under conditions similar to me going to office. I did much better in worse road conditions than what I face when I go to office. I got the green signal from the doctor.
After I wrote here about the great progress I was making on this blog, I basically made no progress in the note making process. I made no notes. I fixed this by ordering a new Neorah A5 notebook for my Bullet Journal practice.
I read about Meishi on Arun’s blog and have shared his design to get about 100 cards printed. I want to try it out as a to-do list and note taking system.
I wrote a poem on each day for Global Poetry Writing month on thinkdeli. I, then, wrote companion blog posts on the blog here. Not, for all of them but ones that I thought I should write about – which was most of them. You can read them here.
First, pick a notation from the first column below. Then, pick a musical genre from the second column. Finally, pick at least one word from the third column. Now write a poem that takes inspiration from your musical genre and notation, and uses the word or words you picked from the third column.
I cannot say I completely followed the full instructions here. This was not because I did not want to follow the instructions. It was because it was not clear to me what it meant.
Picking up 3 things from 3 columns seemed simple enough. I did that. I picked literally go nuts, folk song, and centaur.
This time, instead of writing on thinkdeli where I have been writing for the past four days for GloPoWriMo, I wrote in my notebook. When I typed the poem into thinkdeli I rewrote it more concisely.
In the notebook, the poem was 13 lines long. I made it 12 lines long on thinkdeli. I did this without removing any content details.
I had to write two poems for the prompt given for Day 4 on the NaPoWriMo website. This is what the prompt is, in essence:
Last but not least, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. In her poem, “Living with a Painting,” Denise Levertov describes just that. And well, that’s a pretty universal experience, isn’t it? It’s the rare human structure – be it a bedroom, kitchen, dentist’s office, or classroom – that doesn’t have art on its walls, even if it’s only the photos on a calendar. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem about living with a piece of art.
I began to think about the poem seriously at about 9 p.m. The thinking was interrupted by dinner. I watched something on OTT and did not notice the time pass 11.30 p.m.
I typed my poem on thinkdeli. Then a voice came in my head.
“You think what I do is not art?”
I did think he does on our walls is art. I don’t quite know how I deciphered my son’s baby language but I wrote the second poem. Also, on thinkdeli.
I had this photograph on phone’s lock screen and wall paper. I had kept this on the phone in the end of 2024. I thought this photograph was taken early in the morning.
I imagined, waking up among this forest scene early in the morning. A little later, I would have missed it. A little earlier, I would have missed it. But the photographer, Arati Kumar Rao stayed up and took this photograph.
I wanted this photograph to wake me up early. This is the art I describe having lived with.
The second poem is about my son waking me up in the morning. Not at the time I could take a similar photograph that lives on my phone’s screen, but earlier than I would naturally have.
I live with this artist, and his art is all around me. In the many places I look.
I missed an important milestone, two days ago. I wrote my first blog post on Blogger on 1 April 2006. It has now been 18 years since I started this blog.
This was the prompt given on the NaPoWriMo website:
And just as many songs do, the poem directly addresses a person or group – in this case, the Muses. Taking (Anne) Carson’s translation as an example, we challenge you to write a poem that directly addresses someone, and that includes a made-up word, an odd/unusual simile, a statement of “fact,” and something that seems out of place in time (like a Sonny & Cher song in a poem about a Greek myth).
I wanted to see a parallel in Indian poetry. I stumbled on an article of translations of medieval Indian poetry. There is one that I particularly liked:
svārthārambhapraṇataśirasāṃ pakṣapātāt surāṇāṃ dṛptātmānaṃ karajakuliśair dānavendraṃ nihantum | siṃhībhūtas tribhuvanaguruḥ so ‘pi nārāyaṇo ‘smin rāgadveṣapratihatamateḥ kasya na syāt paśutvam ||
Sūktimuktāvalī of Jalhaṇa 131.59
The author, Anand Venkatkrishnan, translates it as:
When the gods (to whom he was partial) started bowing to him to save their own heads, even Nārāyaṇa, the guru of all, turned into a lion to slay the proud demon-king with his pointy fingernails.
I mean, if you were so swayed by love and hate, you’d become an animal too.
Translation of Sūktimuktāvalī of Jalhaṇa 131.59, Anand Venkatkrishnan
A search for Sūktimuktāvalī shows that it is an anthology of poems commissioned by Jalhana. I looked up the original text and found it on the Internet Archive.
I tried to find more by the writer than the four articles he wrote for The Revealer. I found a Tumblr account in his author bio. However, he has not updated it since 2020. He seems to be currently at the Divinity School in the University of Chicago.
He has written a book on the Bhagvata Purana and about scholarly life in India. I like it’s opening lines:
We often talk about the life of the mind as if it were the mind that mattered, when it’s really the life.
Anand Venkatkrishnan, Love in the Time of Scholarship
The book is an open access publication made available online [PDF link] by the University of Chicago.
I realise now that this post has not been about the poetry I wrote about 45 minutes ago, giving it a lot of thought but not really satisfied with the output. Not yet.
In short, the poetry is about the story of the Nakshatras and the Moon. Modern science posits these asterisms at different points in space and time. I tried but have not been fully successful in adding all the suggestions in the prompt.
Parallel Spirals 