Since writing a summary of my search on reading up on Samkhya, I thought this update would help other seekers. This YouTube video (~ 30 minutes long, embedded below) is the best explanation that I have found online of the philosophy of Samkhya and Yoga. I have been looking for the Samkhya Karika translations online. There seem to be a lot of content for competitive exams but very little else.
What is Samkhya & Yoga Philosophy? by Vishwa Yoga
I am currently reading the pdf of the book by John Davies. After that, I hope to get D E Osto’s book that I mentioned in my earlier post.
Gulmohar before it bloomed. Image credit: Pradeep Mohandas
We moved into this building only last July. I never noticed this tree because I never sat in our balcony overlooking the tree. I didn’t have the time nor the inclination. I was mostly staring into a rectangular device.
After the lockdown, my family sat in the balcony in the evening. It started as a ritual to enjoy the afternoon tea with a cool breeze to keep us company. This practice also gifted us some magnificent sunsets.
The blooming gulmohar seen from our balcony. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas
As the gulmohar bloomed, my wife identified it. After that we looked at it each day as it bloomed and turned into a place of refuge for winged refugees and a stray cat.
Since writing yesterday, the cyclone missed Mumbai and passed South of the city via the town of Alibaug. The Indian Meteorological Department said that the town faced wind speeds of 100-120 kmph. There was destruction but no loss of life.
Billboards torn away by the winds associated with Cyclone Nisarga
I posted two videos on YouTube. One of them showed a billboard near our home that was torn by the winds that lashed Pune as the outer envelope of the cyclone passed through the city.
India is under Lockdown 4.0. There are more than one lakh COVID-19 positive patients in India. There are about 400 in the ward of the city where I live. The Lockdown has been extended up to May 31 in the state.
After struggling with the Lockdown through March and April, I feel that I have some more control and the processes that I laid out for work and home have started showing some benefits. That many of the Lockdown requirements were eased added to the sense of control I felt.
I got myself a desk and two chairs. We had not purchased these since I did not feel the need for a table when I was working from office. I spent most of my time at home using my mobile phone. With working from home, I was spending 8 to 10 hours on the laptop. Other than a place to keep it also helped in ergonomics and lends itself to multiple other uses.
I continued consuming news only through 3 Things and The Moving Curve. I have started adding other news through newsletter, blogs and tweets but reduced it’s consumption through May. But, I try to keep away from news of the pandemic but that has been difficult.
I started packing my work laptop after completing a day at work. I also practiced locking up the room I used for work. This gave me a sense of separation between work and home. I also tried to limit working hour whenever possible. This also helped family understand when I could be disturbed.
We upgraded the internet connection at home which has helped with multiple people using the wifi at home.
Changes outside also helped. Before May 17, government announcements frequently changed when shops would be open and when not. These notifications changed in 2-3 days. This had led to a lot of anxiety. Shops staying open for longer hours and more shops opening up since May 17 has returned a sense of certainty. Power and Internet connections have also become more reliable in May.
Jeff Bezos says – “I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. …[I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”
I first heard of him on Tim Ferriss’ 5 Bullet Friday (dated April 17, 2020). This is the text that Tim adds:
Podcast episode I’m listening to —Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya on How to Invest in This Crisis. This was sent to me by one of the better investors I know, someone who has been exceptionally successful in startups, public equities, and cryptocurrencies. Here is the description: “This is an episode of The Pomp Podcast with host Anthony Pompliano (@APompliano) and guest Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath), the CEO of Social Capital, the Chairman of Virgin Galactic, and the owner of the Golden State Warriors. In this conversation, Chamath and Anthony discuss … where Chamath currently has capital invested, how he thinks we can solve the structural issues in health and economics, why being a patient investor will pay off, where he is looking for opportunity right now, what he thinks should happen with the NBA, and how the world is going to change after the pandemic is over.” Term that pops up in this episode: fiat currency. The term “fiat” derives from the Latin fiat (“let it be done”). For more on fiat currency as related to the US economy, I quite enjoyed Biography of the Dollar when I read it in 2009.
Tim Ferriss, 5 Bullet Friday, April 17, 2020
While following YouTube’s suggestion, I also enjoyed listening to this interview with him for the View from the Top podcast. There is a nice summary of the episode on their website.
I gather that many of his appearances on television has been controversial but he has some interesting insights into the present scenario. He also has an annual letter to his investors where he shares his thesis of the present condition.
It’s been more than a month since my last post about Working from Home. I thought this was a nice time to look back at how things went.
Information Overload
News about COVID-19 was everywhere. Television news, newspapers, podcast episodes, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp group and email newsletters. It was information overload. Eventually, I limited the sources of information that I relied upon.
These are the resources that I turned to over the last one month while I tuned out all the rest to maintain my sanity.
Ward-wise COVID-19 active case numbers shared by Smart Pune tweet, embedded below. Image Credit: Smart Pune.
For local information related to Pune, I followed the Smart Pune Twitter handle. This provided ward-level data about the spread of the disease – number of positive cases and death – in my ward.
There were two podcasts that I followed for COVID-19. The 3 Things podcast from the Indian Express provided news stories from across the country. It covers only a single or 3 topics at the maximum. These deep dives gave enough back ground and insight about the news stories that I slowly ended consumption of other news sources which were covering very little other than COVID-19.
A data based podcast comes from a data journalist, Rukmini S called The Moving Curve (also available on Spotify now).
I also have access to some office-related resources which are not accessible publically.
Working from Home setup
Since the last update, I have become better at separating time between home and work. I tried to setup my working time according to better internet speeds. However, I found that this affected my output and left me feeling groggy most of the time.
As time passed, the internet and power supply stabilized. This allowed me to go back to my office timings for work. When I reset this, it improved my productivity at work and happiness at home.
But, perhaps, by the time people get used to working from home it may well be time to return back to a workplace. Personally, I would welcome it even if we maintain social distancing.
For the past three weeks, I have been working from home. We are faced with a global pandemic that, as on today, has affected more than 5,00,000 people all across the globe and more than 800 people in India. My work place allowed us to work from home during the period. The period of work from home was extended after the Prime Minister of India announced a 21-day national lock down.
Before I got to work from home, schools and colleges shut down. Then IT companies in Pune asked its employees to work from home. Our fiber optic cable based internet provider faced issues for a few days but seems to have stabilized two days into the 21 day lock down. Over the last few days, there have been power outages where I had to switch to my Jio hotspot to access the Internet to continue to work.
My nearly 3 year old daughter does not understand why things are shut down. The concept of a lock down is alien to her. Her explanation for why the school is shut is that her teacher is asleep. At the rate at which the lock down is getting extended, I think her class teacher will soon compete with Kumbhakarna.
Despite having heard podcasts about working from home and having read various articles and online websites about working from home, I did not find myself prepared for this transition. Since we live in a 2 bedroom apartment, I was able to assign one bedroom for me. However, it has been getting more and more difficult to demarcate work time and home time. They have been fluid so far.
Internet speed and power outages have affected my productivity besides the usual transition time to getting used to a new setting. Focusing on work when you can hear your family members next door is difficult. I have been getting better at tuning out the noise as time passes.
A few months back, I had started listening to the Distributed podcast started by Matt Mullenweg (co-founder of WordPress, that powers this blog) that spoke of how to re-imagine the work place of the future when everyone was at home. His company, Automattic is totally distributed.
Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, wrote a piece a few days back about working from home. The article links to further resources that might help in your quest to work from home. He had started a website called WebWorkerDaily way back in 2006 to think about the distributed future of our work place.
I’ve subscribed to Ryan Holiday’s daily email newsletter, Daily Dad since I heard about it on his podcast with Peter Attia. Before this, I had struggled with answering questions related to bringing kids into such a violent world and the curbs on our freedom that they impose. In his newsletter edition on March 13, titled The Trade off is worth it (you can listen to the edition as a podcast) answered this question for me.
This is the last paragraph in the newsletter:
“Most of the freedom I had before kids,” Paul Graham wrote, “I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it.” It’s true for you too. It’s true for all of us. We’ve paid a high price for these kids, but we have gotten—we will keep getting—so much.
The quote above is from Paul Graham’s essay on Having Kids, which is also a great read. That is a longer answer to Holiday’s concise one.
Parallel Spirals 