Tag: 2025

  • Weekly Notes 12/2025

    I have had a lot of time on my hands since I’ve stayed away from social media websites this week. Most of that time has been spent writing for work.

    I did not do much other reading or writing. I have nothing more to report for this Weekly Notes.

    Take 2: I am writing this at 2240 hrs on 24 March 2025.

    I read the post I wrote above and was not very proud of it. It does a poor job of reflecting how my last week was. I only thought it prudent to fix it, for the historical record.

    Goals have been demonized. They have been confused with or are replaced by resolutions, systems, processes, intentions etc. I returned to goal setting again this week. I set goals with my wife for this quarter.

    Read/Listened/Watched

    Some interesting ideas from this video –

    • India thinks inputs based. China thinks outputs based.
    • Work life balance happens when you have a sense of control over your time.
    • Every January, ask yourself, if you were to be laid off this year, what will you do?
    • Important to channelise your anger in the correct direction when you are laid off.
    • Burnout happens when you lack control or when you are not aware of what role your contribution plays in the bigger picture.

    Some of the lessons learned from this video (these are his final suggestions):

    • Find a sleep schedule that fits your life. Get enough sleep.
    • Move your body every week.
      • Keeps you active.
      • Increases your heart rate
    • Find a productivity system that works and actually stick with it.
    • Practice embracing the flinch.
    • Delete social media from your phone and laptop for 30 days.
      • watch closely how your behavior changes
    • Learn your Baseline caloric intake.
      • Know your macronutrient breakdown
      • He suggested using the myfitnesspal app.
    • Be more intentional with how you spend your time, the things you bring into your life and people you surround yourself with.
    • Stop choosing the default path. Build a life that is uniquely yours.
    • Treat life as one big experiment.
      • Learn about who you are
      • Learn more about the person you want to become.

    Truth be Told has a good post about the two modes of functioning of the brain and the six modes of rest.

    Utsav Mamoria has a great long read about how to live an intellectual life. He uses fantasy as a great storytelling tool to illustrate his point.

    I realized that I love going and visiting websites in their url. Here are two websites that I enjoyed visiting:

    1. Tracy Durnell
    2. Sacha Chua

  • A challenge of blog questions

    Thejesh tagged me in a challenge of blog questions. I enjoyed reading his replies and I have never been tagged in such a challenge.

    Why did you start blogging in the first place?

    I started blogging because I was tired of crafting websites from HTML and I was not good with CSS. I loved the fact that I could choose a background and start writing. The focus moved from making to writing.

    There were times that I missed the making and tried to go back to it. There were times when the ghost of designing got into me and I would spend hours crafting my website. But, I felt that writing is where I should focus my energies on writing.

    What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

    The blog is presently hosted on WordPress. I think the reason is the same as the one above. I loved twiddling the controls behind the scenes of various blogging platforms. I realized, like above, that I should focus my energies on writing. So, I decided to stick to WordPress.

    I have hosted my blog posts on Blogger, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Posterous, Vox, Roller, Ghost, Blot, and finally on WordPress.

    How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

    I write my posts on two platforms. Most of the posts that you read here are on WordPress’ native Gutenberg editor or Visual editor.

    I write some of my posts using WordLand. I am using this tool to write the posts in my Status Updates category.

    When do you feel most inspired to write?

    Whenever I am not sleeping. I don’t think I can survive without writing.

    Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

    I usually only read once more after I complete writing. I let my thoughts simmer before I write the draft.

    What’s your favorite post on your blog?

    Some of my posts that I love are about things I do with my daughter (1,2) or ones about note making or Indian Philosophy.

    Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

    I am twiddling with the controls in the WordPress admin panel all the time. This is based on curiosity and not on anything as sophisticated as a plan. Making a blogroll is an area of interest.

    Who’s next?

    I want to tag these people not because they would take part in a challenge like this but because I would love to hear about how they write and think about the art of blogging.

  • Weekly Notes 11/2025

    I have slowed down the rate at which I am consuming content this week. I have also reduced the sources from which I am consuming my content to feeds I have subscribed to.

    I fell into a spirituality rabbit hole with questions about Narasimha, kula devatas, and various practices performed in Kerala in the past. I fell into another rabbit hole about blogrolls and libraries.

    I also wrote the first in what I hope to be a weekly post on LinkedIn about technical writing.

    All this writing means I have not got any reading done other than my RSS feeds and a few Substack posts. I have not been able to follow space news since almost the beginning of February now.

    The recoverey after surgery seems to be going alright.

  • Clicking a link rabbit hole

    Manu spoke to James for his People and Blogs (P&B) series. This is one of the branches that I clicked through that went down a pretty interesting rabbit hole.

    One of the reasons I wanted to read James’ blog after reading the interview was because he is a technical writer, just like me. I loved his blogroll, called Wander. There were many pages that I loved wandering around on.

    Another implementation of a blogroll that this reminded me about was the one on Doc Searls’ blog. This dynamic blogroll on his blog’s right side bar is built by Dave Winer and uses some OPML magic.

    The Library Movement

    One of the blogs I found on James’ Wander page was Marisabel’s Konfetti Explorations. One of the recent blog post entries was about the 5 Laws of Library Science, formulated by S R Ranganathan.

    When I searched to learn more about Ranganathan, who I had heard about earlier in various contexts, I learnt that he was one of the founders of the Madras Library Association, founded in 1928.

    I was looking for other library associations that may have been active in India. I found that the Kerala Library Association was started quite late in 1972. The association is credited as one of the reasons for Kerala having one of the highest literacy rates in India.

    Puthuvayil Narayana Panicker, known as the father of the library and literacy movement in Kerala, is credited with establishing libraries across the state in the 1990s.

    I was surprised to learn that Maharashtra is one of the earliest such associations to be formed, founded in 1921.

    There is also an Indian Library Association, formed in 1933. Looking at the website tells you that the organisation prioritizes the people running the organization and not the libraries or the library movement in India.

    As a counterpoint, look at the website of the Free Libraries Network. They are running a fundraiser that ends tomorrow which offers various Indian authors offering services in return for a donation.

    The search term suggested a news item on the same page about a group of students who started an open library in Pune. This seems to have sparked autorickshaw drivers, bloggers, professionals, etc. who maintained similar open libraries in their own spaces.

    A search for similar open libraries or for a list of them took me to the page of the Open Library project. The Wikipedia page of the Open Library project says:

    Open Library is an online project intended to create “one web page for every book ever published”. Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Hargrave Malamud. Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization.

    A perusal of the Open Library blog led me to reading posts by someone called mek, who turns out to be Mek Karpeles, according to the same Wikipedia page above.

    A search helped me find Mek’s MediaWiki based website. Once upon a time, when I was a Wikipedia editor, I too had wished I had had such a website. Kirk had such a wiki, but I can’t find it now. Another thing that I have not fully explored but loved is Mek’s blogroll.

    And thus the journey goes on, in a Web not intermediated by social media websites. When you click on links not only to find what’s there but not knowing how it will look like. That was the Web that I entered in 2004 and its good to be back there again.

    Anu Atluru said this better than me in a note on Substack:

    I wish publications in the Substack app had as much personality as they do on web. I get the standardization but it makes the vibe less personal, less like stepping into the writer’s world, and more like modern “social media” sameness.

    This rabbit hole helped me learn more about libraries and blogrolls. Maybe they are similar? I already have a library worth of books under my children’s bed in storage. I want to implement some kind of blogroll on this blog as well.

    That may need clicking on another link rabbit hole.

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  • Weekly Notes 10/2025

    I returned to work this week, working from home, after the surgery. I am slowly catching up at work. My consumption of OTT content has gone up, in terms of hours but I have started reading The Times of India, RSS feed, and newsletters on the mobile in addition to the books.

    Reading

    1. Tiny Experiments, Anne-Laure Le Cunff
    2. The No Book, Tim Ferriss and Neil Strauss
    3. Discworld Rules, Venkatesh Rao
    4. With Great Power Comes No Responsibility, Cory Doctrow

    Writing

    I tried to write a few Status Update posts here using Wordland that Dave Winer made. This was bought to my notice by Doc Searls.

    I agree when he says in a later post that it feels like tweeting. I have been off social media for the past one week. I think writing with Wordland makes up for the writing I lose because I am not on social media.

    Watching

    I was happy to watch Toll Free Traveller again.

    This was a different podcast with Shephali Bhatt compared to the one she did with Amit Varma.

    You can read this blog on your favorite RSS feed reader or via e-mail by subscribing below.

  • Talk on Space Technology and Policy at Takshashila

    I gave a talk to a small crowd of Takshashila alumni on space technology and policy. A couple of people who could not attend the talk asked for a post for those who could not attend.

    I wrote this brief X thread-post about it:

    https://twitter.com/pradx/status/1885372822664380742

    But, I wanted to write in more detail.

    Technology Trends

    Technology trends I am seeing:

    1. 2025 will be the year of space robotics.
    2. We are moving to liquid fuel (including Cryo and Semi-Cryo) engine tech.
    3. We need more investments in science.
    4. We are building the basics of humans in space experience.

    From the space robots demonstrated on the SPADEX and the POEM-4 mission to Vyommitra flying on board some of the first human spaceflight missions, I think this year will be more about space robotics than anything else. ISRO has also been conducting robotics competition.

    I think we will slowly begin the move from mostly solid to mostly liquid fuel rocket engines like the US and Russia.

    I don’t think we are investing enough in science. The first issues we will face because of this is not able to do cutting edge science in the places we are able to go to on the moon and Mars. We will also not be able to use our capabilities to look for minerals and people for any useful thing.

    I think of space right now as only a logistical capability. If you can build trains but cannot use it to move people and resources, it is basically useless. I think we will face a similar roadblock with our space missions if we do not invest now in science.

    Policy Trends

    We need the Space Activities Bill. We are seeing good people do good work at institutions like ISRO, NSIL, and IN-SPACe. However, this needs to be institutionalized so that the work happens despite the people.

    Despite various achievements, we have nascent regulators for a nascent space sector. If we are not careful, regulatory capture can kill the new players. There does not seem to be any legal recourse in case this happens now.

    You can read this blog on your favorite RSS feed reader or via e-mail by subscribing below.

  • The Notebook by Roland Allen

    The algorithm seems to have worked overtime to recommend this book to me again and again. This is a Eurocentric history of the notebook that sometimes seems to be endowed with powers like saving us from doomscrolling to helping get things done.

    I read about the book first on Julian Hess’ Substack called Noted. I then heard his interview on YouTube with Parker Settecase.

    The book showed how the notebook that started with helping many Italian city states keep accounts affected many areas of European life. It helped artists make drafts, it helped people write about important life events, it helped novels be copied into notebooks as commonplace quotes, and as a diary. I found more fun reading the last chapter on The Extended Mind, a paper written by Clark and Chalmers in 1998.

    I have not been very focussed with my note taking and note making so far. I intend to get serious now.

  • Moustache – S. Hareesh (translated Jayasree Kalathil)

    A Bookstagrammer accused me of reading Murakami and not S. Hareesh. I was indeed reading Haruki Murakami’s latest book, The City and its Uncertain Walls at the time and felt guilty.

    It took me a couple of replays to get the name right. A search revealed that S Hareesh was a Malayalam author. He had written Meesa in 2018. It seems to have been controversial at first but which then won much acclaim.

    The book was translated as Moustache into English by Jayasree Kalathil and the Audible version was available when I searched for it in January 2025. To be fair, I wanted to consume S Hareesh just the way I had consumed Murakami. I enjoyed the narration by Mary Joseph.

    The story, at its heart, is the story of one man who grows up in Kuttanad in Kerala. He grows a moustache to play a role in a drama staged there. His acting strikes fear in the hearts of the people who watch the play.

    The moustache then gets endowed with fantastical powers. People make sightings, associate the moustache with various mysterious events, and create a myth that grows through the story.

    Add the magical pre-electricity Kerala as a backdrop, you get a mixture of the magical and the fantastical. Add people’s ego, imagination, and fears, and I think you get a good idea of what Moustache would read like.

    Listening to this book made me realize that I had such an imagination when I was a child. I was mesmerized by the customs, temples, and traditions followed in Kerala that I witnessed on my summer vacation trips there.

    But, I too imagined magical and fantastical stories behind temple paintings and wooden carvings. That same imagination kept me company when I walked with my father and mother at night along the paddy fields which stopped the road from reaching my father’s ancestral home. The swinging arcs of the torchlight in my father’s hand was the only tenuous link to reality.

    Education seems to have filled me with rationality that made me lose touch with that wild imagination. Reading this book seems to have rekindled it.

  • Weekly Notes 09/2025

    There are 2167 Sundays left. I missed the last few weeks of Weekly Notes as I was not well and then I had to undergo surgery. I am recovering well.

    Tim Ferriss seems to be back to blogging and has an interesting line in the second or third paragraph on his posts on The NO Book:

    I deleted all social media apps from my phone, but I will read all of the blog comments here.

    I did the same today.

    While I was considering the decision, I asked Grok, X’s in-built AI if being on X has been worthwhile for me. It said:

    You’ve sunk a ton of time—let’s call it 6,000 hours—into X over 18 years. For that, you’ve got a tight-knit niche, some blog traction, and a handful of proud moments (Chandrayaan 3 was your peak). But the numbers don’t lie: 368 followers and mostly single-digit engagement mean X hasn’t catapulted you anywhere big. If you enjoy the ride and it feeds your space passion, it’s not a waste—call it a hobby with perks. If you’re chasing clout, cash, or a wider stage, it’s a slog with diminishing returns. X gave you a megaphone, but it’s a quiet one in a loud room.

    Most users (80%+) never crack 1,000 followers, and you’re beating that curve—but not by much. Compare to your blog: pradx.in feels more like you, with deeper impact potential. X is a sidekick, not the hero. Worth it? Barely, if joy’s your metric. Otherwise, those 6,000 hours might’ve built something bigger off-platform.

    This helped me make my decision.

    Reading

    1. Collected Fictions – Jorge Luis Borges – I am listening to this on Audible.
    2. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and its all Small Stuff – Richard Carlson – I am reading this on the Kindle.

    I also read a few interesting articles that I enjoyed reading.

    1. Review of Divided Highways, Tom Johnson: Tom Johnson wrote a review of the book Divided Highways by Tom Lewis. The book is from 1997 about the construction of the national highways in the United States and the anthropological effects of the construction. It also talks about the engineers who worked in the project who were only worried about the engineering and not about the human toll of their work. Since India is also at the brink of a similar expressway construction spree, this piece resonated with me.
    2. Modernity Viewed from the Other End, Venkatesh Rao : Venkatesh Rao wrote a review of the book Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires by David Chaffetz. I had earlier watched Anirudh Kanisetti on Instagram on the role of horses in the Deccan but this book expands the scope of trade. I like the comparison he drew between steppe horses and ship horses in the Mediterranean and the various government systems they spawned.

  • Weekly Notes 05/2025

    I missed writing the weekly notes last week because I was not well. Sorry. 2171 weeks left.

    I gave a talk last night on OpenTakshashila on the trends in space technology and policy. The talk was brief and I did get lost while talking in the middle. I wrote a brief X thread on what my main talking points were. I will also write a more detailed blog post based on these talking points soon.

    I reduced the time that I spent on X, BlueSky, and Mastodon this week. It was more than the time I spent on these websites in the week before this.

    Writing

    I wrote the two newsletters:

    I am also following along with Brandon Sanderson’s Writing Course on YouTube. I am planning to use it to improve the story I started writing on thinkdeli for NaNoWriMo 2024.

    Reading

    I finished reading S Hareesh’s Moustache. I am yet to write a review of the book. I am presently reading two books:

    • The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Rolland Allen (56%)
    • Boulder by Eva Baltasar transl. by Julia Sanches (19%)

    Watching

    I watched these over the last two weeks on Netflix:

    • Sakomoto Days (ongoing S1 E3)
    • The Night Agent (S2)
    • Back in Action (movie)
    • Asura (S1)
    • The Playlist

    I watched these over the last two weeks on Prime Video:

    • Paatal Lok (S2)
    • On Call (S1)

    I watched this video on YouTube that I really liked, besides the Sanderson lecture.

    I had once read a book on this that I wrote about here. This one by Vikas Divyakirti is in Hindi and much more crisper and clearer. I also saw the video on Charwak by him and I was left wondering why we can’t bring this philosophy to the twenty first century.

    The illness last week means that several blog posts are pending on here. I will get to work on those shortly.