Author Archives: Abhinav Bhatt

Year 2024 Summary

When one doesn’t write much, starting something new takes the most mental toll. The cursor blinking on a blank page is daunting. The best way to get over it is to write about that feeling itself. Easy hack.

So, here we are, the year 2024 is coming to a close. Here’s a short summary of life in 2024.

Good Parts

Becoming a Distinguished Toastmaster

This could’ve been a separate post in itself but the fact that it isn’t sums up the feeling I have about it. For someone who was not really considered a great public speaker, achieving a DTM is a big deal for those who are in Toastmasters. For others, not so much obviously. But the fact that I have achieved this feat in 8 or so years (after kind of restarting with Pathways), it does feel like a coming of age. Through Toastmasters, I got a chance to meet so many various kind of people with varying talent but a common feeling of appreciating others in public. Appreciating others is an art but in Toastmasters, this is in its ethos. I am proud to be a member and prouder to finish the highest educational award one can get in it. I still think that there’s a long way to go for me to be called a Proficient Public Speaker but at least now the collywobbles are in control. Thanks to everyone who have been with me in this journey. Special thanks to a few folks who thought it was funny to mock my speaking style thinking I didn’t really notice it.

Parenting

Although I wrote about it already but this deserves a lot more because each day is an experience and learning. No matter what you can do for your kids, one always feel like they’re not doing enough. My kid has now entered teen-age. Teen is 3 in Hindi. The experience nowadays is a good teaser for how actual teenage is going to be after a decade. In short, I don’t know how to convince her to do what I say. I am going to keep repeating this phrase forever I think.

Bad Parts

Aging

I wanted to first have a bit of salt and pepper instead of sub-continent cricket pitch but what’s the fun in that?

Larry David said in one of the seasons of Curb, he didn’t believe in praying because he was bald.

Heh, thanks to Bengaluru water, general stress in work, and environment, I am balding faster than getting gray hair. Also, due to the pandemic mindset, physical activity has been tending to zero. Overall, the feeling is not great. But we cannot control it so entering the fourth decade will be done with enthusiasm instead of somberness. A lot has been said about it but when you grow, people you grew up with grow older faster. That is something I think about more than anything else.

Ugly Parts

Obesity

Instead of writing about it, it is better to do something about it. Let’s circle back after a few months.

Work-Life Balance

Honestly, and frankly, I don’t really get working remotely. It is not good for anyone. All we needed is an option to work remotely in case needed but as per my 5 years of expertise in this field, working from office and switching the mind off after the day was ideal. This wave-particle nature of WFH and Return To Office is stupid. I’d rather be given stress face to face instead of someone slacking me about it.

Things I consumed this year

The list is not too big though.

Books

The Anthology of Balaji: A Guide to Technology, Truth, and Building the Future by Eric Jorgenson. – 3.5 stars

Timeline by Michael Chricton – 3.5 stars

So I recently read ‘The Complete Maus’
So I recently read ‘Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!’
So I recently read: Same as Ever
So I recently read: The People of Indus
So I recently read: THE BEE, THE BEETLE AND THE MONEY BUG
So I recently read: Factfulness

TV

What we do in shadows – Excellent overall. Review some other day.

Succession – Excellent overall. Review some other day.

So I recently watched: Barry

With a hope of writing more, wishing the reader of this post, a Happy 2025 to you and your loved ones. Enjoy more, worry less.

Header Image is AI Generated, as if this needs to be said even.

So I recently watched: Barry

A hitman wants to turn his life around and become an actor. But his past keeps creeping on to him from behind and he gives hits after hits, from bullets and not with his acting career.

Making dark comedy is such a delicate task as one wrong move can totally change the tone of the whole show. I think, Barry nails this fine balance and comes off as one of the best shows I have seen. It has comedy in equal proportions as the brutality of violence in others.

Although past performance doesn’t guarantee future results, the creator of the show features someone who has written Seinfeld and Silicon Valley. The highlight is of course the lead Bill Hader who is mostly known for his gags in SNL. It’s amazing how comedians deliver the best tragedies. No wonder this show was called Breaking Bad of Comedy. All the ensemble cast is just brilliant too.

I have generally liked the movies of Coen Brothers, and shows like Fargo. This fits right with them.

Comedy has become so rare these days that one really has to really dig deep into the abundance of nonsense present across OTT services. I am glad that I found Barry. Highly recommended.

So I recently read ‘The Complete Maus’

I will get to the point straight. ‘The Complete Maus’ by Art Spiegelman is one of the best things I have ever read. I wonder why didn’t I read it long ago. For those who haven’t, the premise of the graphic novel is that Arthur (the author/illustrator) is talking to his father Vladek Spiegelman through some months/years and writing this very book. Vladek is a Polish Jew and a Holocaust Survivor.

Art describes Jews as Mice, Nazis as Cats, and other nationalities also as anthropomorphic.

The relationship depiction of the father-son duo is absolutely terrific. I mean, I could go on about how relatable this is and how truthful it might be across the world, but I don’t really want to go there at this moment.

Despite having watched plethora of World War 2 related movies, included some of the best works like Schindler’s List, Son of Saul, (and even Inglorious Bastards), this take still shakes you to the core when Vladek describes what happened back then. How he and his wife Anja got separated, met again, again got separated and eventually sent to Auschwitz and somehow survived, is thrilling, moving, emotional, and leaves you hopeful.

Even thinking of what some people had to go through gives one shudders. Although World War 2 is now something which happened 75+ years ago, humans haven’t really evolved and time and again we come across similar behaviors. Reading this reminds one of the horrors again.

The highlight for me is however the relationship between the writer and the father who has been so much. I strongly strongly recommend everyone to read this. This is one of the best out there.

So I recently read ‘Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!’

Sometimes you come across some books rather late in life (relatively) and wonder why you didn’t read this earlier!

This book is one of those books. ‘Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman’ is an autobiography of sorts. It has chapters from Physicist Dr. Richard Feynman’s earliest days when his curiosity led him to experiment and eventually becoming a scientist, to his stint in the Manhattan Project, and his teaching days and general philosophy in life.

Nobel Prize winning scientist Richard P. Feynman was one of the most interesting characters the field of Physics has produced. He was referenced a lot in ‘The Big Bang Theory’ but I didn’t take notice. But when he made an appearance in the movie ‘Oppenheimer’ playing bongos when the Trinity Test was done, I thought to delve into this book I had only heard praises about.

The title of the book is perfect because some of the stories are absurd. It can also come across as eccentric or even arrogance but one needs to read it objectively. For instance, when the Nobel Prize was announced for Feynman, he jokes about how weird he felt accepting it and meeting the royalty of Sweden. His relationship and general opinion about Humanities are very relatable even today as the world is trying to react to the advent of the Wokeism culture.

What I liked the most was his approach to understand anything! Rote Learning which we suffer from thanks to our educational system has been criticised a lot in this book. He stresses on not remembering definitions or terms, but understanding the concepts.

On a totally different spectrum, he details his adventures of learning new languages, traveling to Brazil and Japan, and being a frequent to pubs and making friends and girlfriends, as if a comedy show is being played out. It would actually be a very interesting one if someone adapts to a biographical TV show.

I enjoyed reading this and would like to read other non technical books of his. I have also heard a lot about the Feynman Lectures where his Physics Lectures were videographed. Anyways the interviews of Richard Feynman are equally interesting.

Adding my podcast to the millions out there today

Here are all the links for  your consumption (next you know the drill like, share, subscribe)

YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkUh-KUiNVmW9GyGISDxZP5AonIfqLwXE (All (and only) 6 episodes are available already. Tudum!)

On Audio Only Platforms, each episode will be released on Thursday Morning. 1st one is already out:

Tools Used

  • Canva for all the cover art and animations
  • Microsoft Clipchamp for stitching videos and audio
  • Zoom to record video interviews
  • Spotify for Podcasters as the Podcasting Platform
  • YouTube for hosting and sharing

Special Thanks to my Toastmasters Club Folks for allowing me to do this

More thanks to these people for inspiring me to do this project

Just a stone’s throw away

Dropping your kid to school for the first time is an experience in itself.

*wait I will continue this in a minute after taking a deep breath and seems like something is in my eyes*

It is slightly easier if the pre-school is just a stone’s throw away but leaving them there on their own is like someone grabbing your intestines and twisting them a bit gently.

We have been prepping her for a year by showing the school to her so she didn’t face any difficulty in adjusting to the place.  Just being a new parent and adjusting to not seeing her around is challenging. Handing over your biggest asset to strangers and then trusting them fully is something to learn. You think you can focus but your mind keeps going back to school. imagining if your kid is safe there or did you just hear her crying?

When I was sent to a school I know I must have cried buckets. Kids nowadays are built differently. Even schools are built differently and aren’t the same old dingy lit dungeons where a dragon (the teacher) is sitting there to split you open and gorge on your insides. Now they are airy, well-lit, and full of attractive toys to lure your kids. I hardly heard any teacher shouting at kids. And as I stay *literally* opposite that school, if they do shout, I will get her back instantly. *Eminem’s mockingbird song comes to mind*

As I write this waiting outside to pick her back up, the teacher told me she vomited after crying a bit but she is totally fine now.

I don’t know how to deal with such stuff.

Photo by Michał Bożek on Unsplash

So I recently read: Same as Ever

There was always an ongoing joke when I was growing up that if the weather forecast says it would rain, it definitely won’t rain. If they say, the day will be sunny, high chance that it will rain cats and dogs. Fortunately, the accuracy of weather prediction has come a long way and it is indeed really accurate nowadays. But forecasting remains a funny topic.

I spent the majority of the last 3 years working in forecasting for retailers. The algorithms take historical sales and inventory data and after applying a bunch of data science models, generate forecasts for the next few seasons. When it comes to retail, it is generally safe to assume that for mature market societies, patterns generally repeat seasonally. Thus, the forecasts more or less are pretty accurate. Of course, when drastic events happen, all forecasts go haywire but even those are nowadays taken into account and predictability takes into account such shocks and comes up with good predictions.

You cannot apply forecasting easily to many other things like Share Market, although people try their best to do so. Gambling and Betting on Sports play on human emotions and greed more than luck and forecasting abilities, I think. Another field that deals with prophecy is Astrology. It is beyond me that horoscopes are given such a big place in newspapers and people take pride in being from such and such zodiac signs. I can go on and on about this but let me not digress.

I recently read Morgan Housel’s ‘Same as Ever’. He surely is one of the most known writers nowadays who knows how to drive a point using stories. His earlier book The Psychology of Money was also a best seller and is often quoted. He explains, in this book, that no matter how much we can predict and play with numbers and emotions, some things never change and that is Human Behavior. Time and again, people do the same things, make the same mistakes, learn from the same mistakes, and the cycle goes on. Societies or individuals go through cycles of ups and downs and initially, we forget what we did then but later we realize. It tells that the world remains unpredictable and human attempts to tame it remain the same. Mediums might change but the primal urge to react to things hasn’t evolved much since our ancestors also reacted and adapted to changes in the same way.

It might sound pessimistic but rather the book strengthens the belief that if we have got into trouble, it is also the human ingenuity that can pave the way forward. I felt that it encourages us to experiment and use previous knowledge to come up with new solutions because even if nature cannot be predicted, people’s behavior remains the same.

As I mentioned earlier, I have been following Housel’s blog https://collabfund.com/blog/ for some time and all his writings and storytelling are highly enjoyable. Like ‘Psychology of Money’, I recommend ‘Same as Ever’ as a compelling book about the psychology of people.

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