Introduction
As the famous philosopher Justin Timberlake once said:
What Goes Around… Comes Around
Perhaps, he is right. There might even be something as ephemeral as karma in this ethereal world. Anyway, my point is that life itself has a way of getting back to you. Whatever you think you’ve passed, whatever you’ve thought you’ve achieved, whatever you think you’ve let go… has a way of returning to you at a later point in life. Seems absurd, but remains true.
With your new-found knowledge of life experience, might be that you’ve come to like it. What an extraordinary thing is this consciousness, I tell you, it’s like water, ever flowing, ever-changing shape.
Three case studies
My hate for yoga
Being an indian abroad has certain perks, but also has its own disadvantages. I got raised with Yoga from a very young age. I did not like it and was totally pushed into it. I hated it so bad that i started doing Karate instead. I got to a brown belt which I was super proud of.
Pretty nice! No one has the power to force things on me, I thought. Life had other plans…
After moving to Amsterdam in the Netherlands - I started getting into bouldering a lot as a way to distress and get away from the keyboard. Eventually, I also caught the climbing bug. As is the norm, I started plateauing at around 6b-6c ish for a very very long time. It seemed impossible to break through those grades. This is when I got to the better climbers, and they had one word for me, Yoga. And, surprisingly, It helped. I was able to do a 7a in my life for the first time after using yoga as a way to restore and warm down. I am happy to report that I’ve finally gotten the yoga bug, and I love it so far
My hate for programming
I got introduced to coding way early on. My neighbor was a computer science major at his university (he would go on to get a PhD in computer systems or whatever, I don’t remember anymore). So, as with all other things, I was pushed for around 10 years or so into “computer class” for some reason. I had no idea what a programming language was at 10. I didn’t even understand English that well. Shakespeare made no sense to me when I was that age
So you have this and a highly formalized way of writing called the C programming language - this was the worst. I hated the blue screen, I hated the semicolons, and I hated the curly braces. Nothing made sense, you could just write a sentence in plain English. Why tf was there this need to follow this extra difficult “English” that just prints some stuff onto the computer screen or adds some numbers? It made no sense to me whatsoever. From then on, I had an aversion to being a software developer, or to computer people in general. I thought it was a waste of my time. I didn’t enjoy it.
We had a logo at school - somehow or another, I just would do magic with that turtle in the middle of the screen. Compared to the textual C console, this was waay more fun, and I excelled in computer science class at school. Fast-forward to high school, where we had MySQL and some kind of application building stuff called NetBeans. Again, this was a walk in the park. I eventually went on to top the school in our finals
Fast-forward to after I moved to the Netherlands. I got super interested in modeling and computational physics. I did an introductory course in Python, and it was awesome. The teacher was a cool guy, and he was super inspiring. He got me into Vim, Git, and all the necessary tools to get me ready to be a software developer. I totally didn’t have a clue then that these things would be immensely useful later. The MNIST dataset was just published two years ago, when I was still at the university. This was super nice. I was at the cutting edge of AI before I even knew it. I did some introductory courses. My first ever linked-in post was a text-to-speech model that I trained myself for 5 days on my laptop (link required). Nowadays, this can be done in an hour more or less, maybe ? Indeed, we have come far.
This is exactly when the Cambridge Analytica scandal happened. I had a feeling that I had to do something about it. I knew the literature, and I have the math from my main study. Not only that, but if I’m not getting any PhD positions, then why not? Why not start a company that does that? My first ever startup, Antai, went bankrupt eventually. That’s another story entirely
I realized that programming is power. It feeds me. I can do stuff with it. I can make money with it. Eventually, with all things, I started to like it. Not the programming that I was used to in academia, but the actual software development cycles.
It is indeed baffling and inspiring to hear the various trailblazing stories of all these entrepreneurs. And how they continue to shape the world even today. I realized this thing I have is power.
A few years later….
Here I am, when everything else in life is going to sh*t, and the art of programming provides the necessary respite. Some level of control in this chaotic world. The solace of fixing some grievance, providing some value - fixing one thing at a time. It is fun.
In both of these things, I give you a personal example of how long-held (dubious) beliefs breakdown and change. They change in accordance with my own self, so to speak.
This is strange, but refreshing. It goes to show that nothing—I mean, nothing - no belief system whatsoever—has its own perspective. I thought I hated these two things, but these beliefs have a “shelf life” sort of. Updating one’s ideas is therefore necessary.
Maybe we should all be sharks in the sea of information and belief systems. Always keep moving, always revaluing the importance of things. And how they are perceived by our own selves.
Just for the record, I don’t listen to Justin Timberlake anymore.