Who am I?
What’s my purpose?
Am I my thoughts or my actions?
Am I my habits or the moments in between?
Am I my job and title or the person after the clock hits 5 pm?

Maybe I'm all of it, or None of it!
Maybe who I am isn’t a fixed answer, but, an unfolding question I live to answer every single day!

I had this quote on my instagram/X profile, "Life is just a markov decision process having zero expected reward with absolute certainty". A mouthful of mathematical jargon, but, in simpler words: only the present matters, and whatever you collect in this life, you'll leave behind. Or as Hrithik Roshan put it far better (with his charismatic dance moves), "Khaali haath aaye the hum, khaali haath jaayenge".

In the past few years, since I've been married and now a father to a beautiful girl, I've been thinking that can't be all. The things I feel when I'm with them can't be explained with my life's philosophy. That line isn't the whole song. There's more to life. I've learned that what you leave behind isn't your job, title, and posessions which are all transitionary and social constructs. The love we give to others, the things we build to help others, and the way we make others feel; is what makes life valuable and precious. So, I've rewritten my quote: "Life is just a markov decision process having zero expected reward with absolute certainty, but, with infinite potential, value, and love".

Just like the quote, in this blog I'm here to rewrite myself. In the pursuit of writing my haphazard thoughts into coherent words, I hope to find my soul, learn what nourishes it and help nurture it.

When I was little, I somehow picked up from my elder cousin that if you went to IIT, you'd do well in life. So when I entered high school, that became my singular goal: get into an IIT. And well, I did! After that, I never really paused to ask what I wanted to do. I just kept drifting toward the next shiny thing, chasing new opportunities, switching paths, and making sure I could build a stable life for myself and my family. In that drift, I lost what ultimately helped me get into IIT or made me happy, my curiosity. I'm not unhappy with where I am. In fact, I'm grateful! I have everything I wanted as that 10 year old kid, maybe much more than that kid thought was possible. Peace is still fleating. Is this what I imagined I would feel when I have all of what I imagined I'll have? Why? I suppose Social media is to blame; I guess to a certain degree. A targeted and hyper-personalized feed of videos about other peoples fabulous lives, shown to you in a small black mirror of yours you hold so dearly, certainly can't help. Imagine you feared "chaar log kya kahenge", now you always have to think what the whole world will think about you!

How do I get back that curiosity that I lost? How can I be more content and peace with everyday? With anything, I don't think you stumble upon what you want, the same probably is with peace. I recently heard a quote by Nikhil Kamath on his podcast, "Happiness is peace in motion; peace is happiness in rest", and I couldn't agree more. In this world, you can't go and sit on a mountain for days looking for peace. You have weave it into the nature of who you are (your everyday) to achieve it. So, in this continuous journey of life, I want to make a small dent by being delibrate towards peace.

As you can see from my other interests, I like systems, evaluations, building things and I think having a system to being more delibrate would atleast be slightly helpful. There are various frameworks known in various cultures, for eg: ikigai. Some frameworks are sold by gurus, self-help books, lifestyle reels. These frameworks could be Odyssey plan, heroes journey, moodboard, eisenhowers matrix. I am not a big fan of such books, but, I have many of them and did end up reading some of them 😅.

For this exercise to work, I'll go with one framework. Let's assume, life is made up of a few main elements, mental and physical health, family and close relationship, social life and friends, finances, career and intellectual satisfaction, spirituality. I'll try and give a personal score (out of 10) to each of these categories. The main objective is to give the score without thinking much and simple based on what one feels when they hear those words. Once done, we'll go over each category and figure out how important the category is to me and how can we improve on it.

Physical and Mental Health

Everything starts from your health. It is the foundation that everything else stands on. If you're healthy, you'll be able to support your relationships, family, go meet friends, work to earn money, etc. I ended up giving it a 4 as I've been struggling with addiction to 🍃💨. I have been partaking in the activity almost everyday for the past 2-3 years and weekly/bi-weekly for almost 10 years. My preconception of marijuana that it isn't addictive shattered a a year ago since I've been trying to quit, but failing to do so everytime. As I fell off the fitness wagon, I was exercising almost everyday for 7 years and then suddenly stopped due to covid, combined with smoking, both my physical and mental health has taken a bit hit. This requires a heavy intervention.

From now on, no more smoking. Not even a little bit. Let's go cold turkey on this. Secondly, to keep the cravings on the bay, we'll indulge into fitness, nutrition and the occasional cheat meal. There are majorly three things I need to focus on:

1. Nutrition: Your body and mind needs fuel to operate well. Eat clean most days with an occassional cheat day. Doing a fast every week will further help improve body's insulin response.
2. Mental and Physical Activity: Moving your mind and body allows it to learn its functions, explore its degrees of freedom, and grow. Practice any kind of movement, weight-lifting, calisthenics, cardiovascular exercises, etc.
3. Mental and Physical rest: It's only during rest, that you recover and rebuild. Sleep and meditate as much as you can. Sleep can be a great deterrent to marijuana. Whenever you feel the urge, just take rest and sleep.

I'll do a longer post on fitness, for now, the potential action is simple; exercise and eat healthy most days, rest and keep off the choo choo train everyday.

Relationship and Family

Currently, this area doesn't need major improvements. The only reason I think I didn't give it a 10 is because most of my intermediate family lives far from me. I guess, this is what every immigrant trades-off for a better work/life. We're okay with living far from our parents, as long as we can give them a shot at a better life. I sometimes think it's so foolish, you sacrifice the same thing you work so hard for.

One thing I will do to improve on this aspect, which I think is easy: Schedule one video call with a faraway family member every week.

Social life and Friends

I'm lucky to have great sets of friends! The people who care for me and my family, never back down in supporting me or having fun. The reason I gave this category a 7, mostly because I don't get to spend time with them as much I would want to. That's adulting, isn't it? Making plans take forever and everyone's fighting their own battles. At the same time, immigration doesn't just set you far apart from your family but your closest friends too. I hope to love and cherish every moment I spend with them but there's nothing I want to change here. This category can definitely can be better, but I'm very much content with what life has given me.

Financial

Should you even discuss financials on a public website. Probably not, but, you shouldn't discuss other aspects of life other. But, what is really private anymore (iykyk)? I was born in a lower middle class family and I realized very early on that money is super important to have a comfortable life. In a capitalistic world, practically, most people would put money above everything else. Recently though, I've learnt time is the most important thing. You might trade in your time for money, because it literally runs the world; But, money is only a means to an end. I hope to earn enough money to have a comfortable life and such that none of my family members have to worry about money. But, why did I really give this category only a 6? As long as you're living paycheck to paycheck, when you're only a few bad months away from losing the place you call home, how can you feel financially secure? But, what can I do to be really financially secure. For now, I'll continue to do a few things which help make long term wealth: Save and Invest regularly. I hope to do a larger post on this later as I try and unpack the secrets of personal finance.

Career and Intellectual

As you immigrate to a new country to make a career, sacrificing your proximity to your family, I feel guilt every moment I'm not working on my career. If you look at the Ikigai venn diagram:

• What you love: building, engineering and technology
• what the world needs: building, engineering and technology is obviously one of them
• what you can be paid for: corporations and governments generally pay good amount of money to good engineers. Lately, the best researchers and engineers have been earning in upwards of $100M
• what are you good at: I am moderately good at engineering.

What I do directly aligns with what I'm doing. So, why did I give this category a mere 5? In the past decade, my career and my skills have grown but I still feel largely behind my peers/colleagues. One of the reasons is the kind of managers I've had in the past few years wherein I've seen so many important opportunities just slip away from me. I try to find various reasons what happened, why I got left behind? That's just a futile exercise. Nothing can change the past, but I can take action to change it for the future, igniting the fire of curiosity again:

1. I hope to write a book on machine learning and publish it. This blog writing is basically a precursor to put me in a habit of writing.
2. I have already started to small businesses, namely, ActionSync and NestAura and I hope to continue developing them. NestAura specially comes with a special mission, close to my heart, making healthy life accessible to all!
3. I want to continue indulging in activities that keep me mentally active. I have started playing around with electronics and hope to even start board game design.

Spiritual

I don't want to comment on this section. I think I never understood or understand spirituality enough to say anything about it. In fact, in most cases, I've tried to run away from it. I've seen cultural and religious wars, people spewing hate for each other just based on the fact on which god/religion they follow. I never got the urge for it and I hope I never do. Isn't spirituality different than just the religion you follow? I think it is. But, again, I don't understand it enough to speak about it. I hope to learn and bring this more into my life. For now, I have other things to do 🙂.

Goals

The path ahead isn't about chasing another shiny title or external validation. A journey that starts with the sobriety, the first plank of wood in my new foundation. These six goals are my current anchors. They represent my commitment to rewrite my story, not just on this blog, but in my life, by living out that revised quote: finding infinite potential, value, and love in every deliberate action. I look forward to using this space to document the failures, the small wins, and the evolving answer to that unfolding question: Who am I?

1. Eat healthy food.
2. Exercise regularly.
3. stop smoking.
4. Spend more time with family.
5. Work on three things:

• Complete machine learning book
• Pet projects like ActionSync and NestAura.
• Follow the hobby of making electronics and board games.

6. Continue to save and invest.

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you find you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over again. -F. Scott Fitzgerald