1.
Watched a series, The Old Man (Disney+), primarily since I wanted to escape and take my mind off things. It had some promise - of an old ex-spy who still can beat much younger professionals comprehensively and his daughter who he wants to save. Good writing - even though I was wondering if the profound dialogues about the meaning of life will really hold muster if we try to understand what it really means. It all sounds like zen koans or beautiful poetry and hints that someone has achieved enlightenment to be able to grasp bigger truths, but is it anything better than hallucination?
Watched a movie in the theatre after a long time, Premalu (Malayalam). It had many laugh out loud moments and I like the main characters from their previous movies (Naslen and Mamatha Baiju). I am not sure if my mood is colouring my perception, but I was thinking if this is degrading the expectations from average Malayali boys/men, who can use booze to forget disappointments or failures and gain sympathy, expect girls/women to take care of them, blame dysfunctional families for poor discipline and behaviour, stumble through studies (make fun of CBSE and math olympiad) and eventually succeed at life by emigrating to middle east or US/UK/Canada/Australia. I am probably intellectualising something which is meant as a light hearted comedy, sort of as a poor man’s Hyderabad Days (as opposed to the movie Bangalore Days).
2.
Finished reading “Thinking in Systems” by Donella Meadows. I should write a longer blog about lessons learned from it. I had been thinking for some time that there is an invisible thread connecting many of the philosophies guiding distributed systems development, microservices, buddhism, blockchain, complex systems, open source and how nature works. In my limited power to shape teams, I hope I can apply some of the learnings - in how hierarchies work, how feedback loops are setup, how to have more real time information flows, how to be comfortable with adaptive nature of teams and where to look for leverage to nudge them in the right direction.
3.
Continued to listen to long podcasts from The Seen and the Unseen and continuing to write bit longer daily journals. Even some days seem long where I think nothing significant happened, but once I start writing, a lot of things stumble out, thoughts that I was trying to connect from what I read, listen and experience. Slow productivity, slow living, consuming long form reads, not falling into the trap of short form content in any form, writing more, having longer conversations - everything I am coming across of late seems to point to this. Maybe a phase.
4.
I read something about building apps for oneself like having a “home cooked meal”. Creating something just to use within family and friends. I had come across a similar idea earlier too, about coming to an era of building personal tools rather than mass produced software. Something to try.
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