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Update till Feb 4

Life

Last year in December, all the cousins gathered in Kolkata for winter which is a HUGE logistical challenge to pull off. However we managed and survived. It was an incredibly rich experience. As we all grow older, life happens and the time we can spend together with each other keeps reducing. When we were younger, we technically grew up together. Now, we meet twice a year. The time we have with each other is dwindling. I am extremely glad to have such a close set of cousins and family around me. Furthermore, it fills me with immense joy that every single one of my cousins are wonderful people to be around.

I got some gifts for the cousin brothers this time. The boys get left out very often while the sisters have been on the receiving end of a lot of gifts. I felt that I needed to tip the scales :P. The gifts were well received, for which I am glad. The boys were really surprised and they did try to pretend that they didn't care about the gifts. However, I have hindsight on my side. I know what it feels to be young and to receive gifts. Hehe. (note. The sisters were not left out.)

A new friend has happened to me and she has taken it upon herself to introduce me to potential partners. My personal history in dating and all things romance has been nothing but tragic. I am glad I have friends like this. I have my fingers crossed. More about this later. This section deserves its own subheading.

In December I attended a friend's wedding in BLR. It was beautiful. I was adopted by the groom's cousins and I loved it. They are a very interesting bunch. Spending the entire evening with them reminded me of my cousins and how close we all are. Prajwal, if you are reading this, THANK YOU so much buddy. May your kind grow. :)

Varsha was in town and we hung out after like a MILLION YEARS. She has been a constant source of strength and comfort over the last couple of years. The last time we spent time in-person was back in 2019 in Prithvi Cafe in Versova. I had forgotten how it felt to be in "the presence of" Varsha. I guess this happens when you spend a lot of time video-calling each other. We have this running joke between us that we should attempt to call each other every month at least. She is the kind of friend with whom you can talk after months and it wouldn't feel like it has been THAT LONG.

A very close friend of mine has some very interesting life updates. He moved out of Kolkata to Pune for a new job AND (and more importantly) he has found a partner for himself. I spent some time with them back in Kolkata. I am extremely happy obviously because this guy deserves ALL THE GOOD THINGS in life. They both look very cute together. I kept teasing them (yeah.... I still do that...). He also bought a car and is a good driver. :)

Life: Dating and Love

The only thing I care to admit is that it has been very long since I last dated someone and since I was in-love with someone (or at least I think I was)!!

I do not seem to have trouble making friends. I am a great friend (not my words) and I am friends with some great people. However, the lack of romantic love is slightly concerning. At this point I do not think that I would recognize it if it came and stood in front of me.

All of this is very subjective and there is no rule-book that you can read and figure it all out. A lot of this figuring out is trial-and-error and I have not done a lot of trial and error. Most of my learning has been through absorption. I am not sure if that is a winning strategy.

Anyway, we stay hopeful, we do the work and we TRUST THE PROCESS

Reading

My reading has increased slightly. This is mainly due to the fact that I am far less distracted than I used to be. Since I started escaping the tyranny of the screen, I seem to have more time in my hands (or watches).

Currently I am

  • Starting
    • Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
    • The Education of Yuri
  • Reading
    • Tuesdays with Morrie
    • Walden
    • The Body Keeps the Score
    • Attached
  • Re-Reading
    • A Psalm for the wild-built
  • Ending
    • Let my people go surfing
  • Listening
    • Wheel Of Time book 6: Lord of Chaos

I also read a bunch of smaller novellas/books
- Flowers for Algernon
- Metamorphosis

The list is long, but I am NOT reading all of them at the same time. Sometimes I do not pick up a book for months / weeks.

Outdoors

Sadly I have not been able to get outdoors much.
Back in Kolkata I would not step out because the air was just too bad.
However after returning to BLR, I have been slowly taking myself outside every day. Work gets over early and that is a nice thing indeed. I have a lot of time to myself these days.

I have started running and working out again regularly. Since I have been out of touch for a while, everything feels very difficult and has left me exhausted on most days.

I finally got the bicycle repaired and I have been taking it to work often. There was a lot of work that needed to be done on the bike in terms of maintenance and other things. I bought a fancy lubricant for the bicycle and I think this will extend the lifecycle of my bike in the long run.

TIL: You are only supposed to add lube to the chain and not the cranks and the cassette. I have been doing this wrong for all my life, about 8 years of cycling.

Work

Work is great. I still have a hard time figuring out that this is the reality now. My teammates are very kind and understanding. My manager was visiting India for a week and we spent a lot of time together, just talking about work and non-work things. He is from India and he spent some part of his early life in BLR; about which we spent a lot of time talking.

I made my first commit into the codebase at Cloudflare couple of days ago and it felt great. I am going to own a very important internal tool. I am very excited about this.

From what I understand, this role is going to be a very programming-heavy role which is a good thing. This is exactly what I wanted. A lot of the focus here is on getting the design right; so we spend a lot of time discussing the design elements of the project before writing code. It is a very rigorous process and I can see why this feels closer to real engineering like say how you would go about building a bridge or an electricity grid. I am glad that I have been exposed to this type of work-culture.

Cloudflare really encourages people to talk to others and learn as much as you can. I exercised this by asking one of our senior network engineers in London to walk me through an outage and the mitigation steps which they did very very nicely. The gesture blew me away. I really want to get into network-engineering once I am done exploring the breadth of my current role.

Whew, this is a long one. Thanks if you made it this far.
P.s. I am also trying to write more.