The demons conspiring to chain us down – a look at our mental blocks

We have come up to the third post on this blog, and given my history of abandonment and procrastination, it already is, something.

The last couple of years have been a bit of a mental muddle for me, especially the last one. Initially, it felt like a passing phase but then it stretched. I felt like a fake, trying to hold a facade, I had become afraid of failure, of trying, my eyes constantly lingered on the destination and not the trail. At times I longed for someone with whom I could lay bare these vulnerabilities of mine, someone who wouldn’t stab me with my armour off. All of this unpleasantness forced me to look at myself and troubleshoot what was going wrong. Yes, there were a couple of external factors playing their part but today, I believe all of it distils down to one single point, I was unable to respect myself, no longer proud of being myself.

The stage for this was set in the first two years of my college. I cannot speak for all institutions but the Indian Institute of Technology BHU has this culture where effort is downplayed and the results glorified. Essentially, the higher your perceived result/effort ratio, the bigger your clout. All of this didn’t matter to me initially, as an underdog, just another random face in the crowd. But then time passed and as everyone does, I too started having an impression in my tiny portion of the universe. I started growing a reputation of someone who knew how to get things done, how to build things that worked, also came the reputation of someone who didn’t study his coursework. All good, even enjoyable for a couple of years, but then things changed.

As a natural part of growing up, I moved on to bigger, more complex projects but I had already set myself up for failure. I had developed a fear of failure and far worse, a fear of lowering my perceived result/effort ratio. A larger project brings with it bigger challenges, which need more effort, ingenious and maybe far fetched solutions, but every time a project floundered, instead of doubling my efforts, taking more creative, more risky approaches, I would instead cut losses(risk/effort ratio) and bail off. A couple of consecutive failures take a big hit on your confidence and you begin anticipating failure, spiralling into a self-sustaining vortex.

I picked up a camera in the third year of my college, quite determined to learn photography, Starting with books and blogs, I got reasonably good with object photography since I could practice that in my room, alone with no one else there to judge the results. The problem was that I could not click people, presented with an opportunity to click people, my brain would suddenly find itself dropping down a well of laziness, it would find something more important, urgent. Once in a while, I would win in this battle against my own insecurities, but often I failed. The point to be noted here is that quite often, the thing we most dearly want is also what we are most afraid to go after since we have attached too much value to it. We become afraid of failure, holding off till a hypothetical day when we will be fully prepared to take on the challenge, a day when we would have eliminated every probability of failure. That day never comes.

There is a misguiding force in our heads. It pulls us away from our strongest calling. I have been a victim of this force, still am, probably a lot of us are. Look out for the things you are most reluctant to pursue, hidden underneath would be your deepest desires, run after them ignoring every misleading story that your brain makes up, you would find happiness.

The writer William Faulkner was once asked ‘Do you write on inspiration or on a schedule?’ Faulkner replied. ‘Well, of course I write on inspiration, fortunately it strikes every morning at a quarter past 9.’

GET UP AND GET CRACKING. EVERY TARGET OUT THERE ASKS FOR A PAYMENT IN THE CURRENCY OF EFFORT AND EFFORT ONLY. PAY THE BILL TAKE YOUR GOODS HOME.

Judging people by their clothes – musings from a visit to the bazaar

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Humans have a subconscious analyser that kicks in, the moment we set eyes on another person. This background process of forming a first impression is there for a reason, it gives us an estimate of the other person’s mood, attitude, social status and possibly a lot more. This approach, despite being quite effective in steering us clear of gun-slinging terrorists, fails quite often in modern society. Our society today is growing more secure every day while also turning into a cauldron of randomness, of individual choices that few others can appreciate. In this evolving society, I see a decline in both the requirement and the effectiveness of an initial judgement.

The way we dress and accessorise has been a very important and effective marker in this evaluation, sometime back this was leveraged to create the fashion houses of today. They fuelled this trait with ad campaigns aligning their brands with affluence, power, control and character, pushing us towards a society wherein the tag on our shirts become our identity. This kind of marketing wherein power is drawn from the no. of people believing the story has a multiplying effect. The more the no. of believers, the greater the incentive to pay for your tag. There’s also a problem with this approach, a lot of this brand value also comes from exclusivity. If everyone had the same tag, how would you stand out? Why would you pay the premium? Hence the pricing, just right to keep it from becoming pedestrian.

Amongst all of this hullabaloo, there’s a growing no. of people who are shunning “dressing-up”, instead choosing to spend on things with more substantial value, books, hobbies, travel. They are so very confident of their inner-core that they no longer have to derive importance from others. People judging us, also has an inductive effect, what others think of us and what we think of ourselves is linked. To not care what the external world makes of you, requires a discipline and confidence that takes time to build, but here as well the growth will be exponential, as more and more people decide against spending on fashion brands, it will keep becoming easier for others to shun these tags. In fact, its only natural for everyone to prefer more comfortable, cheaper clothing. In a world with no place for judging people, there really is no market for today’s flashier brands.

To a world in pajamas!!!(building rockets😉)

INDIA 2020-My Perspective and Vision

I wrote this piece 7 years back, sitting in a TIME class. Thankfully, I came to realize that the class was not for me but the thoughts penned here, still resonate true. We are well on our way, Education has improved, Taxation has become simpler, and Infra is coming up fast. I remain incredibly optimistic.

A perspective from 2015 –

It’s difficult to see 5 years further but as I clear the haze and form a picture of what India would look like 5 years down the line, I see an athlete going full steam, a nation running headlong into the future making up for all those lost years, to regain its place at the top. As my heart begins to rejoice this image, my right-brain gets to work, pulling me back to reality, to the reality of some fundamental challenges we face, illiteracy and poverty.

The vision of this proactive India stems from the rapid growth witnessed in the post liberalization period. The good thing about this growth is that India’s growth and exports have not been labor intensive but knowledge intensive. India hence has a strong footing for accelerating growth in the years to come, not just as a manufacturing hub but also as an innovation hub specializing in frugal engineering. As growth subsides in the Chinese and Korean economies, India has the potential to come up as a manufacturing hub, but this potential will not translate into reality unless we correct a few basics. India is by far one of the most difficult countries for business, unclear and complex tax laws, red tape and lack of trained human resource are dragging India’s Manufacturing sector.

Political parties find it difficult to rise above personal differences and work for the nation, the recently stalled GST bill brings forward the anarchy in our parliament. Every government since Independence has been Indifferent towards education, only recently the AAP government broke the jinx doubling Delhi’s education budget. No country can dream to develop without an educated society, the Chinese and the Koreans understood this at an early stage and invested in their primary and secondary education system, the fruits of those efforts are showing up. By 2020 I see India rushing to boost its primary and secondary education system as it understands the role education plays in empowering society.

There has been a better time to invest in India as it prepares for a new dawn. The huge market offered by India makes it very attractive for multinationals to invest in. This investment brings with it jobs, which in turn effect societal upliftment. I believe we are standing at the most crucial juncture in the history of independent India. Raising Venture Capital has become relatively easy, bank loans are easily available and per capita income is encouraging people to start their own businesses. Entrepreneurship is the buzzword, new and innovation driven companies are coming up every day. Constraints aside, India has arrived at the world stage with growth in its cross-hairs. Any walls separating us from our target will be brought down be it illiteracy or poverty. I see 2020 as the year of awakening for India.

The Steve, Woz, Sculley dilemma

Hello, lovely people of planet Earth. This is me again, Roy, coming to you direct in a slightly inebriated state. Recently, I have had quite a bit of spare time, and like all human brains, my thoughts too have a tendency to wander around when allowed the luxury of free time. So, I did a bit of that reflection thing and found three characters that kind of sum up my entire dilemma.

It seems like a long time back when we were just a few guys sharing a room, and at times sharing a dream, of putting a dent in this universe. Those were the JEE prep days, and maybe also a bit of Senior Secondary schooling on the side. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve had just come out and the four of us had one copy between us (those were the heady days of Flipkart), we couldn’t decide who got to read it first and so each of us got to read one chapter at a time, and thus the book went around. The excitement around that book carried on for weeks, every nuance, every character trait of his was a topic for discussion. We chided him for his estrangement of Lisa, and hailed him for his vegan quirkiness, for his obsession with A-players and his fixation with straight traces on the circuit board, mocked him for his ‘reality distortion field’, but soon enough Apple was the most valuable company in the world.

It was only a few years later that I read Woz’s version of it all. To be honest, it was kind of a letdown, nowhere close to the thriller that Isaacson had produced, of course under the direction of the maestro himself. Woz seemed way more focussed on the personal work that he had produced, rather than the story that Apple had written, his pride in his designs overshadowing the larger impact that they had. His dad being an electronics engineer at Lockheed, Woz got a really early start into the world of electrons and the plumbing that made them flow, his dad was a true Engineer at heart and instilled in him a pride for Engineering. Woz got hooked, and soon, was miles ahead of his fellow students, this feeling of being the best, at what he believed was the most important profession in the world(Engineering) kept him yearning for more, he didn’t wanna lose that lead. From those very early days, his designs were not just about getting something done, they were a source of pride for him, they were about doing things in the cleverest way possible, they were the canvas for his craft. This obsession led to tweaks here and there, that others would/could not care about, all these small innovations added up. This obsession with electronics also meant that he was constantly creating new designs and devices, each project added to his intuitive understanding of electronics and became a stepping stone to bigger, more complicated projects. All of this experience with TVs, computers, and calculators came together in Apple I to create a truly revolutionary design for that time, a computer that had a display and a keyboard in place of indicating lights and punch cards, a computer that stored a boot up program in ROM, so you didn’t need an hour of fiddling just to get it up. The bits and pieces had already been there, but no one had the cumulative knowledge to connect those dots.

Steve too was a quiet child and though he was also interested in electronics from an early age, he did not have the kind of exposure that Woz had. Steve’s dad was a mechanic and could only teach him some basic electronics. His childhood was kind of a story of missed potential, he got good grades but was bullied at school, to the point that his parents decided to shift in order to get him into a better school, where Steve got introduced to computers. He fell in love with the concept, but could never dive in the way Woz could, after all, Woz had his very own personal Aquaman, his dad. Later on, he would get introduced to Woz and the two of them would become good friends, goofing around, and then starting Apple Computers.

Now, while Sculley did write a book about his time at Apple, I never got around to reading it. So, we will make do with the prevalent public opinion and maybe interpolate a few observations of our own.

The starting of Apple was a two step process

Woz invents a revolutionary computer interface
Steves takes that idea, puts on a pair of Nikes and runs like hell

If Woz’s story was about pioneering designs, Steve’s story would be about sheer will. While Woz brought Apple into existence with his pioneering design on the Apple I and then the more mature Apple II, it was Steve who kept the ball rolling and ensured that Apple stayed at the forefront of technology, bringing together Engineers who could do it over and over, scouring the globe for technologies that could open up the next frontier, the GUI from Xerox, Capacitive Touch from FingerWorks, Gorilla Glass from Corning, et. al. The important point being that he knew exactly how much to stretch, which products could be made possible with the technology of the day and which ones would trip the company over. He could judge, how much paranoia added to the appeal and when to open up, say putting a USB on the iPod or bringing the Office suite to mac. Steve could take those decisions because he understood the technology, he himself was in awe of what computers could do and was driven to make an impact in the industry. Scully, when given the same mandate, made poor choices, both with product and strategy, this even though he had been a star at Pepsi. Licensing away Software, he diluted away their value proposition, with Newton he chased a product that was not possible in the day. Scully came from a business where his primary job was managing numbers. A technology business is fundamentally different from a bottling business, in a bottling plant the primary concern is to keep the taste constant, tech on the other hand moves really fast, the primary concern being to clamber on and stay at the top of the pile, especially for newer companies. Bureaucrats might be well suited to running cargo ships, but U-boats demand a Barbarian at the helm. Take the recent rise of AMD under Lisa Su(a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering), over Intel under Bob Swan(no Engineering Degrees).

Pick and Choose, Mix and Match –

The Bomb Maker – Woz
The Guerilla Leader – Steve
The Police Officer – Scully

There is only so little that we see

For many years, I believed that I understood religion and its place in this world- as humans evolved and started living in larger and larger groups, they needed a guiding principle to segregate good and bad. Religion was the document that provided this. How do you make people accept this? Tell people it was written by a superior/magical being. This made for quite a logical explanation and pretty much everyone around me agreed that it must be so. I have an educational background in science and so do most of my friends, we tend to be quick to accept explanations that validate the philosophies of modern science. It was not until I got lost and needed an Anchor point that I went back and further explored Religion and its place in our society, specifically Hinduism. Why so many Gods and Goddesses, why this elaborate scheme, why an effort to try and explain the workings of the Universe? These questions helped me look at Religion in a whole new light and I found a new answer. It is not something built just to contain society in a manageable structure and people within acceptable behaviour, it is also a framework built to help us evolve, built to be a guiding light for our growth, it gives us idols to follow, it gives us stories of hard-work, sacrifice, devotion, courage, and love.

This last weekend, four of us went out for an evening, we roamed around far and wide, ended up some 20 Km from home. Returning options were a cab against the metro, one of us wanted the cab, we tried booking one, three cabbies refused. I next went on and booked one for the nearest metro, so our guy took offence, it was an insult to his decision-making, wish, judgement, etc. The thing is that he didn’t know the whole story. There is also the question of the refusing drivers, one could get furious at them for refusing a particular destination but there is one particular trivia that I am aware of in our case. We had to travel from Delhi to Gurgaon and there is a Rs 100 24h-pass for taxis entering Gurgaon from Delhi or the other way around. A 350 bucks ride with a Rs 100 entry tax might not make sense to some.

Each one of us has a huge library of concepts and thumb rules that collectively form our view of the world. We draw conclusions from the way our life plays out, and then archive those conclusions, the next time a similar situation comes up, we quickly refer to this archive for efficient answers. Unless forced to, there is resistance to re-evaluating a problem, after all, we already know the solution. The issue with this approach is that loads is hidden from our view, and hence the conclusions that we draw are just informed guesses. Alright- So What? The reason it makes sense to know this consciously is that it helps us in being more open to new suggestions, ideas, and concepts. We can be less confident about knowing the absolute answer and might give others more ears, it also makes us more open to questioning and re-evaluating our decisions, to explore and gather as much information as is possible in a given situation before we make a decision.

So the next time your reaction to something does not seem to fit logic, remember that there could be years of reinforcement clouding your judgement, it takes strength to go against all of that and make the logically correct decision, at that moment. The next time someone suggests a wacky new idea, remember that they might know something which you don’t, perhaps it’s time you re-evaluated your definition of possible.

Our subconscious, individual definitions of happiness and the ensuing slavery

In a previous post I put forth some thoughts regarding personal productivity. Well, I had an extremely productive week following that, just one. The past two weeks have been unsatisfying at best, still, there’s this constant exhaustion, a lingering feeling of tiredness. Why is it that a productive week feels less tiring than an unproductive one? Why is it that despite knowing that I am gonna regret the minutes I spend scrolling my Facebook feed or those random YouTube channels with sciency claims, I still let those minutes slip-by. There is an endless list of things enticing us with small dopamine bursts, taking away small but significant chunks of our time, we know it’s a trap, but still, keep falling. This is an attempt to explore the emotional aspects that drive the output of our working lives.

Humans are happiness seekers, our radars constantly point us to our happiness beacons. The problem is, that often our radars can’t see very far. We tend to pick up more on the short-term dopamine potentials and in the rush to collect these small highs, tend to miss out on the larger beacons trying to give direction and purpose to our lives. The signal from these far-away beacons is often faint, making us unsure if that long journey is worth the effort, we perceive risk, we might never make it, that faint signal could be nothing but noise. In contrast, the short-term rewards are right there, they might not be a jackpot but the risk/reward ratio is lucrative. The problem is that these hits don’t last, the next day all of it comes back in full, as guilt. Is this the right way to spend our limited time on Earth? Running after transitory goals, missing out on our contributions to the world.

There was a time, I had no concept of music or poetry. I couldn’t begin to comprehend why men would put in any effort listening to other people’s tales, tales articulating their love or misery (often one followed by the other). Those were the days when moving coil speakers seemed far more interesting than the sound they produced. Today, I very well enjoy music and quite a gamut of it, even the colloquial Bollywood Romance, still can’t stand rap. The definition of happiness expands, shrinks and morphs for each of us as we tumble through our daily lives and this definition holds a lot of sway over us. The people we spend our time with, the things we read, the ideas we are exposed to, the way we spend our leisure time, all of it adds up to our perception of happiness.

Can we put ourselves in a mindset where leisure is pain and work is joy? Tune our radars to block out the distractions, allow us to hear those far away beacons? A mindset where the idea of an unproductive day haunts us so much, it is way sweeter to buckle up and work. If our definition of happiness is affected by the above factors, given the right inputs, surely we could hack into such a state. I know people have, I know I have, for brief periods.

How do we develop a reproducible, repeatable hack? That will require work. Work requires the right mindset. Oh, the hack was supposed to bring the mindset. Chicken, Egg problem here. I die ~~trying~~ lazing away. 😒

The pros of a fictitious lover

Time to put something in the Love bucket. Here are my thoughts from today’s drive, back home from work:

You get to experience Love the way its meant to be, the fairy-tale version
Our brain brews a concoction of qualities, so desirable that in a certain way they also become our inspiration
There’s none of that pedestrian, everyday struggle involved with a real person
There’s a feedback loop built-in, the moment you begin seeing too much of each other, your head tunes it down, cool-off for a while and it will slowly turn it back on
Even when the above control mechanism fails, your choice is the only choice, the character’s never gonna leave, you can leave any day
Absolutely zero logistical problems
A capacity to enjoy everything from Romance dripping songs to Dard Bhare Nagme, if you are lucky, you might even make a Shayar out of yourself

A hydroponic garden controller and a beginner’s guide to jump-start development with the ESP32

A couple of weeks back I started a project to develop a controller for my indoor hydroponics garden. This is the first in what will be a series of posts, bringing you assimilated knowledge from multiple sources while also helping me archive the development process.

Around October 2018, me and some of my college friends started an experiment in Hydroponics, we wanted to understand the basics and have a taste of how easy or difficult it was to grow a plant this way. Essentially, we wanted to dip our toes and test the waters with minimum time and effort. We started a single tomato(encrypted word) plant in a bucket using nutrients from Amazon and just left it out in the sun. It grew quite well for sometime but around December as the temperature plummeted, the plant began to wither, for a while we left it on its own but with further signs of impending doom, we decided to take it in and placed it indoors under a 100 Watt Incandescent bulb. The bulb was manually controlled at first but then we regularly failed to flick that switch on time, hence it was moved to an Arduino. In this upgrade, we also installed a Hair-dryer and a DHT11 temperature sensor for better temperature control. The plant flourished for a while but then stopped growing once again. The problem turned out to be in the nutrients, we had neglected checking the pH and salt concentrations. Anyway, we corrected it and had a reasonable harvest, but far from ideal.

The trial taught us a lot, but it also gave us conclusive proof of our laziness(wonder how engineers raise kids). Kids are something for the future but a garden was today’s problem. Hence this quick and simple project with the following requirements-

Control following parameters for the grow room-
- Temperature (DHT11)
- Humidity (DHT11)
- Lights (LED tubelights)
- Nutrient solution concentration(analogue, diy ec probe)
- Nutrient solution pH(analogue pH sensor off Amazon)
Logging of the above parameters for analytics(planned 😉)
Allow adjustment of the set-points through a web application or an android application
Keep local backup of the last received set-points
Issue alerts if control for any of the parameters is failing

An initial search for “IOT development board” yielded two prominent results, NodeMCU and the ESP32 dev board. Not having followed the IOT maker space for the last two years, these two boards were unheard of to me, but on-board WiFi and Bluetooth with a 240 MHz dual core processor for ₹ 500 was quite interesting. A bit more googling on the community, support, development options and examples sorted out the ESP32 as my platform for this project.

The ESP32 is a recent Chinese offering and is the go to board for IOT makers these days for its low price and handsome hardware. The board has developed a sizeable community and you can find support with relative ease, should you stumble.

There are multiple options available for software development, but three of the most popular ones would be ESP-IDF, Arduino and Mongoose OS in no particular order. I decided to take Mongooose OS and code in JavaScript as I will not be running any resource intensive tasks, the control scheme is relatively simple for all of the parameters.Also, I do not have much of a background in Micro-controller programming and this way I could execute the development with relative ease.

MQTT was chosen as the communication protocol for its ease of implementation, popularity(brings along community support) and robustness, in that order. The broker was chosen to be AWS because, first- its AWS, second- it is free for one year and third- didn’t have to buy a pi. Since, I was already using AWS, I also decided to use their Device Shadow implementation which basically creates a virtual device in the cloud that the UI can interact with even when the actual device is offline. The changes are communicated to the physical device when it come online.

How to get a Shadow service running with the ESP32 and AWS?

Register on the AWS website
Clone https://github.com/mongoose-os-apps/example-shadow-js and use the sample code for step 3, the code referred to on the below link uses an older AWS library.
Follow the steps on this page https://mongoose-os.com/docs/mongoose-os/cloud/aws.md
Use the files and folder structure from step 2 for further development

Non-Essentials and Quirks-

Save device configuration parameters during Flash-
- run mos conf-get in the mos UI, this prints a list of configuration parameters on the current device
- add AWS certificate and key files to the fs folder if configuring the AWS MQTT connection in mos.yml
- find the configurations that you want to be set during flashing and add those to the mos.yml file, the example shown below is for WiFi configuration

config_schema:
 - ["wifi.sta.enable", true] 
 - ["wifi.sta.ssid", "ssid"]        
 - ["wifi.sta.pass", "password"]

To set the time zone-

config_schema:
 - ["sys.tz_spec", "s", "IST-5:30", {title: "Time Zone: See formats for the TZ env var: \"man tzset\""}]

What happens in case of Run-time errors?
- The OS supports a very small subset of JavaScript, many regular keywords like switch-case are undefined, it will throw an undefined keyword error in such cases
- Certain errors like using undefined variables will simply hold the script from executing without any print
- Errors in function calls also result in a similar looking situation
Stack Overflow error-
- Due to the lack of a switch-case construct, I ended up using around 20 nested if-else statements in one case, and the OS printed a message – Guru Meditation Error-canary watch-point triggered
- This is a stack-overflow error and can be prevented by increasing the stack allocation, add the following lines to mos.myl, this is double the default stack size

cdefs:

  MGOS_TASK_STACK_SIZE_BYTES: 16384

Around 25% of the work has been done, I will be describing the project from a Hydroponics specific perspective when it is more complete, with the transducers, actuators and control strategy employed.

The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference

Words have multiple meanings, multiple dimensions associated with them. Building on this we can conclude that a word can also have multiple inverses, one along each dimension. Two of the most defining characteristics of love would be that it is a very strong emotion and that it is a positive emotion. Along these lines of logic, we could conclude that the inverse of Love along strength dimension would be Indifference and along the valence dimension, it would be Hate. It’s quite a valid conclusion but not a very useful one. In order to assign a preference ranking to these raw emotions, let’s bring in some context.

The Holocaust refers to the genocide in Hitler’s Germany wherein millions of Jews were massacred in the name of ethnic cleansing. Hitler was a man consumed by fanatic visions of his country and the Aryan race, this distorted love also led him to believe that the Jews were a subpar race and holding Germany back. So began the extermination campaign. But the question here is, how could society be convinced of such propaganda? In post-war Germany, the people needed something to blame for the loss, their national pride had been wounded. As Hitler gave them a target, people took the bait, quite indifferent to reality. Few cared for the truth, as the situation had no direct bearing on them. It is also difficult to believe that the rest of the world had no wind of the concentration camps. In my opinion, they too were indifferent.

Hatred and Love move hand-in-hand, often love for one results in hatred for another, sometimes in quite distorted and unethical ways, but to me the real killer is indifference. It is stealthy and lethal. What is worse than a couple which keeps bickering over minuscule matters? A couple that refuses to recognize bickering matters, a couple that would prefer walking away over spending energy on the situation.

Hate at the very least means that you recognize and associate importance to the other person, and once you have recognized them you begin to learn more, spend some mental energy on the situation. In a situation involving rational, liberal people this will more often than not result in a reasonable solution.

Love > Hate > Indifference