The Things That Save You

 

You don't always know when a passion begins. There is rarely a moment when you wake up and announce that this will be the thing you love. There is no ceremony. No great revelation. No music swelling conveniently in the background.  More often, you reach for something because you need it. You work because work makes sense when other things don't. You run because movement quiets something inside you. You lift because there is comfort in discovering that something heavy can become lighter simply because you have become stronger. You read because escaping into an author's world of thoughts and musings is sometimes easier than being present to reality. You clean the house because sometimes putting the books back on the shelf is the only chaos you know how to fix. And then you keep doing these things. For months. For years.  Until one afternoon, perhaps sitting alone in a coffee shop with a notebook in front of you, you ask yourself a slightly terrifying question: 

What if your entire personality—everything you call passion—is actually just a coping mechanism?

You can spend years examining yourself and eventually discover that almost everything about you has an origin story. Keep digging and eventually you can make almost every admirable characteristic sound vaguely pathological. Your independence was hyper-independence. Your ambition was validation-seeking. Your discipline was control. Your competence was protection. Your passions were avoidance.

Soon you're standing over the archaeological excavation of your own personality wondering whether anything about you is authentic or whether you're simply several childhood experiences wearing good jeans.

When you think of coping mechanisms, you probably think of the obvious ones. Drinking too much,  avoidance, emotional eating, doomscrolling, or staying in bed. But nobody warns you about the productive ones. Nobody pulls you aside because you've become exceptionally competent. Nobody worries when you get promoted. Nobody asks whether your five-mile run is an expression of athletic joy or simply the socially acceptable way you've learned to outrun disappointment and dejection. The world has very little objection to your coping mechanisms when they produce attractive results.

If people are unpredictable, achievement is reassuringly transactional. When life feels uncertain, you can always become better at something. And after enough years of this, you can build an extraordinary life while never quite asking what all that building was protecting you from.

Maybe you started running because you needed somewhere to put your feelings. But eventually there are mornings when nothing is wrong and you still want to run. You want the cold air against your face. You want the stubbornness of the first mile and the strange ease of the fourth. You want hills. You want tired legs. You want to feel the rhythmic metronome of your heartbeat in your toes and fingers. You want to come home sweaty and hungry and wonderfully present inside your own body. The run no longer takes you away from yourself. It brings you back.

Maybe you once threw yourself into your career because achievement made you feel safe. Titles mattered too much. Recognition meant too much. Being good at something became evidence that you were, somehow, going to be okay.

But then something changes. It's the joy of bringing structure to where there was chaos before, the satisfaction of making something work—reducing the noise a little and amplifying the signal a little more. And every once in a while, there is the rare resonance of an entire team becoming excited about the same thing. The quiet, reassuring peace of being in sync with momentum. Perhaps that is the distinction. It doesn't particularly matter why something entered your life. Maybe you ran because you were heartbroken, worked because achievement felt safer than uncertainty, or read because someone else's world was easier to inhabit than your own. 

The more interesting question is why you stayed. At some point the emergency passes. You no longer need the thing in quite the same way. And yet you reach for it anyway. Not because you are running away from something, but because somewhere along the way you discovered something there that was yours. The things that save you rarely tell you what they will become. Sometimes they arrive as armor and stay long enough to become skin. Sometimes they begin as escape and quietly turn into a destination.

And sometimes, years later, you look at the career you've built, the miles you've run, the books you've read, the strength in your body, the people around your table, and realize that perhaps it no longer matters why you started.

You stayed because somewhere along the way, you fell in love with the thing itself.

Passion doesn't announce itself. It grows quietly inside you, like ivy taking root, until one day you can no longer remember what the walls looked like without it.

Gulzar...

 ke din jadon ke hain,

khidki khuli hai,

dhoop andar aa rahi hai.

Wear designer saris, do social service and just chill

 I have an uncle, an influential and powerful man, who likes to give me life advice. The last time I talked to him, he said - " What are you doing killing yourself working hard at a corporate job, running marathons and living away from your family in some other country..." meaning well for me, he continued "...When you can be home, marry a bureaucrat, wear designer saris, do social service and just chill." 

Quite honestly, I was rather pissed when he said that to me. But today is one of those days that's making me question it all. Why did I come here to go to grad school and spend all my life's savings on it. The answer was very clear to me then. I wanted a larger playing field, more options to see where I can grow and become better. I had that wide eyed optimism and perhaps some degree of romanticism about the endless opportunities and great people I will get to work with. And that probably the reason that I threw myself into my work with all the honesty and earnestness I had - living and working in three countries and four cities over six years. These years have shaped me to become the person that I am today - definitely a more mature and wiser person, perhaps better at my job than I was before. I think the most rewarding part has been knowing the people that I have worked with - how some of them were kind and looking out for me even when they didn't have to. 

However, I never anticipated the extent of loneliness this whole experience would come with. How there will be a cost to speaking my mind and the truth as I see it. How my opinions, my suitability for the job I have and sometimes my very presence in a conversation will be questioned at times. What will make it seem more unfair is that a man saying the same thing I said with more confidence and less accuracy will  be accepted unquestioningly without resistance. How after more than 6 years of honest work at one job and 13 years in the industry, I will be sitting here thinking if just heeding my uncle's advice would have been a wiser decision. "Wear designer saris, do social service and just chill" - that does seem like a fun way to live life.

Fashion rules: Combat boots

I have always been a fan of combat boots for the comfort and edge they bring to any outfit. They are cute but the usual mid shin length makes them a little bit tricky to pair with pants and skirts of different lengths. So here are my rules of combat boots -

DO's -

Pair with skiny jeans or any trousers that can be folded to hit right above where the boot starts

Pair with shorts and fun tops for that boho music festival look

Pair with maxi or midi dressed to add edge to your feminine look

Pait with short dressed that end well above the knee

DON'Ts -

The only don't I have is to not pair them with any dress or skirt or trouser that hits the knee because then you will be segmenting your leg at two different points and confusing the visual elongation of your legs.

Refusing to use words does not erase history

I was recently having a chat with friends who were extremely upset about the word 'slave' being used for some computing machines, like master-slave in database replication where the changes made to the master copy are always replicated to the slave copy or in batch operations where a fleet of machines picks up compute jobs from a job queue and executes them. This got me thinking as to what is wrong with using the word 'slave' to refer to machines instead of 'worker'. The word slave implies a lack of agency and volition in choosing one's actions and the recipient of the benefits of these actions while the word worker implies a certain amount of freedom of choice in what the worker chooses to do and also includes the idea if fair remuneration for said work. Given these definition, calling a compute node a 'slave' is the right usage.

Now, if the word also reminds us of a historical period where a group of human beings treated another group inhumanely, and makes us uncomfortable then refusing the use the word won't make history go away. If a word makes you uncomfortable, may be you should introspect and work on yourself so that it doesn't.

What is love - 1

I don't why but I have found myself pondering this question lately. Today on a phone call, my friend said - "I love you and I will not judge you no matter what you do." and I thought perhaps that's love. Earlier this morning, I talked to a friend and she said - "Love is wanting the happiness of the loved one and constantly striving to keep them happy." When I think about some people in my life that I am sure about I love, I think that love is wanting their well being no matter what. When they mess up, I do judge them but I never stop wishing them well. I don't know how long-lasting love is but I did feel a pang of pain in my heart when I heard that my uncle who I have not talked to in perhaps 10 years was going through a lot of sadness. I was raring to hear that he is his happy jolly self again which made me wonder if it was love I felt for him or attachment to an image of a loving-happy-jolly uncle that I have preserved in my mind for many years.

So, the only thing that I am sure of is that when you love someone, you wish them well. The intensities and ways of doing it may differ but the basic intention remains the same.

To be continued...

Ex-Machina and sexism

I remember the movie Ex-Machina and how it depicted a guy's fantasy woman being created into a very lifelike robot. She was capable of feeling emotions, feelings, and physical pleasure. So I asked a guy if he would date a woman like that. He would know that she is man-made but won't be able to tell in any other way and he said, "Yes". I was a little surprised because the answer was a very loud and clear no for me if I were ever asked the question.

This got me thinking why when it came to emulating what we desire sexually and romantically as a machine, the natural choice for the movie makers was a woman. This is what makes me think that the objectification of women is deeper than the 'result of years of brainwashing by advertising'. Maybe when men think about what they desire, it's just a combination of a set of attributes and responses. As long as it's strictly in the desire realm, it's an object that they are desiring. If I could get inside the mind of a guy who is the average of the mind of all guys on earth, in a moment when it's at the peak of sexual desire, I would like to check what's being perceived as the cause of this desire and how much humanity is attributed to it. Maybe it's worthwhile to do the same for women too. and not just the average, we would also want the whole range and the standard deviation too. But I think there is a fundamental difference between how we think about what./who we desire.