https://samyaksahu.xyzSamyak's Nook2024-03-29T12:10:52.357495+00:00samyakhiddenpython-feedgenPerspectives of a 22-year old infant.https://samyaksahu.xyz/idk/idk2024-03-04T17:28:40.589718+00:00samyakhidden<p>When I was a little kid<br/>
I so wish that I knew<br/>
That being myself isn’t cakewalk<br/>
But not that shabby too</p>
<p>That everyone’s who nice to me<br/>
Might not be my best friend<br/>
And anyone who’s fucking rude<br/>
Isn’t Satan from hell’s end</p>
<p>That every blonde is not that dumb<br/>
That every <em>baniya</em> isn’t smart<br/>
That someone who’s great at numbers<br/>
Might be just as good with art</p>
<p>And all that my friends post, say and do<br/>
Wasn’t the highlight of their lives<br/>
And the best moments from their trip<br/>
Were not meant for our eyes</p>
<p>GPT's great at knowing things<br/>
But can’t convey that well<br/>
The thrill, the chill, the high and shrill<br/>
The things that make eyes well</p>
<p>But I don’t know, I’m still a kid<br/>
Or so I feel at twenty three<br/>
How sure will I be, growing up<br/>
Umm, well, idk, we’ll see…</p>
2024-03-03T20:40:01.142696+00:00https://samyaksahu.xyz/resolutions-2024/New Year Resolutions (2024)2024-01-10T18:11:12.731042+00:00samyakhidden<p>A flip of a digit in the YYYY section of the calendar might seem trivial, but it can be a start of something big. These psychological triggers (e.g. change in the year) can be used to make lasting changes that can change the trajectory of your life, or at least initiate that change.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">January 1 needn’t be “just another day”. Our brain can segment time in many ways. Only some are constrained by biology. Designating a calendar date as a starting place to achieve behavioral and/or psychological change is entirely legitimate. If you want a change, set it & get it.</p>— Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. (@hubermanlab) <a href="https://twitter.com/hubermanlab/status/1609641699747467267?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 1, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<p>I started off with my set of resolutions back in 2020. Because of the list of things I wanted to achieve, I was able to make use of unexpected extra time I got during the lockdown. In fact, as I talked about in an earlier post, I enjoyed my time in isolation because of the same reason.</p>
<p>After a failed set of resolutions back in 2021, I came back for public accountability and posted my set of <a href="https://samyak.bearblog.dev/resolutions-22/">New Year Resolutions for 2022</a>. As expected, it worked! Even though I was not able to nail my Resolutions as much as in 2020, I still was able to do a lot.</p>
<p><img alt="Samyak's Nook" src="https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/samyak-1704309198-0.png"/></p>
<p>The biggest fail was probably that I didn't publish as much stuff as I should have had. Be it music or blogs, I wasn't able to sit down and work on them as much. I think my 10-pull-ups-in-a-row resolution was a bit too far-fetched, especially when I was looking to gain mass (pull-ups get more difficult with increasing body weight).</p>
<p>I'll learn from my mistakes I made the last time and make this year even more interesting, with a variety of resolutions for the upcoming year.</p>
<hr/>
<ul>
<li><strong>Health & Fitness</strong><ul>
<li>Bulk upto 69 kg</li>
<li>Bench press 60 kg 1RM</li>
<li>Squat 90 kg 1RM</li>
<li>Deadlift 130 kg 1RM</li>
<li>Skipping for 10 minutes in a row</li>
<li>Rowing machine - 1 km in less than 4 minutes</li>
<li><del>Wake up every day at 6:30 am for the weekdays in the first week</del> Sleep every day before midnight on the weekdays for the first month of the year</li>
<li>WHM every day for the first one week</li>
<li>Less than 4 hours of weekly avg phone screentime for the first month</li>
<li>One meditation session per day using Headspace for the first month</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><strong>Creation & Consumption</strong><ul>
<li>15 minutes of writing or editing drafts for the first one week</li>
<li>10 minutes of reading blogs and/or books</li>
<li>One watch later video per day from the YT playlist</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><strong>Travelling</strong><ul>
<li>One international trip (TBD)</li>
<li>One domestic workation (TBD)</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<hr/>
<p>I'll also urge everyone reading this post to make your own "fresh start", be ambitious and keep it going as long as you can. Don't forget to get back on track just in case you lose it.</p>
<p>It's a new day, a new month, a new year to conquer!</p>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oHRNrgDIJfo" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>
2024-01-01T00:00:00+00:00https://samyaksahu.xyz/old-friends/Meeting old friends2024-01-03T12:55:40.190279+00:00samyakhidden<p>No, this is not about friends getting old; I'm too young to experience that.</p>
<p>This is about friends who were little kids at some point in their lives, have grown up, and are all leading their separate lives.</p>
<p>I’ve been meeting a lot of my school friends lately. One fine day, I went to meet my classmate of the 5th grade. On another occasion, I met my Delhi school friends I last saw in the 10th grade. I went on a trip with my friends, who I used to hang out with till the 12th grade.</p>
<p>I’ll try to sum up some common observations that I had when meeting these <em>chaddi buddies</em>:</p>
<ul>
<li>You have a strange sense of familiarity meeting them. There’s almost no ice to break, and you resume right where you left off.</li>
<li>This may be because they know you from your old anecdotes and memories. They repeat it in front of you like an annoying horn but with an added zing of some sentimental value. Mind you, good things about you are <em>never</em> talked about, and neither they should be.</li>
<li>This makes you behave like a kid around them -- like that 14-year-old you who knew nothing about this world and wasn’t nearly as refined as he might be today. That keeps you grounded and makes you realise how far you have come.</li>
<li>In your never-ending conversations, you rapidly switch between the past and the present. You talk about the people you’ve lost touch with and how inevitable it all was. While you feel good about letting go of some people in your lives, you have an added curiosity of getting in touch and knowing more about the people you genuinely admire.</li>
<li>Childhood impressions are lasting. Even if you’ve taken a 180 from the personality you previously had, your friends will try to find similarities between your old self and the new one and will try to expose the inner child inside you as much as possible.</li>
<li>You’ll also have a ton of fun hanging out with people who weren’t necessarily your favourite back then. You’ll hug them, laugh with them, look at them with awe and promise yourself to be in touch with them.</li>
<li>While saying bye to them, you realise how you’ll probably end up settling in different corners of the world and will see less of each other as time passes. That will leave you with a weird feeling.</li>
<li>When going back, you remind yourself to check in on your old friends every once in a while. You realise what you have between each other (trust, rapport, sense of humour, shared pains, and whatnot) is invaluable, and in a world mired with suspicion and trustless solutions, is impossible to find.</li>
</ul>
<p>So yeah, meeting old friends can be hard, but meeting them is so worth the effort! It’s the intellectual equivalent of climbing on top of a hill and looking down at the beautiful landscape that was once right under your feet.</p>
<p><img alt="Samyak's Nook" src="https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/samyak-1704034719-0.jpg"/>
<sup><em>A beautiful view atop the Savandurga Hill. I'm not uploading my friends' photos here lol</em></sup></p>
2023-12-29T19:02:11.698186+00:00https://samyaksahu.xyz/ttt/Turning Twenty Three2023-06-16T17:33:05.520596+00:00samyakhidden<p>It was a strange start to a special day.</p>
<p>I was in a cab back home. I should have reached before 12, but I wasn’t able to. It was mainly to do with my inability to keep my phone’s battery alive when I should be very careful about using it. I got bored on my flight back home, so I used the time to groove to some downloaded songs. My phone went off when I needed it the most.</p>
<p>And here I was: on the fifth of June at 11:59 pm, on a cab back home with my friends video-calling me to wish for my birthday. Spending the first days of being 23 with a cab driver wasn’t what I had planned, but here I was. Throughout my journey, I was thinking about some related themes.</p>
<p>Most of it involved me turning 23(!!!) and adulting. I moved places in Bangalore two days back, and all of a sudden, I felt much older than before. It was a strange feeling: it wasn’t unpleasant but at the same time, there was a bit of anxiety as I realised that I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone that I’m twenty-two anymore.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Chaotic. Adulting. <em>Chaotic adulting.</em> Adulting chaotically.</p>
<p><code>— brain</code></p>
</blockquote>
<p>It was also this feeling of running into a one-way door where I’ve longed to go for years. But now I’ve finally gone through it, I look back, take a big gulp and keep moving forward, for that’s all I can do now.</p>
<hr/>
<p>I started working full-time starting in <em>June</em> last year. I graduated college last year in <em>August</em>. My family shifted to a new home after six years in <em>December</em>. I moved to Bangalore in <em>January</em> of this year. I got into a proper 2BHK with a flatmate in <em>June</em> of this year. I <em>immediately</em> turned 23.</p>
<p><em>Wait, what!?</em></p>
<p>There have been a lot of changes that I’ve been facing. The pace of life has been faster than it has ever been for me. On one hand, I enjoy it. On the other, I wonder if I’ll ever miss being young.</p>
<p>It’s about time: I won’t be called a fresher anymore at work. I’ve even started helping out interns in my company and new people onboard. My sparkling new MacBook has started to collect dust in its crevices. I can’t call myself new to the city anymore.</p>
<p>There’s a comforting sense of naivety in being called <em>new</em>. You feel okay with not knowing stuff, and every new experience is a thing of wonder to you. But as you get used to the ways of working, the routes you take, the people you talk to — the same things that once felt <em>amazing</em> start feeling mundane. I just don’t want that to happen anytime soon.</p>
<p>Maybe that’s most of my concern with being an adult — getting familiar with doing what once seemed spectacular. But another concern would be that my life ahead is mostly unstructured.</p>
<hr/>
<p>You see, I’m not the only one facing dozens of lifestyle changes. Maybe it’s you, the reader, who has already graduated college. Perhaps it’s you who’s figuring out what to do next. Maybe you’ve resigned from a toxic workplace, or have broken up with someone not so right for you, and you wonder, what’s next?</p>
<p>Life in school feels difficult yet structured. You crib about your everyday pains, but at least you know there’s an expiry date to it. You'll be set as soon as you graduate, you say to yourself. But look at you now, how’s adult life treating you? 🙂</p>
<p>Apologies if all I’ve done is scaring you till now. But you see, there’s always an expiry date - to this universe, and even to <em>the school of life</em>. The only thing that’s changed is your play area — if it was a 10x10 foot turf earlier, you now have the entire football field to yourself. You have a lot of room to run but don’t know where to start.</p>
<p>What has worked for me — or should work for me, I believe — is just to keep moving. Crawl, trod, hop or do a full-blown sprint; you must keep moving. If you don’t know which way’s the goal, you pick a side and start marching. You can course correct yourself later. Displacement doesn’t matter here, but the distance you covered indeed will.</p>
<p>Whether you pass or fail, whatever you do will eventually lead to some experience. All you have to do then is write like a madman (yes, me), reflect on where you are heading, and slowly course correct. Where ever you move will lead you to somewhere; <strong>the only important thing is to keep moving</strong>.</p>
<p>Okay, enough of acting like a know-it-all dork. I’m cringing already as I’m reading the paras above. <em>For now, all I know is that no matter how good or bad things look today, it will all be well someday. Because, in the end, it always gets better.</em></p>
<p><em>Or does it? Guess we’ll have to see!</em></p>
<p><em>Happy birthday to me!</em></p>
<p><em>What a feeling it is to turn twenty-three!</em></p>
<h6 id="here-s-a-cool-indie-song-i-recently-discovered"><a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/5V6XcXBrCGI6JOeYr4Uyo3?si=d8cb73297afe4885" target="_blank">🎧 Here's a cool indie song I recently discovered.</a></h6>
2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00https://samyaksahu.xyz/self-care/Making a case for self-care2023-03-30T20:23:46.499041+00:00samyakhidden<blockquote>
<p><em>It's been a hard day's night</em></p>
<p><em>And I've been workin' like a dog</em></p>
<p><em>It's been a hard day's night</em></p>
<p><em>I should be sleepin' like a log</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjyj8qnqkYI">— The Beatles</a></p>
<hr/>
<p>After a few hard weeks of adjusting my social battery to meet new people, finding a place to stay, attending the office regularly (after years of not attending <em>anything</em>), working at odd times of the day and working out; I decided to lay down on my bed and sleep.</p>
<p>I wake up after 12 hours, brush for 5 minutes and clean my tongue, shave to <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWVvXA824aCbn?si=ba07a1934a294257">my favourite jazz playlist</a>, trim my nails, take a relaxing shower, moisturize my skin, stow my phone away in a corner of my room and just sit in silence. Doing absolutely nothing.</p>
<p>After many happening weeks (and even more happening weekends) ever since the start of this year, I had a tiny epiphany. I’m saying that it was a tiny epiphany because had it been a large one, you’ll make fun of me because I was taking a dump while thinking about all this.</p>
<p>So, I had this tiny epiphany thinking why do I deserve self-care. Isn’t it all unmanly? Ain’t I supposed to be young and wild and up and running 24x7x365 till the time I turn 30? After all, as of today, my body can tolerate all that I throw at it. Sleep deficits, brutal workouts, tons of junk food, excessive booze, countless rejections, skin infections — you name it.</p>
<p>But then again, I thought to myself: should it?</p>
<p>Should it tolerate all that I throw at it, that too for no good reason? Agreed, there are times when things keep coming right at you, and you don’t have the time to wind back to your bed and catch rest. Sometimes the opportunities are too good to pass. Sometimes there is a unfairly large reward for a relatively small amount of risk. But if it’s none of that, then why shouldn’t I take some time back to recharge?</p>
<p>I realized how tired I really was when I went back home after spending close to 2 months settling down in Bangalore. I had multiple days of sleeping for 10 hours or even more, not going out anywhere, getting to play with my little friend — the ukulele, and some other little friends — my younger cousins, 8 and 14, who came to visit us.</p>
<p>If you had asked me for a trip plan, a cool hackathon/product teardown idea, a night at some club in the city or even a few hours worth of video calls/chats, I would have outrightly rejected it. And probably that’s why I hardly made any calls or came down to visit anyone anywhere while I was chilling at home.</p>
<p>Why? Because my body <em>really</em> deserves it.</p>
<p>It does so much for me. My bones and muscles allow me to sit and stand and dance and roam about like a regular human being should. My face helps me communicate with people I know and love (and get me a date or two lol). My brain helps me think of crazy and scary and lovely and annoying things. My internal organs and the various other systems of my body help me function in ways I so often overlook. If I somehow manage to never overlook what all do my bodily systems do for me, and how <em>normal</em> they make me feel, I’ll probably be happier in general than ever before. Happy to report, that I’m inching closer to that point!</p>
<p>I think that my body deserves the care and love I give it occasionally, despite the fact that I’m at my most resilient self at this age (at least that’s what my elders tell me). And that’s not only because I want my bodily functions to sustain, but also because I’m grateful for all that my body does for me. All day, everyday.</p>
<p>Sometimes this self-love is tough. Sometimes it involves me pushing to my limits and seeing them move further. Sometimes it’s also to venture out in this amazing world and try to absorb all that it has to offer. Sometimes it’s about delaying the pleasure of being for sometime to enjoy a greater sense of being.</p>
<p>Just like with most other things, it has to be a delicate balance. A balance of pushing yourself to become the best, savouring all that the present has to offer and taking some off to treat yourself like a baby. Because life is tough, and <a href="https://youtu.be/QbObB81Rujg">the brakes of this goddamn F1 car need to cool down so that they can work properly!</a></p>
<p>To be honest, I don’t even know the point of writing all this. Perhaps it’s to justify and remind myself of the occasional moments of leisure that I often underrate because others are doing so.</p>
<p>After all, my brain also deserves to see its beautiful chemical abstractions on an electronic medium, like this blog page, and be happy about the fact it’s coming back to the writing groove and posting more and better stuff in the upcoming months.</p>
<hr/>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Heee-Heee</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UGliJzlhew">— Micheal Jackson</a></p>
2023-03-30T20:12:56.683938+00:00https://samyaksahu.xyz/projects/Projects - v0.12022-10-29T02:44:53.420353+00:00samyakhidden<h1 id="thoughts-around-social-media-and-other-tech-that-shapes-our-lives">Thoughts around social media and other tech that shapes our lives</h1>
<p>I have a confession to make…</p>
<p>I’ve been working on different versions of this essay(s?) for quite some time. More than 2 years, to be honest. Yes, I've been running in circles and I'm not very proud of that.</p>
<p>Most of it revolved around my experience with social media, why did I leave Instagram, what was I thinking about when I came back, what do I think of other social platforms, etc. Most of the time it ended up becoming too personal and uncomfortable, sometimes it read very opinionated and blindly stupid and one-sided. But I still wanted to publish something around this topic.</p>
<p>Social media and its implications on individuals, which in turn results in community-wide behavioural changes, leading to revolutions in the way we speak, think, dress and act — these were the themes that attracted me towards product management in the first place (which is what I’ve started to do for a living since the last few months). But I often felt that I had too little expertise on the topic, and I still do. As a result, I didn’t publish anything, out of fear of being mocked for my stupidity.</p>
<p>But after some thought, I’ve decided to give it a go. I experienced a strange sense of thrill, often followed by satisfaction whenever I did something I was scared of doing. I’ll try replicating the same stuff here, on my blog. What's there to lose, right? Right!?</p>
<p>Expect some posts on the short-term and long-term implications of social media on this blog — this tiny, simple, insignificant nook of the internet. I wrote this entire post down because I’m working on some things I’d like to be accountable for, and I’ll share them sometime soon. I like to call them my “projects,” to my friends’ annoyance.</p>
<p>The urge to write this down rekindled itself after I saw the news of Elon Musk acquiring Twitter, and the gazillion reactions people have to this news. Almost everyone seems confused; I’m also one of those people. But still, I have some opinions I’d like to share with you, the (not-so-many) readers, who think I have something of substance to say. So that’s what I’ll cover next — what does the acquisition of Twitter by a man known for trolling people on the same platform means, and what is my idea for a platform like Twitter. After all, if a man who’s scaling EV and rocket companies is interested in buying Twitter, there <em>should</em> be something to it.</p>
<p>I’ve not been getting a lot of time to write because of my busy schedule lately. But I think I can do better — I’ll try to be more regular. So hello there, welcome back!</p>
<hr/>
<p>Also, I've decided to make <a href="https://samyaksahu.substack.com">a new Substack newsletter</a> out of the blog posts which are more tech-centric in nature. So, if you're interested in some of my better essays, other than personal-blog-type-shit that I might post here every now and then, you should consider subscribing up there!</p>
2022-10-28T17:44:54.389782+00:00https://samyaksahu.xyz/almora/Almora: Trip of the introverts2022-08-31T18:09:04.023927+00:00samyakhidden<p>I reckon every trip that you make has an underlying theme to it. Since I’m still trying to discover myself socially, I’ll call this <em>the trip of introverts</em>. There were four of us — Yash, Puney, Shikhar and I. All of us who like to spend our time in solitude instead of partying the hell out of things. At first I had serious doubts that this is ever going to work.</p>
<p>But we chose just the right place at just the right time. The people for such a situation were just about right as well.</p>
<hr/>
<p>We were pretty amped up for this trip since the last two weeks. We found it hard to focus on our internship work at hand, and instead, spent time making to-do and to-carry lists. I expected a lot of noise and frolic on this trip, for the previous trip had too much of it!</p>
<p>At the very last moment our organizer shifted our place from Mukteshwar to Almora because of a forest fire caused near that region, and we were actually upgraded to <a href="https://www.shivohamresort.in/">this amazing resort</a> in Almora. The property is barely a month old but it has everything you could ask for. The underlying theme of the entire place was “serenity”. There were no ceiling fans (we didn’t need them anyway), and no city noises at all. The only sound you could hear during the day was the chirp of birds singing sweetly all around you.</p>
<h3 id="so-heres-how-our-journey-went"><strong>So here’s how our journey went.</strong></h3>
<p>We boarded a train from the Old Delhi railway station at dinnertime, an “express” train which was around an hour late. We had to contend with four sleeper class seats that were booked away from each other, to add to this was a joint family of 15-16 members quarelling in the train and keeping the entire bogey fired up and alive. We had some chicken from KFC which kept us satiated (except for this one friend who’s a Jain and doesn’t even touch eggs).</p>
<p>Thankfully, the large family of fifteen departed at Moradabad and we had an entire cell of seats to our name. The weather grew cooler and more pleasant and so did our urge to upgrade our ticket to an AC-3-tier. We had chai and some packed snacks on the way, after all, I had to settle with four days of cheat meals and I had made peace with this. We opened up about our college lives and discussed some “bonus content” we didn’t knew about each other.</p>
<p>We barely caught an hour of sleep when we arrived at Haldwani. We made a decision to get out of the train here, but we were so late in making this decision that we literally had to jump off a running train.</p>
<p><img alt="The dashboard view..." src="https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/samyak-1661968414.JPG"/></p>
<p>We booked a cab through the winding mountain roads of Haldwani. We were accompanied by a very friendly driver on our way who guided us through the interesting bits of the route. It didn’t take us long to realize that the Kumaon people in general are a warm bunch of people who like to meet new people.</p>
<p><img alt="On the road - Naini Lake" src="https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/samyak-1661968171.jpg"/></p>
<p>After long hours of some sleep-deprived travel, we finally arrived at our resort were we were given a nice room. We stretched our feet on the amazing mattress and fell asleep in a matter of seconds.</p>
<p>We woke up in the afternoon and did a small trek towards Dipeshwar Falls, which is a coy waterfall located at the base of the Kumaon valley. After walking in the unusually sharp sun (which is normal for 6500 ft high place), we put on our life jackets and jumped into the icy cold water of the waterfall. That was the freshest I felt in weeks. I lied down on my back and let the calm water gently drift me as I looked up on the waterfall crashing down metres in front of us. “It’s such a beautiful world,” I said as I smiled like an idiot.</p>
<p><img alt="The waterfall" src="https://i.imgur.com/wH3EHkk.jpg"/></p>
<p>Sitting under the waterfall was an entirely different experience. It was the violent kind of quiet. I could see multiple rainbows in front of my eyes and that was pretty much it. Imagine sitting under your shower, but with a super-slippery rocky surface underneath and a hundred such showers all pouring water on you at once. Even if the force of water was 10% more, one could’ve hurt their back from sitting under it!</p>
<p>After getting cold beyond our tolerable limits, we jumped out of the water. We then had a cold sandwich and went back on the same path. This time around, the path seemed a bit more difficult as we were climbing up.</p>
<p>We came back and chilled out in the balcony which had a beautiful view of the green, forested mountains of the Kumaon valley. A strong wind started blowing and some minutes of downpour made the weather even cooler than we could’ve wished for. Still, it was good enough that you didn’t have to put on a sweater.</p>
<p>When the sun set, we started preparations for roasting chicken by the fire. It took awfully long to cook the bird, but boy, was it worth the wait. The smokiness of the wood infused itself well into the meat. It was a bit too chewy than we would’ve liked, but wasn’t half as bad as the chef of the cafe predicted it to be. Maybe it was our hunger from the day’s exertion or the chef’s homemade schezwan sauce, but it was a very satisfying meal. We chatted all through the night, called our friends and made them envious, and got into a nice, deep slumber.</p>
<p>We woke up on the next day and did nothing. Absolutely nothing. We cancelled all our plans to go the wildlife sanctuary or the area which had “hippie cafes.” After so much travel, and our own nature of being, we found it much more enjoyable to grab one of the books on the cafe shelf and sit down and chat about philosophy, businesses, college experiences and much more.</p>
<p><img alt="The balcony view at sunset" src="https://i.imgur.com/tNWDZ2M.jpg"/></p>
<p>As the evening was about to settle in, we took a stroll towards a reserved forest area near the resort. We collected pinecones, did some feral-child stuff, clicked some great photos and headed back. We found it a little hard to digest but we had to get back the next day.</p>
<p>For our consolation, the owner of the resort was kind enough to triplee us on his Royal Enfield and roam about in the market at 9 in the night. We are still talking about Harleys in our trip WhatsApp group.</p>
<p>We woke up comfortably after missing out on a magnificent sunrise view, packed some of that amazing schezwan sauce that the chef had prepared for us, and headed back home. The trip down the mountain to Kathgodam station is a fun one.</p>
<p>We met a very weird but very sociable driver who kept us both annoyed and entertained throughout the journey. He made sure he didn’t slow down in the tight, winding road, with the dexterity of the rally car driver. He also made sure to bitch about the ladies who didn’t give a shit when he tried wooing them. Moreover, he high-fived nearly everyone on the way back.</p>
<p><img alt="Roaming about forests..." src="https://i.imgur.com/uWHlOB8.jpg"/></p>
<p>This made me realize how well-knit these <em>pahadi</em> communities are. Maybe an example for people like us living in metros who hardly know our neighbours, despite living much more densely. Maybe our social bonds are a result of us living too close to each other and being self-reliant about basic necessities; a luxury the village people don’t really enjoy. They live in beautiful-yet-harsh areas where a roadblock due to a landslide or a collapsing bridge might mean days off from basic services we come to take as granted.</p>
<p>Maybe people bond best over shared difficulties. Like we did, often questioning what’s meant by enjoyment in the traditional sense and is partying and being loud and putting up Instagram stories about what food we’re having, all actually enjoyable. We all (except one) made sure we weren’t using our phones all that much, except for the occasional call we got from our family members. We didn't put stories or photos on our socials during the trip. Maybe, we ever won’t. Who cares anyway?</p>
<p>The themes of introversion and society were running in my head when my friends snapped me back to reality with the ongoing F1 Spanish GP. We watched the race in the train, discussed the upcoming plans, arrived at our destinations, and waved each other bye.</p>
<p>Until next time!</p>
<hr/>
<p><em>This is something I was kinda afraid to try out at first. But documenting my journeys helps me relive them and feel nice and fuzzy on boring days. I often write about the places I've been, but not publically. Would love your honest feedback on this new format. Cheers!</em></p>
2022-08-31T09:37:35.654786+00:00https://samyaksahu.xyz/wifi/Papa switched off the Wi-Fi2022-08-23T15:12:30.562790+00:00samyakhidden<p>I don’t know why he does it.</p>
<p>The reasons he gives are pretty weird, to be honest.</p>
<p>“Give rest to the router.”</p>
<p>“The internet speed will slow down in 2 days.”</p>
<p>“Why do you need the internet at night, anyway?”</p>
<p>The creative excuses don’t seem to end. Every time he switches it off, there’s a tiny pang of annoyance; a little voice in my head grunting in disgust. It depends — when I’m tired from the day’s hard work, I feel bad about it. When I already took an afternoon nap and feel wakeful in the night, I feel worse. Much worse.</p>
<p>You might expect that I’d spring up from my bed as soon as I get disconnected and switch the router back on: <strong>no, I don’t.</strong> Not because I have some sort of phenomenal respect for my father’s decision (don’t look at me like that, I <em>do</em> respect him in general, but umm… anyway…). It’s mostly because I have my phone around, and I <em>can</em> use mobile data. Hotspot on, problem gone.</p>
<p>But on most days I don’t turn on my mobile data either. If I’m working on my laptop and I can’t find my phone in the dark, I don’t turn the lights on. I don’t search for it anyway. I don’t need it.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Why do you need the internet at night, anyway?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>No, I don’t talk to some girl at night (not now at least!). I’d prefer a voice call anyway. I’m hardly active on any social media: all I do is make the occasional tweet and run away, which takes me less than 5 minutes on any given day. I might talk to a friend for something interesting, you know, those 2 am conversations. But not every night is of that kind, either.</p>
<p><strong>What I do, instead:</strong> Either of the two situations might play out.</p>
<p>First, I’m super-drowsy from all the day’s work and I’d like some sleep. I pick up a book I promised I’d read, and then read some ten pages (on a good day) and fall asleep. Goes on to show how sleepy I actually was (or how boring the book was!).</p>
<p>Second, the situation right now. I sit in silence. I stare at the walls when I’m really trying to solve for something, or pick up my laptop and start clattering away. I make sure I write things down on the offline notes app, which I’ll transfer to Notion the next day. I don’t have movies/TV shows downloaded on my laptop. Whenever I do, I’d fall for watching them.</p>
<p>But you know what?</p>
<p>I value this time more than any other time of the day. This is probably the only time of the day I can talk to myself without the constant buzz of notifications and the chatter of people. This is the only time of the day when I’m not crossing off items on some to-do list. This is the only time that I’m able to convince myself that it’s “too late” in the night to do any chore, talk to any friend, indulge in any guilty pleasures — I convince myself that I just don’t have the energy for it.</p>
<p>This is the only time of the day when I don’t have to fit in to anyone’s expectations, to their requests and commands. This is a great time to reflect on my past actions or imagine my future possibilities, and come up with esoteric ideas that impress me or make me cringe to the core. I pick up the ukulele and ‘discover’ some weird chord progressions I didn’t care to think about, because I could look up the tabs of some song anytime. I stretch my body as slowly as I can, often staying in the same hold and going deeper with every exhale. Heck, I can even listen to my heart throbbing or my diaphragm moving with every breath; how could I miss out on something so simple, yet so wonderful?</p>
<p>Isn't the solution to many "big" world problems simply turning the internet off? To appreciate the calmer, "boring" world around you instead of the world the media portrays? Isn't it liberating to simply "cut the cord" that forces you to stay vigilant of the things that you can't ever influence? What is freedom - being able to control yourself or be swept away in the tides or fall into rabbit-holes you can't come out of?</p>
<p>And in these strange, twisted threads of thought, I fall asleep.</p>
<p>Looks like Papa gets it right every time. How does he!? Call it my respect for him or my fascination for the universe inside of me, I don’t turn the router back on.</p>
<p>For it also needs rest, just like I do.</p>
2022-07-10T10:10:14.891052+00:00https://samyaksahu.xyz/struggle/Struggle2022-08-18T09:17:56.526660+00:00samyakhidden<p><em>every day is a struggle</em></p>
<p><em>to escape its luring colors</em></p>
<p><em>and prying eyes</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><em>every day is a chance</em></p>
<p><em>to distance himself</em></p>
<p><em>from the world around him</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><em>every day is a contract</em></p>
<p><em>for the poster boys</em></p>
<p><em>to show their mettle</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><em>every day is a mess</em></p>
<p><em>of undone tasks</em></p>
<p><em>and unforeseen calamities</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><em>every day is a battle</em></p>
<p><em>between the world between the ears</em></p>
<p><em>and the world around them</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><em>every day is a challenge</em></p>
<p><em>for uncovering the truth</em></p>
<p><em>beneath layers of provocations</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><em>every day is a test</em></p>
<p><em>of patience and attention</em></p>
<p><em>or the lack thereof</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><em>every day is a realization</em></p>
<p><em>of him losing grip over his reality</em></p>
<p><em>to theirs</em></p>
<hr/>
2022-02-05T18:37:48.156937+00:00https://samyaksahu.xyz/tms/The Missing Speech2022-08-18T09:17:56.526660+00:00samyakhidden<p><em>This post will cover things I could not say when I was supposed to — the speech that one gives during their writeup. Many things were running in my head during that time, but I couldn’t say it all in the heat (or the coldness/fuddle/rush?) of the moment. I’ll make up for it here.</em></p>
<p><em>Let’s begin...</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><code>7th December 2021, around 11 pm...</code></p>
<p>Thank God, now that I am standing up, my knees hurt a lot less. But I swear, the roasts hurt even more! Before you actually begin to judge me, let me tell you: only 40% of what they said were facts. The rest? Umm, let’s just say they used their “creative liberty” far too well.</p>
<p>The college has been nothing short of a rollercoaster ride for me. Only after I let go and started enjoying the undulations of the ride did I start to relish it in its entirety.</p>
<p>I entered college as a fat, shy, insecure kid who was still tending to his post-JEE traumas. I watched a lot of <em>How It’s Made</em> and <em>How Stuff Works</em> during my school days, and I thought I’d be doing something similar in an engineering college. I aspired to go to an American university and do a master’s in something with many numbers and weird symbols and diagrams.</p>
<p>But I was out in the open; my sample space was set to expand rapidly. I was faced with a lot of choices — and I chose what felt better in the moment. I skipped classes. I talked to a lot of people in SR. I avoided department interactions. I missed out on a lot of club interactions and sports team trials. To be honest, I’m not really proud of all the things I did in my first year.</p>
<p>With a stroke of luck, I got into Team Robocon (just barely). That added another layer of responsibilities for me. I finally got a good excuse for performing poorly in my exams. I was proud of something, though — I improved my health drastically by playing badminton early in the morning. I also got to interact with people across different cultures and backgrounds and learnt so much from them. I was bombarded with different ways people behave, which eventually pushed me to write whenever my roomie was away. I was intimidated by the very thought of expressing myself in public, which, again, is really not something I’m very proud of.</p>
<p>All the people I interacted with had something in common — they were toppers or at least good performers in their respective schools. All of them had something different to brag about — some of these were great dancers, someone taught guitar to kids, someone was working with the founding team of a startup, some of them were knee-deep into CP and web dev. I’m not sure I was good at anything, though.</p>
<p>This feeling of inadequacy followed me in my second year. I was struggling through my EEE degree. I was trying to have fun with my friends but wanted something to bite into, which gave me a reason to get out of my bed. The world felt colourless. I felt good for nothing, absolutely nothing.</p>
<p>Would I be called evil when I say the lockdown came as a blessing and pushed a reset button to all our lifestyles? I’m sure a lot of you had fun, at least in the first month or so of the days you were cooped up in your homes. I took this time and gave myself the space to think through some of the deepest problems running in my head.</p>
<p>The online semesters weren’t the best, but still, I got a lot done in the 2.5 semesters we were at home. I discovered something named Product Management, which resonated with what I wanted to do in the tech space. I learnt from online communities, applied for internships, got myself two internships where I learned what I like and what I don’t like about the role. I got my robotics team a sponsorship amount never seen before in the last 10+ years of its inception. It gave me some validation about where I was heading.</p>
<p>Speaking of validation — I gave a talk on PM Internships and got approached by dozens of juniors and batchies (a senior who’s been a mentor to me since the first year reached out to me for help on her product assignment). On the side, we got our components approved after months of to-and-fro and paperwork. I took a big sigh of relief.</p>
<p>All of this was before the psenti sem. The psenti sem was one-of-a-kind. I mean it — I’m sure to some degree that no psenti sem ever has been this eventful. The arrival of the first group of students — the welcoming quietness and the campus coming back on its feet. The emotional decision of the entire campus reopening — the beginning of the end of the horrible times we went through. The spontaneous plans, the dating frenzies, the “try-out” phases of all sorts of stuff, the (illegal) incoming of alumni and PS-2 friends, the Diwali celebrations, the BPL weeks, the Dandiya nite, the tiny music nites, the emotionally intense parting days — it was all so worth it. I turned down an offer from my summer internship so that I could unwind properly, and I’m so proud of my decision!</p>
<hr/>
<p>I screwed up, but thanks to the sandboxed environment BITS provides, I kept going on. It allowed me to experiment, to fail and to keep moving. I discovered my interests in music and writing. I built tiny apps and bots. I flunked case competitions. I ran and jumped till I fell flat on the ground. I fell in love. I confessed. I sneaked into unknown places. I clicked a ton of pictures. I sighed into the fresh air and the open skies. I danced like a monkey. I hugged as many beautiful people as I could — I remained present and tried to absorb whatever this place had to give me (except for the lectures)! In my psenti sem, I got as uncomfortable as I possibly could have. I showed a middle finger to moments of hesitation, and when I didn’t, I regretted not taking that one step.</p>
<p>It should now be obvious from my writeup: I got it wrong much more than I got it right. But I also realized that it is the case with everyone out there. It humbles me and soothes me. I’m grateful for the things that made me who I am at the end of my four years here.</p>
<p>I’m also grateful to this place as it gave me a chance to interact with some of the brightest minds I’ve ever come across. People who’d hold PoRs, not in clubs, but in government organizations. People who’d develop software, not only for college fests but for billion-dollar startups. People who’d not only make my day but of hundreds of people over mass media.</p>
<p>Thank you — all those who’re here, and those of you who aren’t (I’m happy you didn’t attend this embarrassing mess!). Thank you for teaching me something new every day. Thank you for making me feel small at times and larger than I’ve ever felt during others. Thank you for tolerating my fits of anger and madness and for laughing at my shitty jokes. For giving me space while I was mumbling through my own story like I rote-memorized it or when I didn’t make eye contact. Thank you for making me feel special for my small achievements and pushing me to do things I never knew I could do.</p>
<p>While it’s somewhat likely that you won’t get to talk to me in person in a nice place like this ever again, I just hope I did it right. I actively tried making people around me happy, only to realize that wasn’t the best strategy. Intentionally or unintentionally, if I messed something up, I’m sorry. I hope you give me a chance to make things better if I still can. But I hope you really meant it when you said you’re grateful to have me by your side.</p>
<p>Even though I’m a little dejected that I’ll be leaving this place soon, I’m also happy that the lessons I learnt here will help me navigate my life in the coming years. I know I’ll be riddled with <del>problems</del> BTs, big and small, throughout my life, but now I’m certain that I’ll make it through, and that’s all I need.</p>
<p>Please feel free to stay connected via social media. Feel free to call and have a conversation about anything that’s running in your head — career, cultures, relationships, tech, mental health, memes, whatever! I’ll be happy to listen.</p>
<p>Came in a kid, going out a man. Staying cringeworthy forever.</p>
<p><del>agla sem phodenge</del></p>
<p>Signing off,
2018A3PS0421P</p>
<p>Thank you so much!</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://i.imgur.com/Y7B2Rwz.jpeg"/></p>
2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00