Key To My Life

Cloud Cuckoo Land-  Read Review here https://deepthig.blogspot.com/2022/04/cloud-cuckoo-land-anthony-doerr.html Circe Palace of Illusions - Read These Precious days - Discarded Odyssey/Illiad At Night All Blood Is Black - Removed from list Leave the World Behind Under-a-white-sky Project hail Mary - Read Origin - Read A Thousand Splendid Suns Order of time  - Read The Silent Patient- Read Black cake To Paradise- Read The Candy House Breaking the Spell - Read Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Read Surrounded by Idiots Gita - In Progress 2021 List : https://deepthig.blogspot.com/2022/01/2021-list.html

My Gita(Ditched), Devdutt pattnaik Recursion, Blake Crouch Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Calo Roveli Queeristan Brave new world, Aldous Huxley Satyajit Ray stories The Dalai Lama's Cat, David Michie The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom The Seven deaths of Evelyn HardCastle, Stuart Tarton The Magic Of Reality , Richard Dawkins The difficulty of Being Good, Gurcharan Das Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini My Life in Full, Indra Nooyi Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro  Dune(Ditched) 2020:  https://deepthig.blogspot.com/2020/03/blog-post.html

         “ I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them .” ― Oscar Wilde,  The    Picture of Dorian Gray # Waking up is the hardest part. The moment I am awake, I can feel the pain radiate from my heart through my every cell. It is as though my heart is made of glass and is shattered and the pieces of glass have entered all the cells in my body through the blood stream.   You’d think you’d get used to it, and that the pain will go away slowly but it's now almost a habit. The deposits of all the feelings have now curated, in my heart, this dense, heavy pearl of sorrow that I am practically nurturing. The breeze from the fan slowly settles and arranges the thoughts in my cluttered mind like a stack of papers. In the past 4 weeks, I have found it terribly hard to get myself out of bed. This is it. I have decided to put an end to this. I don’t want to fall hopelessly in love ...

                      Exhalation is a collection of short stories from Ted Chiang. This is a beautiful collection of deep and thought provoking ideas delivered through the medium of stories. The book is, overall, like a "BlackMirror" series of the literary world, combining futuristic ideas with compelling story telling. As I turned the pages of this book, Ted Chiang effortlessly made his way from being a nobody in my world to my current favorite author of all times. My favourite among the gems in this collection is " Truth of Fact, Truth of feeling " where the author draws parallels between the technology of writing and a futuristic technology of indexed memory video logs.  The parallels drawn are amazing to the extents of highlighting the pros and cons of each of the tools with amazing literary devices. Writing in a way is an augmentation to the mind, almost like how external memory can be used to log our lives . The constrain...

Around the time I finished reading Homo Deus, Life 3.0 seemed like the logical next read based on how my thoughts were forming about humans in the landscape and history of cosmos. ( Read my review here:  http://deepthig.blogspot.com/2020/06/homo-deus-notes.html ). I had seen Life 3.0 in the reading list published by Barrack Obama in Dec 2018. My key take aways : 1) "Matter" Matters. The narration touches upon popular questions around AI like jobs, politics, goals, purpose and consciousness. It throws light on the Moravec's paradox which shows how humans find it easier to detect a face and  hard to do long mathematical computations whereas as we cracked the latter problem for machines to solve before we could solve the former. The simple reason for it is the vast number of physical hardware in our brain that is devoted to the former operation which is required for the achievement of the goals. Moravec's landscape also provides guidance to the type of skills that are l...

           For my first job interview in campus where I was selected, I was asked what I wanted in life. The 22 year old me replied that I wanted happiness. The panel reflected on the philosophical nature of the answer, but I was merely expressing my self honestly. I had not yet started thinking a lot about happiness back then. But I found myself seeking the answer to it more and more in the years to come.  Almost 17 years later, here is what I think is the answer to the elusive question of how to define and sustain happiness in tactical terms. We have 2 minds(atleast) we should try to satisfy 1) our Experiencing Mind in terms of simple achievable goals and experiences 2) our Narrating Mind in terms of connecting the dots and having a story, a big picture and a larger purpose.  I couldn't help notice the similarities of this model with a team structure with individuals and a leader.  Keeping this in mind, we need to engineer our intrins...

          I usually do not have a strong, detailed memory of books I read or movies I watch in terms of their plots and story line. However, the key characters and the feeling that it leaves me with, usually stay with me for a long time.  Recently, I was reminded of "Atlas Shrugged" from a tweet by a Mentor and I remembered the feeling of inspiration and disruption it had had on my thinking when I had read it in my teens. I decided to pick it up for a re-read, also curious about a calibration of my own progress.           Reading it again gave me  a feeling of having plunged into a different age in the history of human progress in terms of engineering , of metals, rail roads and the like as opposed to the digital worlds that I seem to be immersed in these days.  The core message from the revolutionary leader in the book (Refer to the Chapter :"John Galt Speaking") is over 70 pages of monologue and is a stark contrast ...