Is it worth it?

There is something the "Bhagvad Gita" which states something to the effect of, "Work your ass off and forget about the expected rewards".

I have been working too hard for a few months now, chasing a dream. Its not been a pain. It's actually been fun as I enjoy what I do. I enjoy making sense of disparate bits of specifications and give something working first time. I enjoy (after a hard day's work of politicking and alignment meetings) to just take a piece of analog circuitry, make sense out of it and get it to work.

These days though, I have been able to get very little of analog circuit design. It's been mostly emailing, ppt'ing, MS-Word'ing and meeting reservation-ing. It is still fun. It is still nice to make a difference and have people listen to and be influenced by what you are saying. It's nice to feel in a corner of your heart that the project will be seriously hit if you were not around.

So while I have no complaints about what I do, sometimes I do wonder if it all is worth it for various reasons.

While I have been chasing one dream, another one has come to fruition. I have held it dear to me for the last eight years. Held it close to my heart. Wept over it. Tossed and turned at night lying awake, dreaming of it. Today it's mine. Do I feel happy?

Well you can say a bit but I am frankly not over the moon about it. Hell, I have'nt even updated my Linkedin and perhaps have no intention to.

So...is it all worth it?

Ayn Rand

Someone suggested I read Ayn Rand to tide over my present grief.

There are a few things though which would upset that person:

• I downloaded an illegal copy. He (ok...its a he) is a fervent believer in protecting intellectual property
• I dislike Ayn Rand. To me she was permanently scarred from her childhood experiences in USSR and that affect her entire world-view. I dislike the choices she made in her personal life. I dislike the fact that her philosophy does not leave room for kindness and gentleness in dealings with other people. Its all me and mine.

I am going to go read "The Fountainhead" anyway. It is strangely comforting.

I get comfort in how Howard Roark approaches each episode in life with intellect and with emotions in control.

I tried to do the same and (sort of) succeeded.

Time for breakfast at 1:00 pm

I am still here!

A few things have changed. And that has led to some soul-searching on my part.

Let me write it down in bullet points like I do at work

• Why do blog-posts need to be small literary affairs? I update stuff on Facebook quite often but that's because I feel lazy to type out an essay every now and then on my blog. Why does it need to be an essay?
• Why do some people give me unconditional love? Why do people offer support and sympathy when I have done nothing on my part specifically for them? Is just a smile and a cheery 'hello' every morning enough? Is just a willingness to listen to them with a smile and the urge to not be in their way while they are trying to do something enough? Why do we expect so little from some and (at the oposite end) so much from others?
• Why does hearing about someone else's tragedy make you feel that you can cope?
• And why can't we men be internally strong individualistic creatures? Why do we run to safety and stability? Weren't we supposed to be the wild ones?

Rediffining Life....

I work with three computers on a normal working day. If a history listing were to be taken out from the Firefox browsers at any of these boxes, the most visited website would turn out to be rediff.com. I must visit that website atleast twenty times in twenty-four hours. A neutral observer would be forgiven for thinking that I work for a news aggregation agency rather than a humble chip-design outfit.

We just returned from an awesome, awesome trip to Phuket. While my wife loved the sun, sand, food, people...you name it, my key impression was of an acute withdrawal syndrome. I was happy to board the flight back home and I spent an ecstatic night trawling through all the websites and blogs that I normally haunt (...and then some), catching up on the lost five days.

Which brings me to the point. Where does a distraction, cease to be a distraction and become an obsession?
There were days when our parents used to wake up at dawn, read the newspaper while sipping tea, get on with the day and then come back to catch the nine 'O clock news. Touching base with the world just two times in a day! While I can definitely imagine myself in a life like that, it would be hard.

I guess this transformation has a lot to do with how accessible news has become. You turn on the telly and you get news every hour. You switch to the net and you get news websites that are refreshed at an hourly basis (or even faster). If you are sitting at home, you are stuck to your laptop. At your desk you have your desktop computer. Outside you have your smart-phone. Its simple to open another tab and keep refreshing. Its like following the world as if it were a cricket score...

What it does to your concentration is another matter altogether. A wasted holiday. A half thought out proposal. Lesser time for important people.

All this was brought in focus for me in an article on Time this week. Anyone can see that magazine is struggling to stay afloat. It is palming off advertisements for cover stories. This week it covers an author I have never heard of and his forthcoming book that no one has read. But the key take-away was that he works on a laptop which is not connected to the internet, has no games and only has the barest essentials for him to type out a manuscript. I fell in love with the idea immediately.

Think of it. No games, no facebook notifications, no email client honking at you and ..... no news tab!

With a laptop like that, the only thing you can do is work. You can immerse yourself with whatever you are doing. You do what is important with your full concentration and if you need a break, you take a walk!

Right.... but what do you do while taking a walk? I would need to Google for that....