We train compassion, empathy, kindness, equanimity — but almost never gratitude. Its opposite is entitlement, and I've noticed the people with the least gratitude are usually the unhappiest, and the hardest to be around. Gratitude isn't a mood. It's a skill, and almost no one trains it.
At fifteen I built my own Visual Basic interpreter, going library to library with no internet to learn how it all worked. In just a few hours, Claude Fable 5 built me a very functioning Visual Basic clone in the browser — full debugger, autocomplete, syntax coloring, and a BASIC interpreter written in BASIC. My younger self would have loved it.
Even a small stressful thought — or a tiny exciting one — can quietly disrupt breathing, digestion, and sleep. On the surface it's nothing; to the subconscious it's a big deal. Watching how things register there matters more than we think, before seemingly harmless thoughts steal our sleep, health, and peace.
NASA's Earthdata repository holds 178+ petabytes, but its dataset names are uninviting and intimidating. As an experiment, I translated 3,000+ of them into plain English and built a curated catalog of the top 300 — each with an AI-generated cover image — to make Earth data more approachable.
You don't really need middle managers — fire them and everything runs smoothly, until it doesn't, because the momentum they set is still carrying you. They're like pure air: nobody appreciates it until you and your family start to develop lung issues.
On learning from history through interactive play — a browser game inspired by the ideals of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, where you earn the countryside by governing well rather than out-producing the enemy. What I built, the art and the design, and where to play it.
The restless mind is never satisfied where it is — with people one conflict, without them another; here it wants to be there, there it wants to be here, back and forth without end. When will this madness of the mind stop, that won't let me enjoy a single moment?
We like to think our words land exactly as we mean them; they rarely do. In a single day I watched a coworker, my family, and someone I'd complimented each reshape what I said through their own angle — a reminder that being understood isn't automatic, and that a misreading is usually just someone seeing from where they stand.
Five reminders I keep for myself before speaking — check what your mind is doing first, remember that a truth needs the right time and place, try to see the other person's limits, watch the ego when you have the floor, and speak without violence in word, tone, or glance.
Why I spent three months of weekends using AI to translate all 4,500+ abhangs of Sant Tukaram — the householder-saint who lost everything to famine and still became Maharashtra's most beloved voice — and what I hope the first complete, theme-mapped reading can offer the millions who love him.
Five small lessons from practice — that equanimity is a muscle you can train, that awareness comes first, that the mind grows to love whatever you keep returning to (so discipline becomes desire), that life is short enough to demand guarding your focus for the essential few, and that momentum, once built, carries you like a river's current.
A toddler hasn't yet learned the adult, accepted ways of showing emotion, so it comes out in her own forms — different each time, and easy to misread as a tantrum. The work is to notice, gently and without judgment, what she is actually telling us — and the same patience is owed to the grown-ups around us, who never fully traded their own ways either.
In meditation, momentum is everything — not gripping the calm, but being willing to return to it again and again. And a different attitude to the mind: investigating why sadness or craving arises at all, until the mind's play loosens its grip.
When a child melts down, it feels like they're giving you a hard time — but really they're having one, caught in a storm their nervous system can't yet hold. Seeing that lets you lower your voice and simply stay. And the same is true of every difficult adult.
With AI, supposedly one prompt makes a polished UI. The way I actually do it is 400 prompts, late nights after my daughter sleeps, two-word stretches between her interruptions. When someone says it was *just AI*, they miss what is actually happening. Writing code is cheap now — the cost of trying an idea collapsed, and work I never would have shipped comes back in reach. The bottleneck moves to taste — also the part AI cannot do, because the genuinely new isn't in its data yet.
A phrase from a Vipassana book I found at a used bookstore — "the feeling of unworthiness" — and how much of what people do, the pleasing and the masks and the drama, runs on it.
The most important thing I could pass on isn't technology or knowledge or even morality — it's the ability to manage your own mind: to stay quiet in chaos, to guard against jealousy and anxiety becoming habits, and the honest catch that I can't give it without having it first.
The Rigveda's river hymn looks like it lists rivers in geographic order. Scholars said so for 150 years but never measured it. I did — and ran the same test on four more old lists. The Indian ones follow the map; the Zoroastrian Avesta and Genesis don't, or not simply. What a list is for seems to matter more than its language or its century.
A short take on the Vedic birth chart: read it backward, not as a forecast but as a record of the tendencies a person arrived with — the specification of a being fused from several streams of consciousness. The full argument is in the linked paper.
A strong memory for your own conclusions can quietly block fresh thinking — the mind says "I already know this" before it has looked again. Weak retention and the ability to re-derive may be two sides of one coin, and a way, too, of re-reading a difficult Mercury.
Kumar asked me what an AI agent costs to run. I didn't know. This is the story of how that question turned into a calculator, a paper, and a book — because the answer needed to work for the next team to ask, not just his.