In love with the mind.

02-05-2024: Sweet tolerance of brain

I often find this happening while reading something interesting (anything: Mathematical proof, any novel, article, etc.)that brain gets to its excited state and even if it wants to keep going, it wants to stop for a while and says to itself: ‘I don’t want to know more but just think more, to take a pause and reflect and not finish everything in one sitting. But mind still keeps reading until everything is over. This is an interesting dynamic and self-conflicting convergence.


04-05-2024: Being discrete

While doing a last minute revision of anything, I have realised that creating latex documents(or using any other document preparation system) makes things more clear and finished than writing on a notebook. Nothing mysterious but maybe it depends on how much freedom we give to ourselves: My notebooks are usually messy, have thoughts in all directions and conclusions in less discrete form (because of happiness of reaching to those conclusions). Revisions are more about being final and clear and not roaming anywhere and latex makes it hard to roam.


06-05-2024: Take it easy

I feel that the philosophy of ‘Hard thing and the right thing are usually the same’ is not always true. It often makes people believe that until and unless they are working too hard, they can’t get on the right path or get what they want. I believed in this since beginning and often saw good results but this philosophy should be limited upto a certain point in life. The goal should be to get comfortable with hard things and make them easy eventually. After a point of time, if someone is able to achieve things easily, then that should be accounted to the years spent in developing a habit of making hard things easy and not on ‘I don’t deserve this because I didn’t work too hard for this.’ There is always an inner voice which knows what one deserves. As long as it dominates the outside worthless voices, there is no hard or easy or right or wrong.


08-05-2024: Interconnection?

I often find many people claiming that they sometimes feel overwhelmed when they see some connection of mathematical concepts in nature. It is indeed wonderful but sometimes we all forget that Maths is our own creation. Mathematical thinking is just a formal manner of articulating our daily thoughts so that we don’t just wander here and there and get to point eventually with a taste of both robustness and accuracy. So this nature and maths is not some sort of interconnection rather a consequence of our own thoughts and how we really want few things to matter more than others. I sometimes even doubt if all the mathematics is just some sort of overfitting of our thoughts in order to make universe show us those things which we think matter and hide everything else which we don’t want to observe and when the Maths proves something true that we want to be true, we say ‘Hey! Maths works. It’s a universal language!!’ More on this soon.


14-05-2024: Definitions

Everything is fine until one doesn’t know what better means.


20-05-2024: Real doings

To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and crticism: all these are things we can do. - Hermann Hesse


24-05-2024: The perfection myth

Most of the times perfection in something comes from giving a specific amount of space to uncertainty in our brain. A space to intuition and not just to being accurate and being a ‘know it all’. This space often gives us freedom to imagine things in infinite number of ways and sometimes we find that most of the things when advanced further are just transformed versions of the primitive ones. Uncertainty gives fun in learning anything.


01-06-2024: Women holding things

What do women hold? The home and the family. And the children and the food. The friendships. The work. The work of the world. And the work of being human. The memories. And the troubles. And the sorrows and the triumphs. And the love. - Maira Kalman


04-06-2024: Let your system 2 work

I hate it when people judge others on the basis of some stereotypes of a place someone belongs to. The effect with sensible people doesn’t last long though but it shows how some people don’t really employ the system 2 of their brain. I have only one advise for such people: Let your brain come out of system 1 which is full of just effortless guesses. It doesn’t do good to anyone.

27-07-2024: Changes

There are so many changes in everyone’s life which make people question, doubt, feel different, and what not. Changes usually are not welcomed easily but over time I have realised that there is always something constant within us which helps us in dealing with these changes. I don’t know what it exactly is but we seek this constant within ourselves when we are going through a transitive phase. I wonder if this constant is something that not only governs our life but just everything in this universe! More on this soon.


14-08-2024: Unique

I often find it irritating when something or someone is called as ‘unique’. Over the years I have realised that there are only two traits: Right or wrong. When something isn’t right, we know it well and we can sometimes try to ignore the fact but we know it. This ignorance when accumulates, gives us a kind of illusion into something being termed as ordinary or unique. I find these things troubling because they affect our surroundings in a way that things get more entangled for people to make a sense of. There is no such thing as uniqueness. There are just different levels of righness or wrongness.


10-09-2024: No ‘regret-free’

I read about an interesting result on the lower bound on regret for multi-armed bandit problems and was in awe (initially) of how we can never have zero regret no matter how well we start or how bad we start. Every action leads to some regret: It can be zero at a point of time but it is never zero as a whole. In real life too: Our actions may seem independent of each other but they are always connected in some ways. I should write whole post on Maths of this thing soon!


11-11-2024: To let go

Often in the name of dedication, we are not taught how much attachment with anything is really necessary. Is it good to be attached with a problem? To our own efforts and what we created? Is it good to be attached to the results? Is it good to be attached to our identity so much that we forget the difference between dedication and obsession? It hurts to let go of things, feelings, emotions, people, everything around us which has some ‘value’ in our lives but I hope that in the long run posterior emerges out to be stable: irrespective of what prior was. Maybe it is for this posterior that one should not stop ‘living’ and dreaming and creating.


14-12-2024: Detachment

My brother pointed out something interesting today while we were on a call which has been revolving around in my mind since then: “It’s a problem with sincere people. While trying to make things right, when they distance themselves from unnecessary people, they also end up distancing themselves from good people, maybe in the hope that only they themselves can make things right or maybe some form of responsibility they feel towards others to not let them get affected by their own confusions.”

And I believe I don’t need to explain it but I don’t really know how do people figure out that balance?