The urge to share my updates in all its nutsy-boltsy glory was brewing for long, but I hadn’t found the time to put it all together and publish a lengthy post. I’ve occasionally been publishing random, impulsively written posts on my Journal whenever the writing bug bites me during rare moments of inspiration, but the main publication hasn't seen a post in a full year.

I set aside an entire day today to do nothing but pour my heart out and share everything I could possibly share, in as much detail as I can. It could very well be that I might disappear again for a while.

So, here’s a roundup of what went down in 2025.

Work And Life

I’m moving abroad again! If all goes as planned, I’ll find myself in Germany by the middle of this year.

As of January 2026, I’ve joined a startup in Munich, Germany. I had been looking for openings in Germany for a while on LinkedIn. I got 4 interview calls in total from about 150 applications. I interviewed with them in parallel, and once I got an offer from my current employer, I didn’t bother with the other in-progress loops and withdrew from the process. I’ll keep my current company confidential for now, while the other three were for C++ developer roles at SonarSource, Exasol and TinyBird, in case anyone’s interested in exploring software dev opportunities in Germany.

I’m currently working for my employer remotely from Bangalore as a freelancer. The deal is that I work remotely for 3 months - which can be thought of as my probation period - after which, if they’re happy with me, they’d initiate my relocation to Munich.

Considering what I wanted in terms of work profile, scale of the company and location, this is as close as I can get to my ideal situation - location being the primary motivator, everything else secondary. Germany had been enticing me for a long time, Munich in particular. Germany because of the opportunity to lead a peaceful life in a functioning society with good amount of domestically remote software jobs, to immerse myself in the difficult but stimulating challenge of learning a new language, and a faster path to residency and citizenship without drama. Munich was my preferred destination in particular for the nature lover in me, with the city promising abundant opportunities for outdoor recreation and mountain getaways. Munich also seems to me like an in-between city in terms of being multicultural, that isn’t as cosmopolitan as Berlin to the point where it doesn’t feel like Germany, or as conservative as some of the more right-wing regions of Germany where you don’t feel welcome.

The job I’ve found is just a means to my end-goal, but I’ve been fortunate enough to find a role where I’ll get to work on lots of new exciting stuff. I’m glad that I’m not staring at yet another flavor of the same 9-5 grind all over again - the same old shit with just a new label of a different company name. The grind of monotonous work obligations is what I strive to escape.

I worked for Microsoft in Bangalore for one and half years. Although my passion for the craft of software development remains intact, this was enough time for me to realize that I’m sort of done with BigTech - giant Fortune 50/100/500 monstrosities where you become a cog in the big, bloated corporate machinery, and slowly watch your soul slip away as you get swept up in meetings, 1:1s with managers and skips, daily standups, emails and pings, dev oncalls, appraisal cycles, town-halls and all-hands, being part of hiring events and interview panels, with some real software development squeezed into the little focus time you have left as you find yourself stretched thin.

Despite my distaste for corporate life in principle, I did find my time at Microsoft pleasant though. The work in Azure Storage was stimulating, and my coworkers were fun. I actually never set foot into the office except to collect my laptop and join a couple team-lunches over the course of my 1.5 years. I immensely valued being fully remote, because on the one hand, the commute was two hours one-way, and on the other hand, working in an office building is something I can no longer withstand. I haven’t worked inside an office since 2020 when COVID forced us all out, and I haven’t missed the office since. With news circulating around that Microsoft will be mandating Return-To-Office sometime during this year, that’s a bullet I’ve dodged now.

I believe I brought value to my role and delivered at work, and my manager came to depend on me to get things done. So he was disappointed when I announced that I’m leaving. I’m a little repulsed with myself too, because I feel that I just milked Microsoft to my own advantage and used it as leverage to achieve my larger goal of moving abroad. I carry the guilt of having used Microsoft as a stepping stone to design this FIRE-adjacent lifestyle vision I always had in mind. But I console myself that it’s all business at the end of the day where nobody owes anybody anything other than contractually defined obligations, and that I did not slack off at my job.

I could have explored internal transfer opportunities within Microsoft, but I really wanted to get out of BigTech MegaCorps and into more smaller-profile jobs that feel light on the shoulders, where the golden handcuffs don’t feel so tight. In the one month I’ve been with my current company, it feels like I’ve hit the sweet spot between a high-octane, perform-or-perish American startup, and a slave-away-and-burn-out Indian startup. People here come in to work at 9, do justice to their work, and leave at 5, unplugging until the next day. I just have one other guy as my immediate team mate who works remotely from Brazil, and we both don’t have a manager to report to. The Brazil dev will help me ramp up and will be the sole judge who will assess the quality of my work and decide whether I’m worthy of bringing onboard to Munich.

The tech stack is entirely new to me and is a breath of fresh air. Having worked all these years on monolithic monsters written in C and C++ that ran on bare metal, I will now be working in Golang and Python on micro-services running on top of AWS. C++ and systems programming will now be like an ex-wife that I’ll always have feelings for, while Go and Python are now my hot new girlfriends, kicking up some mojo in my life.

Thoughts On Moving Abroad

While the prospect of moving to Germany excites me, I also have significant apprehension about what might be in store. The whole reason we are moving is only because I’m not finding living conditions and quality-of-life in Bangalore acceptable. If I have to point my finger at the top 3 reasons why I want to leave, it would be air pollution, poor public infrastructure and road safety. These are the reasons which actually pose everyday danger to life and long-term health for yourself and your loved-ones. I could list another 25 reasons that cause regular annoyances, frustrations and inconveniences for why I want to leave, but the above three life-endangering ones would be my top picks.

People have asked me online and offline - “Bruh, didn’t you already know you’d face these issues in Bangalore before you decided to return from the US? Duh!” This question stumped me in the beginning. I knew about India’s systemic issues before I decided to return back voluntarily, but I had no satisfactory answer to that question.

Over time, I gradually realized why I took the decision to return despite being fully aware of what was in store. I realized that I wasn’t returning to India so much as I was escaping my grind in the United States. Work was beginning to lose purpose and meaning, having to juggle work while parenting our then newborn son was brutally exhausting, and because of having reached the milestone of one million USD, that number was beginning to play psychological tricks with our minds and tempting us with the option to move to India and take a long break from the hustle and grind, which felt very tantalizing. And so, escape the US we did.

That brings me to our second big move - to Germany. Since history repeats itself, I can already tell that this isn’t about moving to Germany so much as it is about escaping India. I’m sick and tired of how broken everything is and how you are completely on your own in terms of making private arrangements to shield yourself from the dysfunctional system, since the government won’t do shit for you. You are solely responsible for arranging respectable housing with clean water and backup electricity, private transportation, private healthcare, private education for your kids, private recreation and entertainment, build your own social-security for old-age, the list goes on. I don't deny that the privileged class and the high-earners can easily afford all these expenses without breaking a sweat. I know I can, but I can’t get over my anger and disgust over the fact that this is how the system functions here.

To live well in India, you have to count on your own pocket money because public services are non-existent or unusable. On top of having to spend your own money for living a life of dignity, don’t forget the hefty tax-money you are paying to get barely anything back in return for it.

I will stop my rant here, I’ve ranted enough over the years - and that brings me to what might be in store for me and my family in Germany. I’m fully aware it won’t all be fun and games, far from it. I worry that it can get lonely there, the language barrier will be a challenge until we pick up German well enough which won't happen fast, winters can be long and depressing, German bureaucracy and paperwork are notoriously tedious, and while my introverted-self might find the reserved society a delight, my wife and kids might fail to adapt to the new environment. There’s a real possibility that the whole cycle might repeat, and we might realize we aren’t cut out for Germany either. If we get to that point, then I’ll really be at a loss about what to do next. This is very likely my last big move, and if this fails, the only option left is to return back to India, or return back to the US, both of which I’m not keen on. Returning to the US is nearly impossible anyway, and even if some employer - despite abundant supply of local talent - found me to be the perfect stroke of genius and agreed to sponsor my $100K H-1B, I wouldn’t dare getting anywhere close to the immigration crackdown currently unfolding in the country - both illegal and legal.

More than anything, I have enormous guilt about leaving my old dad behind. My father is 79 years old and lives alone in our native town. He is as healthy and energetic as a 55 year old, has a very active social life, drives his car himself, and currently has no physical or cognitive health issues. But it breaks my heart to leave my aging old man to fend for himself as he enters his eighties. Leaving my dad behind is the biggest burden I’ll carry on my conscience when the time to leave comes. I wasn’t around when my mother passed away 15 years back. God forbid, if I’m not around for my dad when it’s his time, I don’t know how I’ll carry that scar with me the rest of my life.

Sometimes, with time, the answers simply come to you. I’ll see if in two years, I’ll have the answer about what to do with my dad situation. What I do know for now is that the answer shouldn’t involve assisted senior living facilities. Absolute geographical freedom that lets me shuttle between, and reside in India or Germany when required, for as long as is required, without any restriction, is a position I want to get to as quickly as I can.

For now, I choose to cop out and not think about my father’s mortality, and will forge ahead with my plan to move abroad. Bangalore is the only home I know, and I have no motivation to explore other cities in India, tier-2 towns, or toying with the idea of the smoothly-marketed farmhouse lifestyle in the outskirts of the city. I’m not falling for those Instagram farmhouse reels that sell the idea of a slow-paced life amid nature.

Just like it took me 2 years to realize that I can’t go on living in India, I’ll be giving ourselves 2 years in Munich to make an informed decision on whether Germany could be our long term home. I’ll keep an open mind, and the hardships we’ll undoubtedly face during the initial days shouldn’t pressure us into a rushed conclusion. Only after 2 years, will we be in a position to determine if we’ve arrived at the Promised Land, or if our pursuit of happiness remains elusive.

Finances

2025 was yet another great year for the US markets, returning 17% gains on average to investors.

As you can see, the stock market bull run has continued for nearly a decade now, except for the drop in 2022. Our US stock investments across taxable and retirement accounts crossed the 2 million mark in 2025. This puts me somewhere on a spectrum where there are people in BigTech that would laugh at what might seem like a pittance to them, and there are others that would find this jaw-dropping. I know better than to participate in dick-measuring contests. To me, this is more money than I know what to do with, because sports-cars, cocaine and supermodel escorts don’t exactly figure on my wishlist.

The Munich startup I’ve joined has offered me a yearly salary of €85,000. For a very expensive city like Munich, and for my years of experience, that’s not what you'd call top-of-the-line pay, not even close. With taxes, rent and living expenses eating away at my paycheck, I won’t exactly be padding my bank account. They sure got me for a discount, and I for one know that it’s currently not much of a Buyer’s Market out there.

But that’s the whole point, as I mentioned before. Just like Walter in Breaking Bad ran a car wash as a Front to launder drug money, my job is only a Front for me to achieve my more discreet personal lifestyle goals that I can’t announce openly.

I like to think of it like Einstein’s patent office job. Before he exploded onto the scene, Albert Einstein worked an easy job as an obscure patent office clerk, where he found himself with large amounts of free time that enabled him to work on his science, which then led to his groundbreaking theories of relativity. I want something similar with my remote-friendly job, which gives me large amounts of free time to do my own thing. And since I’m smarter than Einstein, I won’t be wasting away my free time developing the Unified Field Theory that Einstein left unfinished. I’ll instead use my free time to enjoy nice afternoon trail-runs, patio brunches with my wife while the kids are away at school, sunny blue-sky days spent writing at the park, or some other cheesy romantically-cringe activity.

If I start to feel the pinch of a lower salary to be really painful, I’ll simply switch to a higher paying job once I’ve found my footing, settled in and comfortable in a year or two. If need be, I’ll draw down $20-25K from my US holdings every year during the first couple years for discretionary spending, in case my modest coastFIRE paycheck alone won’t cut it. I’d like to put that FI money to use and not die leaving millions in the bank.

This finally brings me to the topic of money and mortality, a.k.a estate planning. This is the one topic where I’m currently overwhelmed and lost. The nagging insecurity of not having a solid estate plan in place is slowly beginning to eat into my peace of mind. Assuming that money in the US stock market doubles every 10 years, and the fact that I’m now 40, I’m looking at at-least 3 more doublings over a natural lifespan, which means I’ll leave behind somewhere in the vicinity of 15 to 20 million dollars. Maybe more, maybe far less, but big enough nevertheless to warrant some solid planning. I’ve read in passing that the US estate tax is in the range of 40% for non-residents, and therefore I need to seriously look into efficient tax planning. If we end up living in Germany long-term, that will trigger various Germany tax rules such as the dreaded exit tax, which will add another layer of complication in the tax equation.

I’m badly in need of a trustworthy professional to help me navigate cross-border tax and estate planning. But again, I’ll cop out for now and park this concern until we’ve lived in Germany for 2 years, only after which I’ll have clarity over the possible future course of our lives.

Closing Notes

And so goes my continued quest for greener pastures. I can’t quite tell if all these career plays and relocationary moves would be memories I’d look back upon fondly when I’m 85, or if these are a series of dumb moves where I’m pointlessly delaying putting down roots and starting to live out the rest of my life, backed by stability and certainty.

I’ve been in conversations where people that are well settled-in have said - “I’m not going anywhere..” in various contexts. I always feel the sting of jealousy in those moments, wistfully thinking - “Here’s a person that has an established home-base with strong local ties and deeply entrenched roots, and then there’s me, someone who’s never present, never grateful for his current situation, always looking to escape the present and run towards the unknown, forever on a quest for lasting happiness and perfection, which probably doesn’t exist.”

This year, I’ll make one more - probably my last - attempt to get to the stage where I can smile with conviction and finally say - “This is home. I’m not going anywhere..”

Here’s to hoping that I get there.

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I constantly struggle to come to terms with acute existential despair where I feel weighed down by the grand scheme of things, and our negligible existence within it that will be wiped away in a handful of decades, leaving no trace ever. This existential weight keeps me from submitting myself very seriously to a pursuit where if I put my mind to it and stick to something over the years, I could end up with my very own personal magnum opus. But it is this existential crisis, and not laziness, that keeps me from taking myself seriously and submit whole-heartedly to any one pursuit. Every news report of the death of a famous person brings with it a reminder that the universe will indifferently continue chugging forward on the arrow of time, regardless of how much a mere individual chases his ambitions, and then dies and disappears anyway. So why take any pursuit, or take yourself seriously at all?

Today, as I sat bored during my son’s school event where he was done with his act and I waited for the event to wrap up, a moment of inspiration hit me. It dawned upon me that I could hit the sweet spot between a defeatist existence, and a life spent chasing ambitions. Instead of taking one of two extremes - where you either whittle your time away, or you surrender yourself heart, blood and soul to your pursuits - why not take a high-quality middle ground? Why not reserve dedicated time and space to engage in deep, meaningful inquiries into topics of interest? This would be your personal spacetime - the fourth dimension that you seek out with the intention to push the boundaries of your mind. And when you feel spent, and you’ve done the day’s due diligence, you leave the dimension and go back to living your fleeting existence without taking yourself seriously.

I’ve determined that my home-office desk where I currently do a little bit of everything - reading, writing, working, goofing off, aimless browsing, snacking, etc., would be the perfect spot to take my quest for depth to the next level. I’ve decided cold-turkey to completely cut off every shallow activity that I engage in at my desk and to re-designate the spot as a place that I retreat to, for embracing depth. This would be the designated location in my universe where I retreat for deep work, day after day, week after week, year after year.

The time window to enter The Fourth Dimension would be from 9 AM to 12 PM, and then from 3 PM to 6 PM, Monday through Friday, Saturday and Sunday optional. After 6 PM in the evening, I exit The Fourth Dimension for the day.

When I enter The Fourth Dimension, I only do deep, hard work. When I'm there, there’s no room for the shallow. There won’t be any indulgence with the easy and the effortless. The Fourth Dimension is the spot where I engage in the advancement of my understanding of the subject at hand. When not engaged in the pursuit of knowledge, here is where I immerse myself in the act of creation - writing, scripting, practising, perfecting, and performing. Any indulgence, analog or digital, online or offline, happens outside of this dimension, and preferably outside the room housing the dimension. An exception would be made only if the medium of indulgence happens to be books or eBooks. My mobile phone, or any other personal gadgets of distraction never enter this sacred sanctum.

When I situate myself in the Fourth Dimension, I enter into the world of the mind. I wrestle with thoughts and ideas. I reach into the inner depths of my mind and explore the churn of the subconscious. I reflect on life - retrospecting the recent past, envisioning the future and examining the present to re-adjust my present to align with my future vision. I strive to improve my understanding in areas of knowledge which help build my career capital, and also in areas that stoke my curiosity and wonder. While not feeding fodder for the mind, I engage in imparting whatever knowledge and wisdom I’ve amassed through my writings, or other means of content dissemination.

Through this little blurb, I am reminding myself to treat the Fourth Dimension with utmost respect, and to honor the sanctity of this little corner of my world, so that every time I enter the dimension and pick up the reins, I go on a rewarding inner journey that leads either to a richly nuanced understanding of something that is of value or importance to me, or leaves me with the satisfaction of having created something - trivial though it may be - where previously nothing existed.

I wake up every morning, and as I walk into the living room, there lies on the coffee table a freshly printed, squeaky-crisp copy of Deccan Herald waiting to be lovingly picked up and opened. It’s hard to resist the temptation to not pick it up - the morning newspaper for a just awoken adult is the equivalent of a tray of cookies for a hungry child walking past.

I reach out for the paper and straightaway confront the bullshit that unfolded in our nation the previous day - how many people died an unnatural death on the roads of the accident capital of the world, a bunch of pictures and local news reports on Bangalore’s fucked-up infrastructure, a few rape and molestation reports across the country (latest - our chapris grope some visiting Australian women cricketers), our insufferable politicians continuing their shenanigans, the list goes on. History repeats itself everyday in a never ending loop.

Whatever little readworthy material there is such as editorial articles and serious journalist commentary, is overshadowed by reports on yet another day of shitshow that unfolded in our dysfunctional nation.

Just like it’s not easy to pull away from a session of doom-scrolling on your phone, I can’t easily tear myself away from the newspaper once I’m in it. I hate myself for beginning my day with a low-quality activity like this that takes up 45 minutes of my precious morning time and leaves me angry, disgusted, anxious, exhausted and sad at the state of affairs. You’d think that digital social media is toxic. Try the daily news cycle. I’ve escaped the stranglehold of digital toxicity by quitting nearly all social media platforms. While I am really proud of myself for having achieved this - truly, it’s remarkable considering how addicted everyone I know around me is - I cannot seem to break the newspaper addiction.

I have so many things I want to do with my mornings. I dream of rolling out of bed and get to deep work right after. I want to revisit the “Stream Processing” chapter of the book “Designing Data-Intensive Applications”. I want to study the whitepapers and architectures of so many database/data-processing systems such as LevelDB, DynamoDB, Cassandra, Clickhouse, SQLite, Kafka. I want a reinforcement of some of the concepts of Database Systems by going back to the source university text on the topic, written by Elmasri and Navathe. Intellectual pursuits await my attention and I instead burn that time away reading up on how India continues to implode.

By 9:30 - 9:45 AM, the buzz of daily work obligations begins, and it becomes hard to steal away some uninterrupted focus time for personal study. The pristine morning time before 9:30 AM is available to me for some quality deep work and I squander it away with the newspaper spread in front of me.

It not only steals my time away, but it scrambles my brains, leaving me with a huge attention-residue as I try to begin my day and switch over to a cognitively demanding task. My idol Cal Newport succinctly puts this down1.

When you turn your attention from one target to another, the original target leaves a “residue” that reduces cognitive performance for a non-trivial amount of time to follow.

And that’s a costly price to pay for someone that’s on a relentless quest to better themselves everyday. I’ve written in the past about breaking out of the news cycle - there’s a journal entry I made on Sep-5-2024, and I also wrote a post about wanting to turn into deeper, more intentional living as I begin my 40s.

And yet, here I am, continuing to reach for that newspaper every morning - against my will, against my inner voice crying for me to commence my studies instead.

I’ve thought a lot about how to break this cycle of addiction. I’m capturing some thoughts and action items below -

• To stop newspaper subscription - This will not work because my wife wants her newspaper fix too, and folks such as parents, inlaws that keep visiting us like to browse the paper as well. And then the Sunday edition of Deccan Herald carries some great writing. Now that is one day of the week where I truly relish consuming the paper guilt-free.

• To confine myself to glancing at the front page for a quick few seconds, get my morning dopamine hit, and then to not proceed further into the inner pages.

• To schedule a short 15 minute window between 6:30 - 6:45 PM when I’m done with my workday.

• To constantly remind myself that nearly everything that happens everyday has been happening for decades, and that there is nothing new to learn. You’re barely missing out, and to worry about FOMO is plain silly. Fleeting events that is news-today-forgotten-tomorrow isn’t worth paying attention to. Opt instead for serious journalistic pieces that’s on a monthly cycle where veteran writers and journalists present a more nuanced, well-researched analysis of important topics that have more staying power. Some places to go to would be respected publications such as The Economist, New York Times, BBC, The Guardian, etc., for global current events. And The Hindu, Outlook, etc., for current affairs closer home. The objective here is to ignore the daily chatter, and get your dose of well written content in a monthly roundup.

Life is truely short. There isn’t nearly enough time to do many of the things that you HAVE to do, and then on top of it, you have many other things that you WANT to do.

It’s easy to take a defeatist attitude against personal development. It’s easy to resign to the fact that we all die eventually, and that from a cosmic perspective, life is pointless and nothing you do matters anyway on the grand scale. So what’s the big deal if we squander our time away?

My little pushback for this argument is that it’s worth it to keep trying for betterment, so that we die with as little regrets as possible. And to work toward that vision, every little thing that might seem trivial but hold us back - like this newspaper addiction - deserves a closer inspection.

This is why journaling is therapeutic. Journaling about this seemingly silly, harmless indulgance is already making me feel so much better, like there’s a weight lifted off my shoulders. Having poured my thoughts out, I now hope that I’ll make some real progress toward a deeper life, free from the soul-crushing burden of daily news consumption.

References and Further Readings

Low Information Diet - Mr Money Mustache
Quit The News - Mark Manson
No News Is Good News - The Commonplace

I’m 40!

While the general tendency is to consider 40 to be slightly on the older side rather than younger, I still feel that my most rewarding, fulfilling and happier years are ahead of me, not behind me.

My life flashes in front of my eyes - a humble childhood in a small-town, directionless 20s marred by distraction and experimentation fueled by my urge to grow out of the shadows of my small-towner background, coming-of-age 30s that involved course-corrections, maturity and self-actualization. And now as I stand at the cusp of my 40s, I feel like a late-bloomer, who is only beginning to tap into his potential that never got a chance to fully emerge due to my modest upbringing, the lack of nurturing environments, and a total absence of mentors showing me the way. Despite all these factors that could have held me back, I’m proud that I’ve done really well for myself.

What I want to focus on next is the pursuit of a scholarly life of knowledge. With foundational pillars of a conventional life such as career, finances, family, childraising, housing, etc., taken care of, now is the time to truly transcend into the deep intellectual life that I’ve always found so romantically alluring. Having just turned 40, the timing is perfect to completely shun the shallow and to whole-heartedly embrace the deep life.

Toward The Life Of The Imagination

The deep life is hard. It is intellectually draining, exerts immense load on your cognitive reserves, and leaves you exhausted at the end of the day. While it’s hard and requires you to embrace some amount of asceticism, it could be the most fulfilling way to meaningfully occupy yourself for the rest of your life and could also be rewarding on all fronts - professionally, financially and socially. It could even be spiritually fulfilling without having to turn to faith and religion for that. The deep life will bring you joy, a heightened sense of self-worth, self-assurance, peace and comfort being in your own skin.

So here’s a thorough and thoughtful reflection on what that life looks like. This is an exercise in thinking through what are some things to keep in mind, what to practice, what routines and rituals I need to engage in, and what activities I need to discontinue which do not serve the purpose.

What does the deep life look like, and what are some measures to take?

• You carry an acute sense of awareness of what constitutes deep and what is shallow.

• A day of deep life will comprise of very little wallowing in the trivia of the shallow.

• You strictly schedule shallow activities to a certain day of the week, thereby leaving large parts of the day for deep work. (This is now taken care of and is on my Google Calendar as a weekly reminder).

  

• A large chunk of your time everyday is dedicated to reading, writing and/or thinking. To enhance the enjoyment of reading and writing, they could be done in novel places like cafes, parks, gardens, libraries or in a wooded area. Thinking could be done while taking a leisurely solitary stroll.

• Consolidate your digital presence and quit social media. Great strides have already been made here. I’m absent/inactive on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Discord, Whatsapp groups, and recently quit my last remaining big distraction - Reddit.

• Taking a cue from the philosopher Schopenhauer, short of completely withdrawing from society, minimize your interactions with society beyond your immediate circle.

  ---

Deliberate Practice

To reach your full intellectual potential, your mind needs to be stretched to its limits everyday, only through which your cognitive boundaries will expand over time. This means you engage in focused studies of difficult, unfamiliar topics everyday, where you take the time to not just read through the material, but truly lean back and ponder over what you read, and ensuring you understand the subject matter at a nuanced level. You could even write your own report on the subject.

At any given point in time you should be pursuing something cognitively difficult that exerts your brain and takes you to your next level of knowledge and mastery.

At this stage, the pursuits most important to me are furthering myself in the craft of software development, and gaining mastery over the German language. While software studies can keep me busy over the next decade and beyond, if I dedicatedly follow through on a regiment of deliberate practice, then 3 years from now I would have gained sufficient command over German to then switch gears and move on to something else, like studying Physics or Music.

Starting this week, I will begin a ritual of deliberate practice, splitting my time between software studies and German. For software, I’ll be starting to dive deep into the underlying architecture and source code of Clickhouse - an analytical database. And for German, I’ll dissect conversational videos that I’ve gathered in my Youtube video library. Here’s a tentative schedule.

Monday/Wednesday 9:30 AM-10:30 AM Software / 5 PM-6 PM German
Tuesday/Thursday 9:30 AM-11:30 AM Software / 5 PM-6 PM German
Friday 10:30-12:30 PM Software / 4:30 PM-6:30 PM German

I’ll be trying to document how well I’m committing to the schedule in my Journals. There will ofcourse be hiccups and interruptions along the journey, because life always gets in the way. But this is not the schedule for the next week, or the next month. This is a schedule for the next 5 years, and so a hiccup here, a hurdle there shouldn’t matter if I relentlessly stretch out my efforts over the next decade. The deep life is a way of life, and not a passing fad.

References and Further Readings

https://calnewport.com/the-deep-life-some-notes/
https://calnewport.com/focus-week-rediscover-depth/
Deep Work - Cal Newport
The Intellectual Life - Sertillanges
The Intellectual Life - Hamerton (Free ebook)

51:40 How do I find time for personal projects?
23:03 How do I do effective remote work?
The Deep Life Alan Lightman
Work Less, Not More Oliver Burkeman

Books Read This Year

The Accidental Universe - Alan Lightman.
Journey to The Center of The Earth - Jules Verne
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
In a Sunburned Country - Bill Bryson
Vamshavruksha - S. L. Bhyrappa (Kannada)

[Saturday, Oct-25-2025]

The Munich based startup finally got back to me with a verbal job offer! We’re currently in talks about finalizing the terms of the contract. The interview and their decision making process has dragged on for two months now, and I’m sure it’ll be another month before things are finalized and I sign the offer letter. The pace at which they’ve progressed and how much they’ve made me wait has kinda killed the excitement of it all. It’ll take a while for the whole thing to sink in, and the excitement of finally realizing my dream of moving to Germany to start kicking back in again.

I have a blog post in the works that’s a long, reflective musing over the big change that’s coming. Here’s the charming old-school pen-and-paper work-in-progress.

I’ve always enjoyed writing on paper than typing the first draft directly into the computer. Writing on paper takes me on a deeper journey into the inner-world that the focused mind constructs. Typing on the laptop keeps me from wandering too far away from the mundane everyday chatterings of the distracted mind.

It’s additional work to later transfer the writing on paper and then copy-typing it into the blog, but that’s alright. The toil of writing is a labor of love.

I’m waiting for the offer letter so that I can also share the details of the employment contract. The big, fat post is coming soon on the main publication.

[Wednesday, Oct-8-2025]

I finally fulfilled my son’s long-standing dream of visiting his favorite place in the world - Jollywood amusement park - with his favorite friend. We had a pleasant day out in the sun at the theme park, enjoying repeated rides through Jurassic Park, frolicking in the wave pool and munching popcorn. I like Jollywood, and for my six year old son, that’s where he wants to live.

[Monday, Oct-6-2025]

Damn hell, are these German companies slow, or are they slow? It’s been more than one full month since I wrapped up my interview loop with the startup in Munich, and I still don’t have closure. They’ve kinda been hinting that they’ll extend an offer, but they continue to keep me waiting.

On the bright side, if this is actually the pace at which life unfolds in Germany, that would be my utopia. I’m now so used to a slow-paced life that I don’t have the stomach for a rushed existence anymore. Over the years, the pace of my life has steadily gotten slower, and I’ve come to appreciate that. Giving that up isn’t possible now for my 40 year old self.

The German interview process can be exhausting and long drawn. You begin with a Get2Know call with the recruiter, followed by either a live coding round or a take-home assignment. Then comes another round or two of technical discussions paired with leetcode style problem solving. If you get this far, there’s a final culture-fit round with a higher level executive. And then you wait for your decision.

I was so exhausted after my interview with the above startup, that I had no energy left to continue on with two other German companies that were in my pipeline. Since this startup continues to dangle the bone of a possible offer in front of me, I’ve made a risky assumption that the bone is for real. So I’ve discontinued interviewing with the other companies, while I wait for a formal offer. Hope I get my closure this coming week at least.

I’m so mentally checked out at my current job and just waiting to send that resignation email. I fight the temptation to just send that resignation email already. Taking deep breaths and practising mindfulness helps :)

[Monday, Sep-1-2025]

This is the week where I'll know if my life is about to change forever or if I'll be back to square one - with regards to my job search abroad. I've just finished my interview loop with a startup in Munich, Germany. From the feedback I've received during the interviews, and the sentiment I've gauged from the interviewers, it looks like the chances of an offer are highly likely. If this works out, Oh my God, this will be it! The doors to my dream destination - Munich - will be thrown open. The dream that I've been nursing for so long will turn into a reality. God, I will cry if this happens.

There were a couple questions in the behavioral/cultural-fit rounds where my take on certain topics might not have exactly been in line with the company culture. This is where I've got some concerns whether these will become deal breakers, so I'm not exactly ready to celebrate yet.

Dear Lord, I don't believe in your existence even a bit, but please if you're out there, I pray that you do a solid to this non-believer for a change, and get me this job offer.

And now I wait, but Goddamit, I can't wait! C'mon guys, let me know your decision quick!

[Wednesday, June-11-2025]

After procrastinating for nearly three months, yesterday I finally got around to updating my resume, and sent out my first round of applications for software jobs in Germany. This is the beginning of an emotional roller-coaster ride for me - job searches usually turn out to be that. If I'm lucky, I'll soon have a job offer. If things aren't working in my favor, I'll soon be drowning in disappointments, self-doubt and self-hate as I start facing rejection emails, or no-responses from companies I applied for. I already see this wave coming because within a couple hours of applying, I got my first rejection email from Databricks in Berlin for the staff engineer role I applied for. Every rejection email hurts, and I better buckle up for the ride.

I'll do myself a favor by building a robust framework of rules to follow as I progress further. It's of utmost importance that I efficiently compartmentalize the job-search process and put it on autopilot, so that it doesn't become a draining emotional burden that'll affect my mental health.

With that said, here are some rules I'll stick to, to put my Germany job-quest on autopilot.

• Constantly remind myself that this could be an ultra-marathon, and not a sprint.

• Embrace rejections as inevitable, without letting them fill you up with self-pity, and keep moving forward.

• Send out your applications first thing in the morning, between 9:30 AM - 10:15 AM.

• Apply for a maximum of 15 companies a day, and spend not more than 40 minutes a day applying. I stop whenever I hit one of these two targets.

• Spend 1.5 hours everyday, between 12 PM - 1:30 PM, filling up that time with one leetcode problem, system design studies, and refreshing my memory on the projects I've listed on my resume.

• Here's the most important part - the one thing I've done during all my past job searches is to continuously, obsessively check my email to see if anybody has responded, wanting to setup an interview, or to declare the outcome of a completed interview. This compulsive email checking leaves me mentally super-exhausted, even depressed. So I'm strictly resolving to keeping my Gmail notifications turned off, and to only check my Gmail at 6:30 PM, like I mentioned in my previous journal update about "scheduling distractions".

And that is it. This will be my framework, and sticking to it devotedly will ensure that I stay consistent for the long term till I succeed and don't burn out or fall into depression in the process.

As a husband and father, this system will also help me be mindfuly present for my family, and not compromise on quality family time. No pursuit is worth it if I don't get to cradle my baby daughter to sleep in my arms every night, or don't get to see my little son's face light up with fascination as I recite tales of fantasy during his storytime before bed.

[Monday, June-9-2025]

I had the day off from work today, making this a long weekend. Leaving our baby daughter at the grandparents, I headed to the restaurant "Burma Burma" at Orion Mall, Bengaluru with my wife and son for lunch. And boy, what a delectable culinary treat it was! I'm a sucker for East-Asian/South-East Asian cuisine. We enjoyed a full course meal of soup, salad, appetizers, steamed buns, noodles and rice, wrapping up with dessert. Too bad they don't serve alcohol - pairing the delicacies with some beer would have been heaven. However, they made up for the absence of alcohol with Boba tea, and my wife and I enjoyed some. My 6 year old son had his first ever sip of Boba, twisted his face and immediately rejected it, lol. You'll grow to love it someday, kid :)

We finished our giant lunch at around 3 PM. I'll now be fasting until Saturday morning 9 AM. That's a good 18 hours of rest for my gut. I need this, I've had a little too much.

[Friday, June-6-2025]

I've been consuming a lot of news around the stampede that occurred in Bangalore during the RCB celebrations, leaving 11 young people dead. Governmental mismanagement aside, I'm being honest here - I fail to fully empathize with the fans' craze over our home team. And given how well we Indians fare when it comes to civic sense and public decorum, I always feel that the public is to blame for catastrophes such as these as much as the government. People that become victims of tragedies while engaging in herd-mentality behavior such as celebrity-chasing, or participating in large-scale religious events such as the Kumbh Mela somehow don't leave me feeling too sorry for their fate.

Ignoring bad-luck as a factor, surviving in our country requires exercising common sense. I made a whole post about this 2 years ago (a special mention of point number 8, which has been happening a little too much in recent times.)

[Thursday, June-5-2025]

I haven't been at my productive best over the last few days, and have engaged in dopamine-fueled online activities way too much. I've been context switching a lot across Gmail, Reddit, YouTube, the stampede news, workplace IM conversations, etc., with only a little bit of book reading squeezed into my day. I've been reading the novel "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" for the last few weeks and I'm currently at page 95. I need to get my page burn-rate up.

I'm kinda disgusted with myself over the distraction I've been drowning in. I could do better than this, and need to step my game up. I've resolved to "schedule my distraction" to a certain time window, and to strictly stay away from shallow activities outside of this block of time.

Going forward, I'm allowing myself to indulge in low-effort shallow activities only between 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM everyday. This is the time-window where I give myself permission to doom-scroll and context switch all I want. I'm free to scramble my brains cycling through junk across Whatsapp, YouTube, Reddit, Gmail, Stock Market, News, etc. But come 7:30 PM, I should be done. The phone either goes in the corner, or I'll be using my phone only to read my books on the Kindle app. WiFi and data stay turned off. Any temptation for online junk-food will be killed by AppBlock.

It's time to retrain my brain and get comfortable with dopamine fasting.

[Wednesday, June-4-2025]

It was a great day for us Bangaloreans as RCB lifted its maiden IPL title! I enjoyed the game with my family, and we watched the Bangalore night sky light up with fireworks. Watching Virat bantering with yesteryear RCB heroes ABD and Chris Gayle was a treat to watch. I wrapped up after the presentation ceremony.

And then I was done with IPL for this year.

It's time to put on my "gyaan" uncle-hat and spew some (cringey?) wisdom.

I'm a big believer in the idea that life is much more enjoyable when you've got "your own show" to run. This is where you've got worthwhile pursuits going on in your own life, and that your own victories, setbacks and challenges keep you feeling alive on a daily basis, rather than some external event ocassionally filling up your otherwise dull, boring life with a few fleeting moments of celebration.

What would a typical hardcore RCB fan with way too much time on his hands do in the next few days? He'll be swept up in the franchise's win as if its his own personal victory. He'll revel in this temporary high, binge-watch match highlights, reels and shorts, listen to talks, participate, defend, argue and troll on social media, put up status messages, respond to status messages, giggle at memes, and basically engage himself in low-effort public discourse that'll trend for the next many days.

And then that high will die down, and he'll be back to living his monotonic life in the comfort zone, looking forward to the next big external event that'll again bring some color into his life.

This kind of existence is fine for a 20 year old but it's kinda depressing for a 40 year old like me if I only rely on something external to feel alive. I need to seek out my own thrills and highs that I actually control, and not merely be a spectator endlessly celebrating someone else's achievement.

There's always something to work on when you prioritize "your own show" over someone else's. Are you happy with where you are in your life professionally, personally, financially, socially and spiritually? Are you happy with where you live? What about your fitness? Are you just growing older in age or are you growing as a person? If you aren't exactly giving these aspects enough attention, then you've got work to do. You'll be better off limiting your celebration of someone else's achievement, and get to work on achieving your own milestones.

I've got plenty of things to chase in my own life. There are books to read, technological and artistic interests to pursue, fitness goals to reach, financial moves to make, deliver on my projects at work, improve my German, start looking for a damn job in Germany which I've been procrastinating on, pump out some articles on my blog, the list is endless.

So thank you RCB for the well-deserved cup and the top-notch entertainment! But I'll be the one losing if I continue to spend more time on post-win mass hysteria. So, I'm done for now.

Until next year. Mundin sala noo cup namde!

[Sunday, Apr-27-2025]

One major trait found in intellectuals and scholars is that they read. They read a ton. And they put a lot of thought into what to pay attention to and what isn't worth their time. This is worth emulating for aspirers of the intellectual life.

I am a wannabe-intellectual/wannabe-scholar. I do realize that I will very likely remain a wannabe all my life. But I try. And I'd like to start trying harder. I am proud of how well I've protected my attention-span in today's age of unprecedented distraction. My ability to focus long and hard on topics that are important to me has remained intact, and has infact been improving over time. But the media that I am engaging myself in could use a little overhauling.

I voraciously consume blogs, articles, documentation, white-papers, etc., but there is one thing that I have gotten rusty at - reading longer books. And it's time for me to fix this. I have to start transitioning from consuming article-length literature to big fat books.

I just finished reading this extremely long, awe-inspiring account of adventurer Henry Worsley's expeditions in Antarctica. Long form writing that's done well truly takes you on an immersive journey into fascinating worlds that few other forms of content consumption can match, including Reddit.

I've observed the typical Reddit user being under the illusion that they're somehow smarter than your regular Whatsapp uncle/aunty, or the Reels/Shorts doom-scroller, or someone engaged in the soulless corporate bullshit and motivational crap on LinkedIn. While there's some truth to Redditors being far more self-aware than the average social-media user, you would still do yourself a service by seriously cutting down your time on Reddit and its unending posts of outrage, rants, low-effort social commentary, memes and shitposts.

Reddit is my last remaining avenue of distraction, and is my latest target in my quest for constant self-improvement. I'll make a conscious effort on cutting down my time on Reddit, and switch to some serious book reading.

Here are some books I'll be getting into in the coming months:

• Cosmos (Carl Sagan)

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)

• The Intellectual Life (A. D. Sertillanges)

• Deep Work (Cal Newport)

Some more literary greats I would like to dig this year - Kurt Vonneghut, Jack London, Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, John McPhee, Russian greats like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn.

[Wednesday, Apr-16-2025]

A day of gastronomical gluttony!

I've been experimenting a lot with fasting these days. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I skip breakfast and lunch, and I break my fast by early evening with a cup of coffee. It helps that I work from home, so I don't have to explain to friends/coworkers why I don't have lunch two days a week. I've been intrigued by the benefits of fasting that the tech-bros can't stop talking about. I see popular folks on YouTube such as Lex Fridman and Andrew Huberman sometime fast for days. I don't yet have the courage and mental-toughness to fast for that long, but I think I will get there someday, gradually building myself up to it.

Yesterday I fasted for way too long and worked way too hard. There's an issue that I'm tackling at work which has been giving me a hard time, and I really went after it yesterday, surviving only on a cup of coffee the entire day until 6 PM. And everytime I've pushed myself way too hard, I've always had the need to make up for it with a day of luxury, indulgance and slackery the next day. So here I am, chilling out today - not working, and just having had a gigantic monster of a lunch.

Here's what I enjoyed during my long, slow lunch spanning 1.5 hours - Grilled chicken, pan-fried egg-noodles, Tex-Mex chicken salad, two slices of watermelon, half a mango, and two glasses of red wine. All this, while enjoying a video on the crazy shit they eat in Kenya. I'm typing this update a satisfied man with a full belly, a head that's buzzing with the effects of wine, and a stupid smile on my face. I'm getting ready for a blissful one hour sleep, and will wake up to a delicious cup of filter coffee. I'll however give my digestive system a good rest by skipping dinner and fasting until tomorrow morning, consuming only water.

I've always been a fan of heightening the pleasure of the eating experience, which otherwise sadly gets reduced to a mindless necessity in our busy lives. A life without the luxury of getting to have long, slow, fantastic meals is a life not worth living. So, today goes down as a good day in my life.

[Friday, Mar-14-2025]

Thanks to the relaxing four day long-weekend holiday on the event of Holi, I'm enjoying getting lots of sleep, plenty of playtime with my kids, running errands by going on longer walks instead of getting everything ordered and home delivered, getting digital chores done, etc. I love days where you're on a slow-paced, open-ended schedule instead of the fast-paced schedule set by your job. The only thing I don't have here in Bangalore is a quiet and clean wooded area by a lake where I could go do some thinking, reading and writing amid the silence of nature.

I was contacted by a Meta recruiter for opportunities in London a couple weeks back. The initial dopamine hit was super high, but on further reflection I held back from pursuing it, at least for now. For one, I don't think I can crack Meta right now - they need leetcoding machines that not only effortlessly solve problems, but solve them fast. I'm good at leetcode, but I don't solve problems fast, I solve them "eventually". My system design skills need some brushing up too.

I could spend an intense month prepping for a Meta interview, but assuming I can crack Meta, my second reason is that I still don't want to work there because of the insane pace and performance pressure, and the constant job insecurity. I'm nearly 40 and got two kids. The last thing I'd want to do is to relocate to London with my whole family, join Meta, and then be laid off under a year. No, thank you!

I continue to find Germany very attractive because of the lure of a slow-paced, stable life and the peace of mind that comes by being protected with stronger labor laws and job security. 30 days of paid leaves a year, on top of weekends and government holidays? Bring it on! Just what I want because I'm done being the hustling career-ladder-climber in my life. I'm a senior software developer, and this is the end of the road for me. I won't be chasing after further milestones such as becoming a Principal/Staff engineer, or a manager. The milestones I'm chasing now are permanent residence/citizenship in a country of my choice, and then either CoastFIRE or early retirement.

I'm nearly half-way through the leetcode Blind 75 problem set, and I'll probably start sending out my resume to jobs in Germany by mid-April.

[Sunday, Mar-9-2025]

I've for long been a follower and admirer of St. Broseph - Dushyant Dubey is Bangalore's "Batman", a tireless social worker and the founder of the Broseph Foundation. He's a ray of hope for people that have nobody else to turn to. I've always done my best to contribute in any way I can. Since I'm a family guy with two young kids and have a full-time job, I don't have the luxury of time to volunteer at the Broseph Foundation. So the next best thing I could do is financial contribution, which I've been regularly doing. I've so far contributed around Rs. 3 lakh spread out over the last year and a half.

Recently Broseph sent out a message on Reddit and on their Whatsapp group that the foundation is running low on funds. Since I'm fortunate enough to be able to contribute a lot more than what I have so far, I plan on making a contribution of at least Rs. 50K at the beginning of every month to the foundation.

I've also been giving away tons of miscellaneous household stuff, shipping them away to the Broseph headquarters. As a fierce minimalist, I hate clutter in my house with passion. My wife isn't as much of a minimalist as I am, and because of this mismatch, stuff keeps building up in our house which after a while starts making me restless. Every once in a while, I go through a purging exercise and build a box full of stuff that are of no value to us. Sometimes I have to do this without my wife knowing because even if she doesn't need those things either, she'll hold on to them "just-in-case" or out of sentimental value.

Shipping boxloads of stuff to the Broseph foundation is a win-win for all. It helps me declutter my house and get rid of unwanted stuff, while it gets sent out to a place where it'll find some use. Way better than all that stuff ending up in landfill. If the Broseph headquarters doesn't need it either, they eventually give it away during their donation drives.

I just sent out my third box yesterday, after procrastinating for months. The freedom that you experience after responsibly getting rid of things you don't need is priceless.

If anyone reading here is interested in doing the same, here's the mailing address of the Broseph headquarters - Broseph HQ. But please do make sure the stuff you're donating is usable and aren't things that should have belonged in the dumpster.

[Saturday, Mar-08-2025]

One of the many innumerable reasons that make life in India miserable is us well-mannered, self-aware, civic folks having to share the same public spaces with the idiotic, chapri crowd with zero civic sense. These lowest forms of human-beings are a disgrace to the reputation of the country. These scum-of-the-earth are all over the entire spectrum of unruly behavior, ranging from committing bone-chilling rapes - the recent one being the Hampi incident - to causing inconvenience to the rest of us that are trying to have a good time. Whatever empathy I had for these people has eroded away over the years. They don't deserve empowerment. What these pests need is extermination.

I took my son to the Nehru planetarium in Bangalore to enjoy a show on the planets. My son is going through an obsession with the planets of our solar system (his current favorite video), and so he was immensely invested in the show. But as always, when you're outside, you're never too far away from a handful of chapris spoiling the experience for everyone else. There were a couple guys seated nearby in the pitch dark theatre that - despite staff instructions to keep your phones turned off - started recording the show on their mobiles held up high, ruining the immersive experience that some of us were trying to have. After tolerating the glare of their screen for a couple minutes, I couldn't take it anymore. I overcame the inertia of being a mute-spectator and yelled "MOBILE OFF!". That didn't get their attention and they continued their recording. I then yelled even louder and that gave the needed courage to a few other silent sufferers to raise their voices too, and eventually one of the other guys went up to the chapri and demanded that the idiot put his damn phone away so we all can enjoy the show without the glow of his screen.

I'm not a hero that fearlessly intervenes to resolve a bad situation occurring in public, but I was mildly satisfied that I at least was the first to open my mouth about it. Sometimes that's all it takes - for the first person to speak up, and then someone else that's even tougher will step in and take further care of the situation.

Finally we all could go on with the show, although my frustration remains that the Indian public in general really doesn't know how to maintain the etiquette of silence and mindfulness these venues require. The background hum of random murmurs, the sudden flash of some person's smartphone/smartwatch never really stops. The live-shows and movie-going experience has for long been ruined for me because of the glowing and flashing devices of other people that destroy the immersive experience you're trying to have. Every screen that lights up in some corner of the dark theatre shoots a dose of anxiety and anger into my bloodstream. It's sad how bad this has gotten these days.

[Thursday, Feb-20-2025]

I was disappointed that the complaint that I had filed with the National Consumer helpline about charging over MRP was dismissed in a day. The reason given was that eateries/cafeterias inside of a bigger establishment such as restaurants, arcades, arenas are authorized to sell products over MRP, attributing the extra to the service/ambience they're offering. It is illegal only when done by actual stores and supermarkets whose only business is selling these products. Fair enough! My googling on the topic confirmed the same. I accept defeat here.

[Monday, Feb-17-2025]

Today is the day I'll take my first step, kicking off a journey of indefinite duration - which is, to find a job and move to Germany. Depending on various parameters, it could end up being a short journey of 3-4 months, or it could draw out to 2 years or more. However long it might take, I'm ready to embrace the grind and just not give up.

After a long hiatus of 9 months from leetcode, I'll get back to it again, starting today. My aim is to solve one problem a day at least, if not more. I'll be focusing on the Blind 75 problem set to begin with, and once I get through all the problems there, I'll either keep revising them, or move on to the Blind 150 problem set. The point here is to keep that streak of "one problem a day" active. While I do enjoy leetcoding and am fairly competent at it, I wish that this would be the last time I'll have to grind leetcode in my life. I want to move on from this stage of being a code-monkey solving programming puzzles for the sake of a job. I don't want to be grappling with tiny brain-teaser code snippets in my 40s. So leetcode, here we meet again, but hopefully one last time!

As always, public accountability is what keeps me going. So it'll be in the public domain for everyone to see how well I'm sticking to my one-problem-a-day resolve, over at my leetcode profile.

German Language

Going forward, I'll also be very closely documenting my progress with learning the German language. The only believable form of documentation is showing up on videos and speaking the language. Otherwise nobody can tell if you're really drawing from your knowledge or just copy-pasting Google Translate. I wish I could do that someday, but not right now. I don't think I have enough command over the language to start speaking in German to a camera yet, and neither do I have the time to make videos. So for now I'll just briefly document what efforts I'm currently putting forth in my quest to acquire German. Here goes the first.

• These days I've changed all my video captions (subtitles) to German - be it on Netflix or YouTube. I watch my shows in English, but let the captions be in German. This helps me get an understanding of how real-life sentences are framed in German. I avoid Duolingo like a disease. It tricks you into believing you're learning, but you aren't learning shit. Picking up on real-life everyday conversations is the way to go. I'm currently watching season 2 of "Mo" and the movie "American Beauty" on Netflix, with the subs in German.

• Reading through the various conjugations of the verbs "tun" and "machen". I've discovered that ChatGPT can be a great source of reference to learn the language. I'm using ChatGPT as my personal German teacher. You feed in a prompt such as "give me all the conjugations of the German verb "tun" along with example sentences", and you get back very useful material and I'm using it to my best. Ich tue mein bestes!

Miscellaneous

I recently took my son to the children's play-arena Funky Monkeys in Orion Mall Bangalore, and there at the cafetaria I was pissed off to learn that they're charging over MRP for consumable products, nearly Rs. 10 extra. While I'm doing well financially, doesn't mean I let myself taken advantage of. There's a difference between being able to afford things versus letting yourself get ripped off.

I objected to this with the guy at the register but what do you expect from a bottom-feeder? He doesn't call the shots. He shrugged his shoulders and said he just follows the rules he's told to follow. So I've taken the trouble to go ahead and file a complaint with the National Consumer Helpline (NCH), and also sent out some tweets. I've heard good things about NCH actually acting on the complaints filed, so it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. If I don't see any action on this by the end of February, I'll give them a call on their number and follow-up on the status.

Moving on, I'll be restarting my gym workouts starting today, after a break of nearly a month because of a bad back injury. I'll target Mon-Wed-Fri afternoons between 1 - 2 PM. Looking forward to getting back to making fitness a core component of my daily routines.

[Sunday, Jan-26-2025]

I watched this episode of Shark Tank India last night. I don't usually watch Shark Tank, but the fact that the Youtuber FlyingBeast - who I'm vaguely familiar with - was the participant got my attention. Getting to see the very successful entrepreneur judges that have strong bullshit-detectors, and the super-motivated participants exchanging a difficult but intelligent conversation is a rewarding experience no doubt, but videos like these always leave me struggling with inferiority complex.

My inferiority-driven thoughts go something like this - "I've played it safe all my life! I've always held salaried jobs at megacorps. I have never tried any risky ventures. The biggest career risk I've taken is a three-year break from working. I'm about to turn 40 and I don't have a shred of business acumen in me. I see the folks on this show speak jargon such as EBITDA, COGS, unit economics, etc., and I don't even know what they mean. My old-ass needs to start educating myself about business and entrepreneurship. Besides a salary, the only other thing I rely upon for wealth generation is stock-market appreciation, which I don't control. I've got some money that I can afford to lose, so why don't I try something crazy and risky with it? C'mon, you ignorant, stock-market-following loser, get off your comfort zone!" ...And so on and on goes my self-hating thoughts as I compare myself to the people on Shark Tank.

I took some time today to truly reflect upon these thoughts and set my priorities straight. Here goes my post-mortem analysis:

What does a happy day look like in my ideal lifestyle? I'd say it would involve waking up to a day of no commitments and obligations, with a wide open schedule. I'd get on with the day with long sessions of activities one after another - the keyword here is "long". I begin with a long session of reading or writing - it could be creative-writing or programming, or reading some intellectually hard material such as a technical whitepaper or software source code. I finish this deep-work session by mid-day, and then I take off for a long run/hike in the great outdoors and come back home having worked up a good sweat and a good appetite. Then I settle down for a long lunch with some beer or wine. I then enjoy a nap. Come evening, I clock another long session of deep intellectual work and then call it a day. I'd enjoy the rest of the evening with family and friends, recreational hobbies, go out to a restaurant or to enjoy some live music. That's me craving the romantic lifestyle of a writer living in Paris during the 1920s!

So for someone aspiring for a lifestyle like this, wanting to be a businessman or an entrepreneur should hold no appeal at all. The latter is all about hustling, collaborating, phone-calls, meetings, overcoming hurdles, launching initiatives, seizing opportunities and many other similar endeavours. No thanks! I'm not cut out for that. I'm more charmed by the lives and daily routines of recluse people like Alan Lightman and Haruki Murakami.

If I wish for silence, solitude, and slow-paced days, getting into entrepreneurship and business ventures would be catastrophic to my well-being. And for that reason, I'm out! I'll continue to not pay attention to the world of entrepreneurship. Taking a cue from how Sherlock Holmes made a case to stay ignorant of astronomy, I will not waste my time learning what EBITDA and COGS mean because that knowledge is neither of any use nor of any interest to me.

So the next time a smart, charismatic entrepreneur or businessman makes you feel insecure, just come back here and re-read this journal entry.

[Monday, Jan-13-2025]

Last Friday, I hit the gym and since I was short on time, I skipped warmups and went straight to lifting weights. I did a few reps of heavy shoulder squats and boy did I pay the price for this carelessness! I had a slight pain in my lower back all Saturday that I dismissed as soreness.

This Sunday I bent down to pick something and as I got back up, an intense pain shot through my waist, and I collapsed breathless on the floor. For the next 5 hours, I lay immobile on the hard floor, and my family helped me get comfortable where I was stranded by sliding down blankets and pillows under me.

Long story short, with family's help, a visiting nurse (got my first ass-jab as an adult from her), and a physiotherapist, I was shifted from the floor onto a bed and now I've been recovering. The pain diagnosis was Sciatica.

I'd like to jot down some note-worthy lessons from this episode.

1. To Be Mindful of My Limits

I should stop trying to be a superhero. Need to keep in mind never to jump into doing weights without warmups. My goal is to maintain good muscle tone and bone density, a healthy cardiovascular stamina, and to preserve my range of muscular motion. I don't care about becoming shredded, so there's no real need to push myself too much.

2. ("La Familia Es Todo" - Breaking Bad)

"Your family is everything". Not your professional network, not your acquaintences or contacts, not the celebrities that you give so much of your time and attention to. For an ordinary individual that isn't a celebrity or an influential person himself, your family is the only thing you can turn to.

• My wife worked tirelessly caring for our two kids, while also caring for me, in addition to running other chores.

[My takeaway] No matter how progressive minded I think I am, I still let my male-ego take over sometimes and want to win arguments between me and wife. I need to kill that ego and learn to accept defeat. I also need to let my wife deal with her own personal issues by giving her plenty of personal space and privacy, without trying to act like a smart-ass, offering unwanted help and involvement.

• My inlaws made endless phone calls and finally found a physiotherapist and nurse that could do a home-visit and help me out.

[My takeaway] To try to be more empathetic with my inlaws even though our perspectives are poles-apart in all aspects. To look beyond petty differences, and to put an end to constantly judging them.

• My 5 year old son was checking in on me occassionally - too young to process the situation - and was wondering why I've been lying down for so long. My one year old daughter that likes to climb on my belly whenever she sees me lying down, came as always to do that, but I had to send her away and she wasn't happy.

[My takeaway] My kids need me very much, so I need to do everything that's in my control to stay healthy, fit and functional. I also need to exercise absolute discipline to give a large chunk of my time to my kids while they're young. I have to practise loving them unconditionally.

Maintaining and nurturing relationships (either familial or with friends) is a very important investment that I haven't been making. As an introvert, I put in zero effort toward relationships - taking my family for granted and letting my friendships fade away. Going forward, I'll make a calendar entry to remind myself every 15 days to reach out to some person that I've known at some point in my life, and haven't checked in on in a while.

[Thursday, Jan-2-2025]

It's a new year! I'm brimming with excitement, energy and anticipation heading into the year.

I made a blog post reflecting on the year bygone - Link

2025 will be the year where I'll be making my most serious attempt to move to Germany. I made a half-hearted attempt to find a job abroad back in March-April-May of 2024, while also parallely searching for a job in Bangalore because I was looking to come out of my mini-retirement of 3 years. My Bangalore job hunt succeeded first and I took it, as I was in a hurry to get my foot back in the door of the IT industry and not let my resume gap grow even wider. This led me to postponing my desire to move abroad by another year.

Now I'll hit that one year mark of working in Bangalore by the first week of June, which'll be here in another 5 short months! And this time, there'll be no postponing my plan to move abroad again.

I'm planning on getting a headstart to my Germany job search by starting to apply by the beginning of March so that if I'm lucky, I'll have a new job in hand by the time I hit the one year mark in Bangalore. I know that the economy isn't doing so well in Germany right now and that might negatively impact my job prospects. But I'm not operating on a deadline this time unlike last year, and neither am I targeting tier-1 or FAANG companies, so that enables me to cast a wider net and wait for my catch for as long as it takes.

If I wish to start looking by March, I need to give myself at least a month of study/preparation. I'm targeting mid-senior developer roles so I can basically let my experience speak for itself during interviews, but I want to cover some ground at least in terms of preparation. So I plan on working through the below topics for my interview prep.

• Leetcode Blind 75

• Whitepapers : Windows Azure Storage, Snowflake, Google Spanner/BigTable/Chubby

• System Design Interview videos on this channel. No other system design videos, period. Else it'll be endless rabbit-holing.

I'll slowly begin easing into the study/prep mindset in the coming weeks by starting to tackle leetcode questions and setting aside hour-long time blocks to read through the above whitepapers.

Having a challenge ahead of me that requires sustained focus and commitment always stokes me up and makes me feel alive. And this "find a job and move to Germany" is a big adventurous challenge that I'll begin tackling in another month or so. Super fired up!

Hope you all have had a good year! I’ve had a decent run this year, financially for sure. Despite the endless banter around economic slowdowns, job-cuts, geo-political uncertainties and a list of other mainstream media buzzwords, the US stock market kept hitting new highs. Take a look at VTI that’s an indicator of the performance of the broader US market - 24% returns this year!

I stand in disbelief looking at this incredible wealth-generating machine throw up a few thousand dollars of gains my way everyday for most days.

We hit our first seven digit mark back in 2020. And now we’re closer to the two million mark than we are to one, solely driven by capital gains since 2021 when we took our first shot at FIRE. For someone like me that spends zero-time keeping up with stock market hot-takes, this feels like cheating. My brain clicks into flight-mode whenever I see a candle-stick chart on the screen. I spend my evenings goofing around with my kids instead of consuming yet another market analysis article. Mr. Jim Collins has saved my evenings from endlessly planning my next market move while doom-scrolling r/WallStreetBets, or Bitcoin tweets by techbros.

My investment strategy has always been, and will very likely be for the rest of my life 100% ETFs, no options, bonds or REITs, no gold or real estate, no FDs, and definitely no shitcoins. I’ve chosen to stay ignorant of all these other asset classes. My only cash flow from the US right now is dividends from my current holdings. These dividends are reinvested right back into the parent ETF. I haven’t been investing much in India despite my salary income piling up in my bank account, because I’m not sure how much longer we’ll continue to stay in India (more on that later). I occasionally throw a lakh or two mindlessly into Nifty-50 index funds.

Thoughts on Working

Let me admit that despite holding onto a job that I’m moderately enjoying, not a day passes when I don’t wake up and wish that I had the day to myself. After all, I enjoyed that freedom for nearly three years, so I do miss that. I beat myself up that I’m doing FI (Financial Independence) completely wrong. Our net worth is inching toward two million USD, and I have a baby daughter who - whenever my wife isn’t around - would rather hang out with me than with the nanny. But I’ve been stupid enough to put myself into a situation where I need to attend to work obligations and dial into meetings, sometimes late in the night. My only justification for this is that I’m using my job as leverage to move back abroad.

I like software, and the product I work on is interesting enough. My manager, though a workaholic corporate bot himself, is a decent guy that respects boundaries. These are the factors that are keeping me sane. And the fact that I’m fully remote is a huge bonus. That spares me from suffering Bangalore’s roads, traffic and pollution, not to mention helping me preserve the resource I value the most - my time - that would otherwise be squandered away trapped in a cab stuck in slow moving traffic.

Besides Microsoft, I also had a job offer from Cohesity. I came close to accepting that offer because I was more excited about that job profile, but they had the mandate to work 2-3 days a week from office which was the deal breaker. And now with the hindsight of experience having commuted to work a few times, I thank myself everyday for not having accepted Cohesity’s offer. I wouldn’t have lasted a couple months enduring Bangalore’s commute, despite the availability of office cab. I’m too pampered now - there’s no room for commute and work-from-office in my life anymore.

In my last post, I lamented about how I’m not happy with my quality-of-life in Bangalore, and wondered if starting to work would give me a much needed distraction from my endless negativity.

Here’s that passage from my previous post, when I had just landed my job.

A shiny office and interesting work, great compensation, good social circle and a nice home could very well be all you need for your pursuit of happiness to come to a conclusion. I’ll get to test this out soon. Maybe I had a little too much free time to moan, groan and complain about the abysmal public conditions in India. Now that I won’t have as much free time anymore, maybe I’ll hit that “happy-and-distracted” trance-like state of existence and might drop the idea of moving abroad altogether. It remains to be seen!

Well, six months down the lane, it’s clear to me that holding a job in Bangalore isn’t gonna put an end to my disgruntlement. On the contrary, I’m even more outraged now that I see a sizeable chunk of my salary siphoned away in the name of income tax every month. And in return, I get potholed roads, trash-ridden sidewalks and polluted air to breathe.

I’m working here only as a means to leave.

Thoughts on Current Life

A year back, I had a very bad day and in a fit of rage, I made a Reddit post on the Bangalore subreddit that exploded and went viral. It was my 15 minutes of fame on the Internet.

Most Indian metros, if not all, have turned into an unliveable, dystopian urban nightmare. I fail to understand how the rich folks build an impenetrable bubble of happiness here. That bubble probably consists of a 3-crore villa in a gated community that you fill up with maids, and install air and water purifiers all over.

Come major festivals, if your locality’s temple invades your personal space with loudspeakers blaring devotional songs all day, despair not! You can sound-proof your doors, windows and curtains. The rich Indian has devised all sorts of richman solutions to chase away the constant creep of third-world nuisance sneaking up on him. The rich Indian is adept at creating a walled-garden oasis where butterflies flutter and babies squeal with joy.

But you need to step out too, right? Therein lies my constant reminder. You’ve got traffic, trash and pollution waiting for you the moment you step out of your community gates.

There’s an angry rapper residing in me that’d like to throw some hip-hop verses at you.

My wife, having gotten used to safer pedestrian conditions for ten years in the US, hasn’t adapted to the Indian streets. She crosses chaotic, busy streets without enough caution, innocently places her trust on zebra-crossings and pedestrian-right-of-the-way, and isn’t guarded enough to watch for hazards on sidewalks. She isn’t half as alert and watchful as I am when we’re out and about. I get anxious whenever my wife - an adult - has to step out without her guardian angel - me - to look out for her. We live here long enough and someday she’ll get run over by some lowlife. Let alone sending my kids out onto the streets by themselves.

Now this is where you might begin dismissing me as a cowardly snowflake engaged in fear-mongering, but I have an extreme irrational (rational?) phobia of Indian highways. Despite being an experienced driver that has driven plenty within city limits, the speedy Indian highways fill my heart with terror. I’ve always paid special attention to road accident reports on the daily news, and the stuff I’ve been reading and watching these days has amplified my phobia to an extent where I wonder if I need to see a therapist.

I can’t shake the image off my head that this is the fate that awaits me or my family on the Indian highways some day.

I have a simmering sense of urgency to relocate myself and my family to a safer civilization with clean air and functioning infrastructure.

I have an aquaintance on Reddit that made a post just a year back about liquidating his assets in Australia and move back to India - to the Delhi NCR region. My suggestion on the post was to not liquidate his assets - not before he has lived in India for a couple years. He returned to Gurgaon, and within a span of a year, he’s moved back to Australia. Good thing he had his PR. He’s had multiple reasons to deem his India experiment a failure, in addition to the unprecedented winter air pollution in the capital region. He seemed unhappy about the education system his kid had to grind through, and he also was seemingly upset about his job search experience in India, where junior kids interviewing you mindlessly throw leetcode hard questions at you with no regard for your work experience.

The story is anecdotal, but I believe we Indians that are caught up in the India v/s Abroad dilemma are in a truly dicey situation. Living abroad has its upsides, but also brings with it downsides such as loneliness, cultural alienation, immigration uncertainties, identity crisis and severed familial bonds. And if you stick to our motherland, you’re settling to live with issues like pollution, overcrowding, trash, lawless driving, traffic-jams and women-safety issues.

You’ve got to pick your poison. If I were to make a recommendation as a friend, I’d strongly advise against settling down in an Indian metropolitan city, or at least plan things in such a way where you do a trial-run of two years before making irreversible decisions.

Thoughts on What The Future Holds

I feel that I’ve endured enough potholes, trash, smoke and dust, honking, and the endless nuisance of public festivals. Bangalore has chewed me up. She just has to spit me out now. It’s been six months since I’ve started working here. I’m counting my days down and waiting for the passage of six more months to restart my job hunt abroad. This time around, I won’t have a plan-B, like I mentioned in my previous post, quoted below.

With the job market abroad not looking very bright, at least for me, I did not want to continue searching indefinitely with no clear end in sight. I fell back to my plan-B, which was to target Tier-1 companies in Bangalore with the possibility to transfer abroad internally.

One of my bucket lists in life is to live and work in Germany. I’ll die a regretful man if I don’t fulfill this wish. Those that have lived in Germany might laugh at my naive excitement based on their own disillusionments. While I’m aware that disillusionments follow you no matter where you go, I want to live through my own excitements and disillusionments, rather than experience them second-hand through someone else’s opinions and feedback.

I’m one year short of turning 40, and now seems to be a good time to lay down some aspirational goals and wishes to pursue in my forties. I’d like to end this year excited about having set a blurry vision in front of me of how I want my life to take shape as I enter my fourth decade of existence.

With the prayer that Mother Nature doesn’t throw any cruel curveballs in my path, or simply kill me off, here goes my dreamy list…

• Move to Germany. If things work out, become a permanent resident. Then become a citizen.

• Gain fluency in the German language, and assimilate well into the society.

• Hold remote friendly jobs, and eventually either go part-time or freelance. Work towards Financial Independence by German standards.

• Go nuts on outdoor recreation, which got so badly suppressed during my time in Bangalore. Running, hiking, biking, swimming, kayaking, etc should be an integral part of daily life. Hell, even a stress-free urban-walk feels like a luxury to me. That's the level of deprivation I've been gifted, thanks to my decision to settle down in Bangalore.

• Experience dog ownership.

• Transition into a lifestyle where work/career progressively becomes a smaller and smaller component of your existence, leaving a lot of room for recreational and artistic pursuits.

  ---

Low-Budget Philanthrophy

Let me close down with a few notes and pictures of some inconsequential social service that I did for this year.

• Acted as substitute writer (scribe) for a visually challenged kid for his 12th standard (2nd PUC) exams and scribed all his six subjects over a period of three weeks. I had written for him in 2023, and he reached out again in 2024 to ask if I could write his 12th final exams. This was a couple months before I started working, so I had the time to commit to it. I’ve also been covering some of his other trivial expenses like yearly cellphone recharges, ordering essential items to be delivered to his hostel, etc.

• Took our housemaid’s two kids to the mall and the gaming arcade to offer them some fun childhood experiences which they otherwise never get to enjoy. The kid in red shirt is my son.

• Sponsored a Rs. 8000 gas water heater in our neighborhood’s rundown old-age home that shelters a handful of lonely, estranged senior folks in utterly inadequate living conditions. They had been suffering cold water showers for a while ever since their electric-coil water heater broke down. I bump into the kindhearted caretaker of the shelter occassionally, and when he mentioned that they were without a heater and won’t be able to get a new one anytime soon due to shortage of funds, I offered to cover the cost of a new water heater. When I stepped in to look at the newly installed heater, the condition of the bathroom left me speechless. Oh, we rich folks have it good here, and yet how I complain!

• Sporadically donated to Dushyant Dubey, Bangalore’s benevolent social worker that’s the voice-for-the-voiceless. He has recently got his NGO legally registered. I’m in the middle of getting his NGO added to my company’s eligible charities list. Once added to my company’s database, all my donations to the NGO will be matched 100% by Microsoft. Hoping the double contribution will make a substantial difference in empowering his NGO for as long as I stay at Microsoft Bangalore!

That’s all I’ve got for this year. Here’s wishing that 2025 be a year of peace and lesser human suffering. Hoping we all make great strides in our pursuit of happiness. Happy new year!

Talk soon,
- Dog

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Books Read This Year

The Body - Bill Bryson
T. Rex And The Crater of Doom - Walter Alvarez
Einstein’s Dreams - Alan Lightman
Krakatoa - Simon Winchester
Atlantic - Simon Winchester
The Runaway Jury - John Grisham
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac

[Tuesday, Dec-10-2024]

I've been reasonably happy with how my days have been unfolding these last many weeks.

Things going well

• I've been running 2-3 kilometers on the treadmill every 2-3 days, Also lifting some weights alongside.

• For the sweet tooth that I am, I have drastically cut down on sugar intake since early November. Most of my sugar right now comes in its natural form through fruits. It's the season of Persimmons and I've been enjoying these delicious fruits almost daily.

• I've been getting my daily dose of vitamin-D by standing shirtless in the sun every morning for 10-15 minutes, just meditating on my thoughts.

• My protein intake has been satisfactory - meeting my daily target of 2-3 eggs. Like most Indian families, we're a carbs-obsessed vegetarian household and I need to make extra effort to get my proteins. I wish we cooked meat, but since we don't, I try to make up for it with daily eggs and weekly grilled chicken from restaurants.

• My German has been improving consistently. I've been watching an episode of Peppa Wutz everyday for the last two months. As a grown-ass man, I'd be ashamed to admit that I watch Peppa, but the learning I get through these videos is tremendous. I tried Duolingo and gave up within two days. I couldn't stand the bullshit lessons that repeatedly teach you how to say "Coffee and Milk" in German. No, screw you Duolingo! I need to quickly learn how to say "your lessons suck and I'd like to kick you in the nuts" in German, and you instead waste my time and insult my intelligence teaching me how to say "Kaffe und Milch" a hundred times. Thanks, but I pass.

Things needing attention/improvement

• Read more technical whitepapers. It is just so hard to make time for this. I've been working through the Azure Storage paper for a month now, and have barely gotten through half of it. The challenge is not in being able to focus and digest dense technical material, the challenge is in being able to find large blocks of uninterrupted time. This isn't Duolingo where you can sneak in 10 minutes of reading everyday while sitting on the toilet. These studies require 2 hours of contiguous time-blocks for you to give them the focused attention they demand.

• To keep your mornings chores-free. Right now, I spend time every morning doing household chores like taking out the trash, restocking drinking water, giving my daughter her vitamin-D supplements, soaking my breakfast oats, etc. All these mindless but essential tasks take away precious morning time from high-value deep work. I need to push all these activities out to evening, after work hours.

• I need to make time every night to read epic classics to my 5 year old son. I feel bad that I'm depriving him of the joy and pleasure of awe-inspiring tales of fantasy and adventure, while he continues to consume crappy YouTube videos on the iPad. I'll be making conscious efforts to start reading him bedtime stories of timeless classics such as Chronicles of Narnia, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Amar Chitra Katha, Jules Verne, etc.

Things to stop doing

• Scrolling - in all forms. Any online activity that involves scrolling is to be avoided at best, very much including Reddit. Scrolling destroys your ability to train your focus on one single topic and turns you into a dopamine hungry beast. I have now put up a cheesy quote as a sticky on my laptop screen that says in bold letters - "SCROLLING IS THE ENEMY". Right beside that, there's another quote - "CONTEXT SWITCHING IS THE ENEMY".

Avoid consuming mass-manufactured content around "hot-takes" on contemporary topics. These are some of the sneakiest time-wasters disguised and packaged as educational infotainment. Very popular Youtube channels like Dhruv Rathi and Mohak Mangal do put out good material ocassionally, but you need to realize that this is all ultimately empty calorie junk food for your brain. Constantly remind yourself that true thinkers are not found on Reddit and social media. The truly smart people write books and run hour long podcasts, not engage in bite-sized tweets and low-effort Reddit comments.

[Sunday, Nov-10-2024]

There's a temple right in the vicinity of my apartment. If you know temples well enough, you'll know that they start blaring devotional songs early on in the morning. My neighborhood temple isn't any different. This was a nuisance to me early on when I moved in here, but now I'm used to it and it's basically white noise to me and I'm able to sleep through the noise.

Today I woke up early for some reason and was surprised by the silence I encountered. The temple for some reason wasn't playing its daily playlist. And boy, that morning silence was divine. Instead of the same old "Kausalya Supraja", I had the sound of birds chirping in the backdrop.

I drifted off to day dreaming, my inner voice talking to me - "if only I woke up to this silence everyday, if only I had some spacious, thinly populated parks nearby to go jogging with my son, if only I had some hiking/running trails within a half hour drive, if only there were some state/national parks within a pleasant 3-4 hour drive, or maybe a lake to go to where I could sit and read/write or watch the sunrise/sunset - man, that would be all I could ever want in my life to be happy." Lots of "if onlys".

As I continued building a fantasy land in my head, I was rudely jolted out of it when the "Kausalya Supraja" song suddenly began pouring out of the temple. Looks like they started their broadcast a little late today!

This sudden shift in my headspace from the ideal to the real was jarring. It also reminded me of the YouTuber "Small Brained American" whose India videos had gone viral a while back. I revisited his channel to see what he's been up to lately and what a surprise - his latest video had just the perfect content to satisfy/amplify my confirmation bias about how much living in India sucks. I went down a rabbit-hole of YouTube videos that show India in poor light. I binged Small-Brain's India content and then binged some more from the Bald guy.

I've got my fix now and am done bingeing "India sucks" videos. This is all ultimately a waste of my time anyway. Nothing will change in my lifetime, there's nothing I can do about anything, and there's nothing in all this content consumption that benefits me. So, thanks YouTube, please don't recommend more such videos of our great nation, I've seen enough.

Other than that, this Sunday was mostly about spending time with my kids. I'm guilty about my YouTube bingeing today, but on the other hand, I'm happy about how much time I spent with my daughter today. In one of my previous journal entries, I had written about exercising maturity. I'm pleased that I exercised this maturity today, even when the chores of childcare seemed endless.

I've been watching "King Richard", the movie around the sacrifices the father of the Williams sisters made, and groomed the two girls into Tennis superstars. Kinda got me thinking about what I am doing for my son's nurturing. My son is 5 years old and this is the right time to start igniting in him a fire toward some worthy pursuit. While I'm not a pushy, ambitious parent and I especially don't want to be the typical peer-pressure driven competitive desi parent, I still have a lot of lessons to pickup from this movie. Will get around to thinking more around this in the coming days.

It's 8 PM, and the weekend draws to an end. It's time to log off from the Internet, set my phone aside and tune down my sensory inputs as the day winds down. Gotta get my distracted son to finish his homework. More household chores lined up ahead of me. Time to get to all this...

Looking forward to the week ahead to pull back my focus only on what really matters and continue my mindful endeavours.

[Thursday, Oct-31-2024]

It's easy to get caught up in the chaos of everyday existence and to start taking life one day at a time, while losing track of the big picture and neglecting your bigger goals.

October wasn't that great of a month for me as I got caught up in putting out these smaller fires, and put my bigger goals on the backburner.

• My baby daughter fell seriously ill and we ran the loop of doctor visits, extra care and medication.

• At work, I had to focus on short-term issues while my larger-scope learning efforts took a backseat.

• I've been dealing with unpleasant interactions with a real estate guy that owes me a large sum of money and I'm patiently working with him to get my money back.

• The nanny working for us quit, so we were burdened with extra childcare and searching around for a new nanny.

• A super crappy visit to Bannerghatta that ruined my spirits for the next few days, filling me with anger and disgust.

• I don't identify with the Indian obsession with festivals, and grow tired of the noise and public nuisance of large public festivals. September/October were months of large, noisy festivals - Ganesh Chaturthi, Dasara and Deepavali. I wasn't in the best frame of mind these last many days/weeks as the noise pollution drowned out my internal voice, and the peace and silence that I crave.

With all these things disrupting my days, my personal development has gone kaput for October. It's been weeks since I've visited the gym. My German studies have taken a hit. I haven't spent time engaging in high-quality technical studies. Neither have I been eating healthy or sleeping well.

With November beginning, it is time to get back on track again. It's a great reminder that you need to keep making consistent progress toward your goals no matter what you've got going on, because "favorable conditions never come".

My major goals for November:

• Studies (all weekdays) - 9:30 AM to 10:30 AM, and 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM

• Gym (Tue/Thurs) - 12:45 PM to 1:30 PM

• German - Wed/Thurs (5-6 PM), Fri (4-6:30 PM), Sat/Sun (1 hour or more, whenever there's opportunity)

• Diet - 2 eggs, 2 bananas and 3 liters of water everyday.

• Sleep - latest by 12 AM everyday

• Topics to read this month - Project documentation in its entirety, Azure Storage paper, Jordan's Kafka videos.

I'm sure there'll be plenty of failures to stick to this demanding schedule along the way, but keeping on trying is what I can't stop - that's what keeps me excited about what's in store for the future.

[Tuesday, Oct-29-2024]

My Memorable Trip To Bannerghatta National Park

I took my son to Bangalore's supposedly "prime" attraction, which is the Bannerghatta National Park and here's how it turned out. I am partly to be blamed too for having picked the worst possible day to visit this park. But holy goodness, check out how bad it got!

I thought of posting this on the Bangalore subreddit, but they won't allow links to YouTube. And neither did I wish to open a pandora's box, with an army of butt-hurt Bangaloreans starting to troll me. So it goes here, in my safe space.

This city never fails to disappoint. So much so that, whenever my wife and I make plans to go someplace new, we say - "why don't we check this new place out and get disappointed?" That's how cynical we've gotten.

Yeah sure, you have great malls, restaurants, pubs and resorts. And we do enjoy these places no doubt. But goddamit, I need nature. I want my kids to be well-acquainted with nature and not just grow up to become consuming and polluting spoilt brats that only know how to blast money at malls and restaurants. And this city is a bad, bad place to be in if easily accessible nature is what you're looking for.

I'm still keeping an open mind and will try visiting Bannerghatta on a working weekday morning to see if things would be any different. But I'll go prepared to be disappointed.

And now, I anticipate with dread the arrival of Diwali - The Festival of Air, Water and Noise Pollution. We just got done with a very noisy Ganesh Chaturthi and before I get a chance to recover from the overwhelm, the king of noisy festivals is already here! My baby daughter is in for some scary times as she'll wake up startled to some chapri lighting up a bomb at 12 in the midnight.

Sigh! When will I escape this urban hell?

[Wednesday, Oct-2-2024]

Today was a good day. I wanna make sure that I'm grateful to get to share days like these with my darling kids and a loving family. Life is short and the time you get to spend with your kids is even shorter. Before you know it, they'll have flown away from this nest you're raising them in.

A day is a good day when I strike a balance across the 5 C's that define the framework for a well-rounded life. The 5 C's are - Craft/Constitution/Community/Contemplation/Celebration. And here's how I hit them all today.

Craft:
Today was a holiday on account of Gandhi Jayanti. I got to spend a couple hours this morning getting some coding work and technical studies done. Whether it's a working day or a holiday, my mood is always negatively impacted on days when I don't get some deep focus-time in. A session of deep-work always nourishes my soul, so I was glad I got that in today morning.

Constitution (aka Health) / Community (aka Family):
My son and I spent some real quality time at our apartment swimming pool today afternoon. It had been a while since we had gotten into the pool. It was a joy splashing around with my boy and I was glad to see his confidence about being in the water steadily growing. I got a little bit of cardio workout as well swimming a few small laps.

Contemplation:
My favorite 'C'! Our apartment on the 15th floor has great views of both sunrise and sunset. Every morning our living room is flooded with the golden rays of the early sun, and in the evening, the bedroom in our house turns orange with the rays of the setting sun. I love basking in those sunrays.

It's also a great time for contemplation and reflection - Today evening, I held my baby daughter and we both watched in silence the orange-red sun sink below the horizon, while I reflected upon life and pondered over how I want to shape it for our future. Watching the sun leave us for the day and head west is also of symbolic importance to me. It inspires me to chase the sun and go west in pursuit of my ideal lifestyle in a new place.

The sunsets lately have been gorgeous. I've set a daily reminder on my phone everyday at 6 PM to get up and get away from my damn laptop and go enjoy some sunset and silence.

Celebration:
My daughter turns 11 months old today - just one month short of turning one. I'm speechless about how quickly our first year with our daughter has gone by. Today is the last monthly birthday that we'll be celebrating of hers, which makes my wife and I kinda emotional that there won't be anymore monthly birthdays, only yearly.

The grandparents are here, and I now close the day by celebrating my daughter's 11th month birthday.

Life is good and here's a reminder to deeply appreciate it with gratitude while the good times last, because these moments are fickle and fleeting.

[Saturday, Sep-21-2024] (Latest checkpoint)

Every once in a while, it's good to consolidate all your past plans and resolutions into one central place so you don't lose track of things. For the developers out there, this is what they call checkpointing/snapshotting in the world of databases.

So here's my checkpointing exercise on this pleasant Saturday morning.

Broader Framework

• Strive to maintain Monk Mode - Do few things, do them well, and obsess over quality. Your only two major areas of focus are your workplace project, and learning German.

• Don't be distracted by all the noise at your workplace to upskill on AI. Do not be a technical-trends chasing sellout. I'd rather be an extremely competent generic backend developer than a very average AI bootcamper. Either be all-in or all-out, and don't indulge in half-assed dabbling. I don't see myself spending countless hours of study and effort required to become even decently competent with AI technologies. So for now, choose to stay all-out.

Keystone Daily Habits

• Start your workday by 9:15 AM everyday. Take a quick glance at your work-messenger to see if anybody's waiting on your response. Then get on with a session of deep-learning. Pick something relevant that you aren't familiar with and study/practice until 10:30 AM. Your first email check happens at 10:30 AM.

• You have the bad habit of making quick distraction-checks in the morning - a loop through Reddit/Gmail/Whatsapp/StockMarket (RGWS). This has to completely stop if you wish to make scholarly progress in your areas of interest. Get your RGWS fix only at 6:30 PM. Be done with them all in 15-20 minutes and then drop off from the online world again - except for mindful consumption of Netflix and YouTube.

• 40 minute workout session every Mon-Wed-Fri afternoon between 1 PM to 1:40 PM. 20 minutes of running and 20 minutes of weights.

• A ritualistic work shutdown at 6:30 PM after which you're a fully present, fully mindful family man that spends quality time with his darling kids without a phone in his hand. The phone stays in the proverbial foyer.

• Be done with dinner no later than 10 PM. Hit the bed by 12. 10-15 minutes of reading your ebook and then submit to the void of darkness.

• Saturday is partially open-ended. Schedule some priority work for Saturday. Sunday should be completely unscheduled and open-ended.

• As always, avoid reading the news. Absolutely nothing good comes out of it.

German

It's time to step-up my German learning efforts and build more structure around it, else my progress won't be note-worthy. I need to treat this like a serious part-time job and have to clock upto 15 hours of study/practice every week. For that to happen, I need to schedule learning German during working hours, because I really don't have the luxury of time to do this outside work hours. And I don't feel that is morally unethical because I'm already saving a ton of time not having to commute, or waste away at work making small-talk with coworkers, or being distracted with Internet surfing and social media.

So here's my German studies schedule. (Target to meet 15 hours/week)

Tuesday 4:30 - 6:30 PM (+1 hour later if there's opportunity)
Friday 4 - 6:30 PM (+1 hour later if opportunity)
Saturday 3 hours (spread out over the day whenever there's opportunity)
Sunday 3 hours (opportunistic)

I'll throw in a tracker table here in a separate comment to keep a count of the number of hours I'm clocking with German. And that YouTube channel to document my German progress is definitely happening sometime!

[Sunday, Sep-15-2024]

25 minutes of my time very well-spent drinking up on the stream of wisdom that my hero Cal Newport had to impart this week. The 10-year rule was once again a gentle reminder that worthwhile attainments in life take time and sustained effort. While I'm no stranger to all this advice, it's easy to lose sight of bigger goals such as these as you get caught up in the mundane day-to-day busyness of life. A weekly visit to Cal's channel always helps me realign my focus and priorities. And as a bonus, I never get tired of his relentless tirade against excessive smartphone usage and instant gratification seeking behavior.

I need to sit with pen and paper sometime and try to dream up how I would apply the 10-year rule to my own life. Someday soon hopefully..

Sunday! It's the day of getting chores done. I finally got around to wrapping up all my pending income tax work for this assessment year. It was exhausting carrying the mental baggage of this pending work all these days/months. I finally don't have to think about taxes until next year.

I however have a big list of other pending todos. Here's some: (✅ for the things I could finish)

• File revised tax return with all the corrections made. ✅

• Prepare a box of miscellaneous items that you don't need to be shipped as donation to St. Broseph. With this box shipped out, it'll be my third box of donation sent to Broseph. It feels great to get rid of the clutter of all the unwanted stuff in the house while also sending them away to a place where they'll be put to better use. ✅

• Invest all that money just lying around in my savings account. Throw it all into Nifty-50 index funds.

• Make a blog post detailing all your tax learnings, scrub all your personal details from your filed IT-return and share it with the world on the blog.

• Respond to blog comments. ✅

• Create a new YouTube channel and upload tax and traffic videos.

I'll try to get through as many of these as I can today.

[Saturday, Sep-14-2024]

I took my 5 year old son to finally watch the movie "Despicable Me 4". This was a long time coming, with either the movie screening time not working out with my son's sleep schedule, or because of conflicts with other plans. Glad we could finally make it happen!

And boy, does 4DX movie experience suck! My son seemed to greatly enjoy the moving, poking and prodding seats and the blinding flashes of overhead lights, but I hated the sensory overload so much that I stopped caring about the movie plot and just waited for it to finish. This was also my son's first movie-in-a-theatre experience and another lesson I learned along the way is that 5 year old kids probably don't yet have the attention span to sit through a 90 minute movie. My son was excited by the novelty of the experience at the beginning of the movie, and he was invested in all the action toward the end, but he was bored and distracted during the middle and was asking that we leave. We somehow stuck it out through the entire movie.

I'll hold off on taking him to the theatres for a while, and will definitely not be setting foot into a 4DX theatre ever again. The sensory overload is a total buzzkill.

[Thursday, Sep-12-2024]

Wow, when you keep a close watch on how you spend your days, you begin to realize how quickly time flies. The days just shoot past you. You write about your plans for the day, and before you know it, the day is over and it's time to make plans for the next day again.

I've been fairly happy with how I'm doing this September. There's plenty of room for improvement when it comes to discipline, time management and getting 8 or more hours of sleep. But I continue to make steady progress in these areas.

My news glances haven't happened in the last many days. I don't do Whatsapp during work hours. I infact go so far as to uninstall Whatsapp from my phone during the day and reinstall it back again in the evening. My phone wifi and data remains turned off during the day. There's no other social media I use (No Instagram, Twitter, FB, Discord, LinkedIn, etc, etc). All my entertainment after work purely comes from Netflix, books and blogs. My time on Reddit is negligible too.

I spent a good couple hours this last Sunday writing a post on how to be a successful developer (link). It was kinda sad to see that the post did not get any traction. I guess people these days just want everything in easily digestible bullet points. Very few have the patience to read long-form articles. Well, the good thing is that we knowledge-workers with longer attention-spans have a huge advantage in the field of IT because we have the capability to stick through reading and digesting hard ideas, while the distracted masses remain lost in their world of reels and shorts.

My German studies have been going along at a decent clip, but I need to build more structure and rigidity around this endeavour. I'll probably spend some time this week to build a rigid German learning routine. I've also been thinking of starting a YouTube channel where I document my progress in the German language. I'm currently reading through kids-stories in German at this link. Kids stories are better suited for learners because the language and vocabulary is much simpler.

The one major area of improvement I need to work on is to start my deep-focus work windows earlier in the day. Right now, I don't get down to deep-work until 10:30, or 11 AM. Until then it's about catching up with email, chat and other shallow low-effort office work until 10:30. Sometimes, I also spend 15-20 minutes making a Reddit journal update (like now!). All this has to stop and needs to be pushed out to later in the day. So the promise I'm making myself as I write this is to get into the zone of deep-focus by 9:30 AM and to stay in that state until 10:45 AM.

[Saturday, Sep-7-2024]

During the Friday morning standup, I confidently promised to deliver my work-item by end of day, and then procrastinated throughout the day telling myself I'd quickly knock it off later in the evening. I then ran into a few unexpected hurdles to completing my work and before I knew it, I was bent over my laptop at 1 AM in the morning, my weary face drenched in the disgusting late-night glow of the screen.

I don't feel proud to say this late-night procrastination-attributable work session isn't the first time it has happened. And this can't go on. I'm 39 years old, a husband and father of two young, beautiful kids that need my time. More importantly, I am NOT a work drone. I don't want work to consume my life like this - that would mean failure. To avoid this from repeating, I need to establish a very clear, quantifiable separation between work and life, where work absolutely doesn't trespass into the zone of life.

This clearly defined separation between work and life has served this professor well. It should serve me even better since I'm doing optional work anyway and wish to build a slow-paced European way-of-life as I enter my 40s.

What would this require? It requires that I pour all my energy, will and determination into ensuring that I am at my productive best during my work hours. Taking a cue from Cal Newport's fixed schedule productivity, every minute of my workday needs to be scheduled and I do my best to adhere to the schedule, while being flexible and smart about handling the inevitable disruptions in that schedule.

And when the clock hits 6 PM, it's time to SLAM-DUNK!!! To slam my laptop shut and cross that line where work ends and life begins.

This is one of my goals to practice this coming week. Come Monday, I'll turn into a formidable force-of-nature during my work hours between 9:30 AM - 6 PM and at 6 PM, my work laptop gets turned off and stowed away until 9:30 AM the next morning. I'll report back on how this goes.

[Saturday, Sep-5-2024]

There's a reason why I try to avoid reading the news (paper, or online) in the morning. It's because it is pretty much guaranteed that there'll be something in there that'll make me incredibly sad while also making me feel angry and helpless that I can't do anything about it.

This morning I took one quick glance at Deccan Herald and there it was - headlines that screamed "India is world's biggest plastic pollutor". And then yesterday's headlines - "Road deaths due to wrong side driving and mobile usage on the rise". You won't be disappointed if you're looking to get your daily dose of shithole news. There's something for you every single day.

It's crushing to read on a daily basis how our country that's bursting with out-of-control population, filled with ignorant, undeserving masses and dysfunctional governing bodies is rapidly turning into one of the biggest shitholes on the planet. There's really no way you can start your day on a high-note when this is the kind of information entering your brain early in the morning.

I'm now old enough to have lost all my naive innocence about things ever changing in my lifetime. While I do my best about keeping my plastic and eco-footprint to the absolute unavoidable minimum, there isn't really much else I can do as a powerless, ordinary individual.

I have two choices - I can either choose to continue to read the news, stay informed about how my country is reaching new lows as the years pass, and one day find myself having become that mediocre old man sitting on a park bench reading the day's newspaper.

The other choice is to accept the fact that I can't make a difference other than on an individual level, and to very deliberately ignore all the depressing events around me and to relentlessly focus on my own personal development. To channel all my time and energy toward making something out of my own life, and chasing after fulfilling, enriching life-experiences so when I eventually turn into that old man, I'll look back upon my life and smile over the wild ride I've had.

That's the reason I prioritize personal development at the cost of being an informed-but-helpless civilian that spends his valuable time just passively following what's happening in the country. I feel the better option here is to conserve my time and mental well-being by abstaining from news consumption.

Life is a gift and I don't wanna waste it watching my country burn while I sit on the park bench - an old man with newspaper in hand.

[Wednesday, Sep-4-2024]

Thanks to my little daughter that slept an extra hour and did not wake up at 6:30 AM, I'm extra energized with restful sleep. Fueled with two egg whites, a slice of avocado and coffee, I'm ready to hit my laptop. I keep insisting to my wife to switch over to a high-protein breakfast, but she's content with her carb-rich south Indian breakfast of upma, rice-bath, tea and biscuits. It irks me, but well, it's her choice.

I have a big coding task ahead of me. Target to channel all your focus on this for today. When you're mentally exhausted, instead of turning into a social-media browsing loser, go for a 10 minute walk where you're just breathing and taking in your surroundings, or play with your daughter (I work from home).

Fit in a 30 minute workout in the middle of the day. The rest of the time, focus hard and be done by 6:30 PM. Keep in mind that you're off this Friday. So ensure that you make significant progress on your work so you can ease into your long weekend with a peaceful state-of-mind rather than unfinished work mentally weighing you down during your break.

[Sunday, Sep-1-2024]

Friday was acceptable. I got through 75% of the technical topics I wanted to cover. I overestimated how much I could get through, especially when you're trying to digest complex new ideas. This is despite the fact that I'm not the type that gets distracted with whatsapp, instagram and reddit every 15 minutes. If you do, you're already doomed and destined for a life of mediocrity. I try my best everyday to constantly keep pushing away the creep of mediocrity.

I snuck in a good 40 minute workout in the afternoon that gave me a much needed cognitive relaxation. A quick 30 minute workout in the afternoon is a habit I wanna make more consistent. I'll target sessions on Mon-Wed-Fri, or if I get a busy start to the week on Monday, then I'll change my workout to Tuesday and Thursday for that week. I'm making this 1-1:30 PM activity non-negotiable. This should be something I pause everything else and get to.

I couldn't get to my German studies on Friday. If I can snatch an hour and a half out today from the jaws of family commitments, I'll get on with deconstructing the fantastic tavern scene in Inglourious Basterds.

Plan for today - It's a Sunday. Keep things open-ended. Don't be selfish about your me-time. Exercise the patience and maturity to unconditionally offer your time for your kids. While it's common knowledge that they grow up fast and soon build a world of their own where you don't even figure much, it's easy to forget that in the moment and get frustrated when you find yourself stuck with them for long.

Knock off pending chores and other shallow obligations. Block time between 3 - 4:30 PM for German if the kids are asleep. Unwind and recharge for the week ahead.

[Friday, Aug-30-2024]

It's the last working day of August, and it's a Friday. My company designates the last Friday of every month as the "Day of Learning (DoL)". Looking forward to an intense day of self-driven learning today. A day of hard, focused, disciplined learning today will give me the perfect wrap up for the month as I slide into September - The month of focus.

Zero distraction schedule for today:
10 AM - 12 PM: Transcribe tech-talks and make notes.
12 - 12:30 PM: Sneak in a 30 minute gym run + workout.
1:30 - 2:30 PM: Consolidate technical discussions/details spread across multiple sources into one central place.
4 - 5 PM: Documentation study.
5 - 6:30 PM: Study German (study and deconstruct Inglourious Basterds Tavern scene)

I'll report back later how the day unfolded.

[Thursday, Aug-29-2024]

Disclaimer - I'm not trying to be a cringey influencer, or create a personal brand, or build a following. I couldn't care if my 100 or so Reddit follower base continues to grow or if it burns down to zero. This is only an attempt to set personal goals and hold myself publicly accountable, and document how well I'm sticking to them as time goes on, and also to show my process. This is my personal public diary.

As we approach the end of August, and also get closer to the end of 2024, it's of immense importance to me to make the most productive use of my time for the remainder of the year. This has been a productive year for me for the most part - I came out of a long voluntary mini-retirement of three years and started at a new software job. With that, I got one step closer to my aspiration to move abroad from my current home-base in India as I seek out a better lifestyle for me and my family. I've gotten a good start at my job. I'd like to keep the momentum going, and finish 2024 on a high note since I have big, ambitious plans for 2025!

With that, I'd like to start setting monthly goals and put them out here, and regularly report back on how well I've been staying on the path set forth.

Goals to pursue until September 30, 2024.

• Broader picture: Practise disciplined monk mode. Do few things, do them well, and obsess over quality instead of the hours spent. September will be the month of focus.

• You've neglected deep-learning at work. Caught up in the mundane obligations of daily work commitments, you haven't paid enough attention toward learning the intricate architecture of your software service (let's call it BT) at a profoundly deep level. September will be the month you rectify that. Set aside some time everyday to read through BT documentation and code. Preferably between 3-4 PM. Block your calendar and show up everyday.

• Avoid distracting upskilling activities - You've been spending good amount of time learning Kafka. While Kafka is a great technology to learn and study, it's being done at the cost of time that should instead be given to gaining expertise in BT. Since September is the month of doing less, where you exclusively focus on acquiring a deeper understanding of BT, put Kafka aside and take it back up after September.

• Whenever you have time and energy, study up on BT. When you've had enough of it and feel you can't take it anymore for the day, switch to learning German. Learning the German language is a pursuit you can't stop at any cost, regardless of whether it feels pointless in the given moment, or when the language feels impossibly hard. Three years down the line when you'll have gained sufficient command of the German language (and might possibly be living in Germany by then!), you'll be thanking yourself for sticking through with it. So, you'll essentially be focusing on only two pursuits for September - BT and German.

• When you get to a point where your brain is completely shot for the day, and you can no longer take in anymore studies, switch over to deep relaxation with either quality time with family, a book, a show, music or physical work around the house.

• Prioritize sleep very seriously. Whether you'll have a productive day at all totally hinges upon having had a good sleep the night before. You need to be in bed by 12, phone in hand max until 12:20, and dozing away by 12:30.

• Things to avoid till the end of September - reading news (paper+online), social media that includes scrolling and shitposting on Reddit.

Here we go..

Today I come with a whole host of updates and the usual rants now that I’ve just crossed the three year mark of FIRE - which, by the way, is ending!

Below’s my last FI update two years back, which mostly revolved around financial chatter. This year’s update will be more introspective.

The Insatiable Desire For Greener Pastures Continues To Burn

If you’re an Indian expat living abroad, you could be one, or you definitely know people that are these types - those that constantly talk about returning back to India someday, but never do.

I’m one of those, the only difference is that I can’t stop talking about moving back abroad. As some long time readers might know, I have struggled to adjust to life in India/Bangalore during these three years after leaving behind my 10+ years of life in the United States. I have way too many “first-world problems” that I have to put up with here and I can’t see myself and my family getting to lead a peaceful, varied and outdoorsy lifestyle here.

Don’t get me wrong, life has been comfortable. Down the lane, I’ll probably pat myself in the back that the timing of our return was perfect - to come back and take a long break from working during the early child-raising years, which are among the most demanding years of your life.

The amount of help and support we’ve got from extended family, maids, cook and nannies has been invaluable during this stage of our lives. These three years within the protective walls of my gated community have been so comfortable that I can whistle the song “Comfortably Numb” all day.

And that’s where it ends. Beyond the walls of my apartment community, the anarchy of this unwalkable big-city is overwhelming. The crowds, traffic, air and noise pollution, trash-ridden streets, encroached sidewalks, and the absolute madness of reckless driving that endangers your and your family’s life, the list goes on.

Over this period of time, my wife and I have come to the conclusion that our primary motivators to return back to India - family and FIRE - DO NOT make up for the many other areas that rob us of our peace and happiness.

Most people that return back to India from abroad are happier for it, but I unfortunately belong in the minority. If you’re tired of my harping, check this post out for a more balanced take on the topic. And for a very positive “everything’s so awesome I pinch myself everyday” picture, you might enjoy Hemant’s writings. Besides these, there’s always Reddit.

I, on the contrary, find myself slouched over my laptop, browsing Google Maps and staring longingly at breath-taking pictures of national parks around Munich, or the sandy beaches of Sydney. Greener pastures beckon me in my dreams.

Our old folks are healthy and independent enough that they don’t need us around for physical support at least for the next 6-8 years, which gives us the opportunity to take flight again and seek out life experiences in far-off lands.

I’ve gotten the ball rolling to move back abroad, which brings me to the next topic..

Job Search

After a couple months of intense leetcoding and related studies, starting March this year, I began my job hunt and started applying over LinkedIn to software developer jobs mainly in Germany, Netherlands, Canada and Australia. These were direct applications, I never sought referrals.

Three weeks down the line and 70-80+ applications later, I had no calls and quite a few resume rejects. This partly has to do with my niche profile. I have been a firmware developer all my working career that wrote device drivers in the C programming language. Looking back, this was one of the worst career mistakes I’ve made. For someone with no particular inclination toward firmware, nor a background in hardware (I’m a Computer Science guy, not Electrical/Computer Engineering), I should have moved out of firmware within a year or two into more challenging dev work where I’d have gained valuable experience in cloud-native technologies that power modern large-scale distributed applications. But I coasted at my firmware job because I was distracted and having way too much fun traveling and soaking up the US national parks, while voraciously consuming FIRE blogs.

A lack of experience in contemporary technologies and frameworks, coupled with a resume-gap of three years possibly played a role in my not getting interview calls early on, which was discouraging.

I eventually got to interview with Snowflake and Amazon, both in Germany. I didn’t perform all that well with Snowflake, so that didn’t pan out. Amazon went quite well except for the round with the bar-raiser. The Amazon recruiter later on during the interview feedback discussion told me that while the four team members that interviewed me (including the hiring manager) expressed the intent to hire, the bar raiser voted against hiring because I couldn’t optimally solve her silly binary tree problem. It also appears that she took offence to my concerning question about Amazon’s work-life balance. What with the bar-raiser being bestowed upon with veto powers, the eventual outcome was negative.

Although Amazon’s Cloud Linux OS work never excited me - it felt more like operational IT-support work with little development - I was still willing to suck it up and go because living in Dresden/Germany, with its numerous parks and historical sights, and proximity to pristine German countryside, sounded fantastic. Add to that the opportunity to immerse myself in the German culture and language, I was ready to pack my bags. Too bad it didn’t work out.

With the job market abroad not looking very bright, at least for me, I did not want to continue searching indefinitely with no clear end in sight. I fell back to my plan-B, which was to target Tier-1 companies in Bangalore with the possibility to transfer abroad internally.

I’ve just landed an offer from Microsoft Bangalore within the Azure Storage team and will be starting soon.

I’m currently living through mixed emotions - on the one hand, I’m super excited to be getting to work on large-scale, data-intensive distributed systems that’ll finally help me get rid of the curse of my firmware profile that has haunted me for too long. On the other hand, I’m sad that my dreamlike freedom of FIRE is coming to an end and the hustle-and-grind of worklife is about to restart. I’ll soon have a manager whose expectations I have to meet at the very least, and exceed at best. Who could be happy about that?

I also feel remorse that I should have tried for jobs abroad a little longer and that I spooked out and fell back to my plan-B a little too soon. I now have to stay put in Bangalore for a year or more before I take another shot at moving abroad.

The pay is good, however. That’s one area where the tech scene in India has dramatically changed for the better. Product companies and well-funded startups in India now offer attractive salaries. A shiny office and interesting work, great compensation, good social circle and a nice home could very well be all you need for your pursuit of happiness to come to a conclusion. I’ll get to test this out soon. Maybe I had a little too much free time to moan, groan and complain about the abysmal public conditions in India. Now that I won’t have as much free time anymore, maybe I’ll hit that “happy-and-distracted” trance-like state of existence and might drop the idea of moving abroad altogether. It remains to be seen!

To uphold the spirit of this blog and share with you as much low-level details of my life as I’m comfortable sharing, here’s the compensation Microsoft’s been offering for the level I’m joining at. I’m presenting it as a tiny range as opposed to exact numbers to maintain some degree of privacy.

Level : L63 - L64 (Senior Software Engineer)
Base Salary : Rs. 45L - 47L
Signing Bonus : Rs 7L - 9L
RSU : $160K - $170K (vesting over 4 years)
Performance linked annual bonus : Upto 30% (but usually 15%) of base salary.

FIRE Related Finances

Over the course of our three years of existence in Bangalore where we had absolutely no cash-flow, we managed to meet our expenses purely out of the Rs. 30L that we set aside before returning to India. A paid off house and not having had to buy a car helped us stay within this budget. In addition to that, I had a little bit of money that came in because I canceled my LIC policies and one other real estate site booking that was stuck in perpetual bureaucratic stalemate.

I haven’t had to sell my US stock investments yet. Despite the US stock market having remained essentially flat when you look at VTSAX’s performance over the last three years, I took no reactionary measures. Now with the market hovering near all time highs, my portfolio is again in the green. This only reinforces my outlook that the path to slow and steady wealth accumulation for passive investors like me is simple index fund investing and just riding out the market churn while doing nothing.

We’re quite close to having our India FIRE funds run out soon and I’d have had to tap into our US funds anytime now. But with my job starting in a couple weeks, I no longer have to stir up my US investments.

Wrapping Up

I’m gonna miss these three years of absolute freedom. I have no regrets despite not having accomplished anything brag-worthy or having barely done any traveling during these three years, thanks to our very young son and recently arrived daughter keeping us tied down. It was just us milling around in our home, spending time with our kids, kicking back and relaxing, peppered with some mild software-studies on my part.

Now that I’m getting back to work, I wanna make sure that I don’t lose sight of what I want out of life. I’ll exercise caution against digging myself too deep into the rabbit-hole of a cushy job that I then won’t be able to crawl out of, even if I wanted to. The option to FIRE again, next time in a better location and not in the middle of a raging Indian metro, is an aspiration that I’ll strive to keep alive.

Talk soon,
- Dog

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I’m a sucker for resolutions. I’m such a romantic at heart that even the first couple days of every month fill me up with renewed inspiration. Standing at the doorstep of a whole new year is a big deal for me. The dazzle of possibilities blinds me.

My 2024 Resolutions

Below’s a list of pursuits I wanna busy myself with this year.

1. Monastic focus on Golang and open source software:

   I’ve always been intrigued by the power of daily practice and the magic that happens in a few years if you relentlessly keep up with your practice routine all the way through to the end. This applies to any human endeavor - be it writing, programming, music, arts and craft, learning languages, you name it.

   
   Stephen King talks extensively about the power of practice in his memoir “On Writing”.
   
   Guitarists and chess players also make for great examples of the power of practice. I’ve for long had an “Inspiration.txt” document where I’ve saved the below notes, gathered from the hyperlinked sources:

   • A champion BMX rider, Slash put the bike aside to devote himself to playing guitar, practicing up to 12 hours a day.

   • Carlsen developed his early chess skills playing by himself for hours on end—moving the pieces around, searching for combinations, and replaying games and positions his father showed him.

   • It required Keanu Reeves to become sufficiently good at judo, jiu-jitsu, and tactical 3-gun shooting. Reeves was game. He trained eight hours a day, four months in a row. The effort paid off.

   • While Bettencourt was slow to adopt the instrument under his brother's tutelage, his skills quickly developed when he began teaching himself, and he has mentioned in many interviews that he would skip many school days to practice upwards of seven hours a day.

   
   You might find these anecdotes unrelatable, I do too. Most of these guys honed their craft with hours of practice when they were kids and had all the time and no responsibilities, and were celebrities by the time they were young adults.
   
   But I do draw inspiration from examples like these. Pursuing mastery in a craft is rewarding in itself and helps keep the flame of enthusiasm for life burning. It keeps me from growing numb with the typical comforts of modern urban existence, where you try to fill the growing internal emptiness with ever-increasing materialistic consumption and conveniences.

   
   My monk-like focus this year will be getting heads-down deep into Golang and delve into Go open-source code. I wanna clock at least 2-3 hours in the morning and another 2 hours at least during the second part of the day. More is better. I know from experience that this won’t feel like hustle and grind.

   
   There are plenty of exciting Go projects to dive into: etcd, raft, go-ethereum, tsdb, go-leveldb, containerd, kubernetes, revel, fiber. More listed at awesome-go.

   ---

2. Learning German

   I’ve dabbled with German in the past but never really did it justice. As I mentioned in the previous point above, the magic hasn’t happened because I haven’t put in the hours.
   
   I always look back to the year gone past and beat myself up - “Man, if only I had spent as little as 30 minutes everyday during 2023, imagine the progress I would have made in 12 months!” The unstoppable time-train keeps chugging forward. I don’t wanna beat myself up again when that time-train grabs me and dumps me into 2025.
   
   I wanna clock one-hour of German language practice everyday. As a parent of a 4 year old boy, I witnessed how kids miraculously acquire fluency in their native language. No lessons, no teaching, no studying grammar. Just listening to the language spoken around them and beginning to speak - broken and wrong at first, that progressively gets better.
   
   I’ll be following the same model with German - no lessons, no courses, no boring grammar studies. I’ll just deconstruct the language by watching German movies and shows, and reading conversational German in comic-books. Add some spaced-repetition to the mix and I’ll be well along the way.
   
   I’ll begin with the excellent Nicos Weg video series.

   I doubt if anyone has read this far into my long rambling essay, but if you also happen to be a German learning enthusiast, let’s be learning buddies! Leave a comment, or DM me and let’s Deutsch sprechen! :)

3. YouTube
   How do I measure my progress with software and German? That brings me to my third resolution for the year - Document my progress on a YouTube channel.

   
   A few of you readers might recall that I had a “CubicleDog” YouTube channel last year which has now disappeared. For new readers that did not get a chance to visit my channel - I had a few videos up there talking about FIRE, displaying my net-worth and playing Guitar covers.
   
   Reading, writing and talking about FIRE and finances now bores me to tears. Unless you’re still learning, or building your own brand-content around these topics, don’t you at some point wanna consider them solved problems in your life and move on to other pursuits? I suppose I’ve arrived at that point. I also began getting self-conscious about exhibiting our net-worth in full public view - especially as I came out of anonymity and the blog readers grew from an intimate group of 25-30 first subscribers to currently 250 and slowly counting up.
   
   I deleted the channel because I didn’t see myself continuing to make videos on FIRE and finances.
   
   I now plan on taking another shot at YouTube, but this time I’ll keep the theme open-ended, with the focus for this year on documenting my progress on Golang projects and learning German. With software, I wanna ocassionally tackle a complex subsystem of a project and maybe do a source-code walkthrough, like this guy does. With German, I wanna show up and talk for a few minutes, scripted or improv, doesn’t matter. The point is to just speak German.
   
   It’s gonna be a very boring channel, and I won’t promote the channel here. You obviously don’t wanna pick topics like these if you’re chasing popularity metrics like views and subscribers. It’s only a way for me to hold myself accountable and document my progress.

   
   The hurdle to YouTubing is that it’s hard - remarkably harder than writing. The amount of work required to create the right environment for making videos is non-trivial. Speaking to a camera also doesn’t come naturally to a lot of people.
   
   I could write sitting on my bed whenever I have the time, while my wife and her parents chat out in the living room and my son runs around kicking his toys, while the news anchor on the TV yells in the background. Making YouTube videos on the other hand requires that I put myself in a perfectly quiet room with nobody around that could interrupt me. We currently have way too much foot-traffic in our house that this is a challenge. I’ll have to do this late at night when everyone is asleep. This is one resolution I’m not very confident about making progress in this year. We’ll see how that goes.

   
   Here’s a sustainable strategy to find the time to build a YouTube channel, or create content in any form without burning out: The Half Day Rule.

   ---

YouTube For Virtue-Signaling

Let’s take a quick digression on how your YouTube channel can be a great means of virtue-signaling that could work in your favor.

Might I make a confession that I’d like to utilize my channel as a passive-aggressive middle-finger to those condescending people that I ocassionally keep running into?

I have a friend who’s otherwise a nice guy. A regular software guy working a regular job, and he’s been telling me for the last 10 years that he wants to “start his own company”. The guy lacks the self-awareness to face up to the reality that he’ll never do shit beyond talking. He keeps soliciting me with stupid SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) “ideas” and I’m too polite to give it straight to him that his ideas are trash. I’m not teaming up with some delusional guy that wants to hack up some app that calls a bunch of fintech APIs, processes the response JSON, runs some basic-ass AWS machine learning models on them, and then parade his cardboard-box lemonade-stand as a startup.

And I’ve run into a few acquaintences that think I’ve been laid off from my job and haven’t been able to find a new job in 3 years. I can tell that they’re thinking - “Boy, he must suck real bad as a software developer, right!? I wonder how much longer he can go on with his savings before he has to start begging on the streets for food!” Some of these buzzwords-spouting guys have solicited me with advice that I could upskill myself with the latest hot-stuff like AI and Machine-Learning. These fad-chasers would have recommended me to level-up with crypto, blockchain and NFT technologies a couple years back when those were the trending topics.

Pointing people like these to my YouTube channel where I discuss the internals of the Golang garbage collector, or to a video where I walk through the source code and data structures of the Redis Bloomfilter, will be a solid punch to their faces, letting them know that I’m so much better than what they think of me, so they don’t insult my intelligence again.

YouTube, or for that matter any work that you publish in the public domain won’t likely make you rich and famous, but it greatly helps to set context on what you’re good at, and what you suck at. New people that you meet and have any business with will already know a little something about you if you consistently keep putting yourself out there.

Few More Resolutions For The Year

• Fasting on the 15th and 30th of every month: I don’t have a lot of experience with fasting and don’t yet have the courage or the strength of character to go without eating for a whole 24 hour cycle. I’ll take it easy and fast only from morning till evening, with only water allowed during fasting hours.
  

• Getting off social media: This is one area I’m proud to already have made a lot of progress in over the years. I barely spend any time on Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and other social media anymore. I use Whatsapp only for 1:1 communication, no pointless group chats and mindless consumption of funny forwards.
  
  YouTube was one of my last remaining distractions. The recommended videos sidebar was a black-hole that frequently sucked me in, and I’d watch video after video for what seemed like eternity. So I was utterly delighted when I recently found this plugin that wipes clean my YouTube home-feed and recommended videos side-bar. This has turned out to be such an effective distraction-busting machine that I donated the developers $25 out of sheer gratitude.
  

• Reading longer books: I’d like to be very mindful of my video consumption and begin gravitating more and more toward the universe of words on pages. I’m not trying to pour the kool-aid of “reading books is superior to watching videos” down anyone’s throat, but I personally wanna see myself with a book during my evenings and nights than staring at a screen. And as always, I turn to my hero Cal Newport for advice here, and he suggests to implement the Phone Foyer method.

  ---

That’s my list of resolutions for the year! I don’t have any major fitness goals for the year because I’m in decent shape. An ocassional workout once every few days combined with healthy eating habits should keep things going fine.

Wish you all a very happy new year! If any of you has their own resolutions for this year, I’ll be very interested to read about your plans. I so love reading such everyday-stories from everyday-people, but dammit, everyone wants to pick a niche non-personal topic and write only about it. I’m starved of stories around everyday life!

Talk soon,
- Dog

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I can gladly give my money away, and I continue doing so liberally. But after a string of commitments this last year where I volunteered my time, I’ve made peace with the fact that I want my time to solely be spent on my own creative and intellectual pursuits.

It’s not hard be a weekend warrior and go do some volunteering every few Saturdays. I used to do that in the US with Habitat for Humanity - spending a pleasant morning every few Sundays doing basic construction work on housing projects for low-income communities. No big deal.

But if you have to be honest with yourself and consider yourself a true social worker, you’ve got to put people’s needs before your own. You’ve got to make it a large part of your identity and embrace a certain way of life that you either have a natural inclination for or you don’t.

Who was I kidding? I’m a selfish prick that puts me first before others.

My Short-Lived Dabbling With Social Service

2023 was the year I was overcome with the urge to submit myself to community service. I was interested in experimenting if this is something I can pursue seriously over the long term. What better way to fill your days after FIRE?

Early in the year, I began keeping a keen eye on the newspapers and local social media accounts to gather resources, NGOs, social-workers, community-service oriented whatsapp groups and what not. Within a few weeks, I was armed with a huge database of all kinds of social enterprises that I could get involved in in Bangalore.

And I excitedly jumped in.

I got involved with the NGO Arms Wide Open and wrote exams for a few visually challenged kids.

I donated blood at Rashtrotthana.

I got in touch with Bangalore’s one and only true-blue, badass social worker St. Broseph and partook in a food distribution program on the ocassion of his birthday.

I took the trouble to hang out at a street corner in my neighborhood and made this video of a deadly pothole that remained unattended to for months, edited the video and later reported it to the city council (BBMP) and to the office of our local MLA. The pothole was fixed a few days later, although I’m not sure whether I should take credit for getting this taken care of. I’ll take the liberty of wishful thinking and pat myself on the back here.

And a few more…

• I applied to be a Math and Science teacher at U&I and eagerly awaited a response from the team.

• I tried hard to arrange for shelter for a young, intelligent looking woman that was begging and living on the streets in our locality. I once spoke to the woman, who said she had lost her job and was evicted out of her rental. Having watched this video, I made a handful of calls to many NGOs but only got empty promises about offering shelter. After some more futile follow-ups, I gave up. And one day the lady just disappeared from the neighborhood. I can only hope her situation has improved!

• I had a daily routine of browsing the Bangalore subreddit, looking for troubled souls crying for help. I stumbled upon this about-to-graduate college kid that was on the verge of getting evicted from his hostel and nowhere to go. While other Redditors were shitposting in the comments, I got in touch with him, spoke to him personally and offered words of courage, and covered his hostel rent for two months (Rs. 7,000 per month) while he frantically looked for a job. He has since found a job and is now financially self-sufficient.

And Then I Was Done…

As I lived through it all, a creeping sense of burn-out was sneaking up on me. I’m a fairly disciplined schedule-oriented guy that likes to plan his day out in advance and then stick to the plan. Social service on the contrary has a very ad-hoc nature to it. Things crop up constantly and unpredictably. And as you help people out, those that aren’t mentally strong come to rely on you for emotional support and begin treating you like their savior, frequently calling you on the phone, sometimes just for the comfort of hearing your voice, other times to seek your advice. It gets exhausting.

A few months down, I was thoroughly desensitized. Empathy had given way to apathy. It’s hard to care when you get the same message for the 100th time for volunteers to donate blood to an accident victim, or set aside yet another half a day to write exams for visually challenged kids, or to go clean up a trash-ridden street. After a while, I found myself marking those unending Whatsapp messages as spam.

There also was always a voice of dissent in my head that kept reminding me that this is not a good use of my time.

Existential crisis hits you when you find yourself on the street doing menial voluntary work. Those self-deprecating thoughts, heartless though they may sound, are hard to ignore - “Fool, you’ve got all this untapped potential and look what you’re doing. People your age are out there raising millions in venture-capital funding, building multi-million dollar startups and here you are, wasting away, helping kids with their 12th grade history exams, writing an essay on Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt Satyagraha.”

Ouch! That train of thought and the related comparison-games hurts that little ego-monster inside. Here’s a side note on this human nature that constantly compares oneself with others.

Looking Ahead…

Helping a guy here, serving a troubled soul there just isn’t scalable. I’ve come to believe that I could have a much larger impact and make this a scalable endeavour if I instead spent my time in ambitious, financially-rewarding capitalistic pursuits which would enable me to make large monetary donations in the future.

I’ve been a huge fan of the selfless work that Dushyant Dubey (with the pseudonym St. Broseph) has been doing in Bangalore. I’ve followed his journey very closely and have even personally expressed my interest in being one of his main financial backers, at least until he gets too big and famous and attracts far richer donors. I’ve been regularly sending him monetary donations.

The guy, just 32 years of age, has already made up his mind to dedicate his life to social work and has given up on his stable career in marketing and has also mentioned that he won’t be marrying. He has built up quite an army of volunteers and runs his operations out of a place he has rented and designated as his headquarters.

So far I’ve sponsored to get him a couple beefy laptops for his operations with a donation of Rs. 1 lakh.

And I once sponsored to cover therapy and psychological counseling for a girl facing domestic abuse that he helped get out of. Besides these one-time expenses, one of my new year resolutions for 2024 is to make him a monthly donation of Rs. 10 thousand for as long as I can. If I start working a software job and begin seeing disposable income again, then there’ll be more money going to him as long as he continues his selfless social work.

Besides that, I’ll continue trying to keep up with donating blood once every 4 months. I’ll also maybe get out very ocassionally for street-level volunteer work whenever I have nothing better to do.

Preferences could always change as one gets older. The one reassuring realization I’ve had here is that if I ever get to a point in life where I feel I have nothing else left to live for, then there’s always social service to fall back to. It can keep you busy and fulfilled for the rest of your days. And it’s undoubtedly way better than spamming on Whatsapp and bingeing YouTube Shorts all day that I see most older folks around me lost in.

Closing Up…

So that’s my little monologue on bowing out from being a street-level social worker and leaning toward being a behind-the-scenes small-scale donor.

U&I got back to me on my application to teach Math and Science expressing an interest to interview me. But my stint with social service had run out of steam by then and I ghosted them.

And the city corp did a shoddy work filling up that pothole with loose gravel and sand that has all washed off and the pothole is back again, deadly as ever. But this time however, you won't see a dog-faced human standing by that hole making yet another video…

Talk soon,
- Dog

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Jerry - “Terminate with extreme prejudice.”
(Movie - Apocalypse Now)

We all inevitably get into bad deals at some point. That’s just life.

Could be a bad job, a bad relationship, bad investment, or a bad location. It could be bad habits we can’t shake off.

I’ve had my share of bad deals. At various stages of life, I found myself working bad jobs, ended up having to live in cities I despised (both in India and US), was stuck in the rut of self-defeating habits, and made crappy investments.

Right now, I’m glad I’ve mostly wriggled out of many such vicious holes and have got my act together. Life has been good and I get out of bed everyday without a dark cloud of doom and gloom hanging overhead.

In this post, I’d like to touch upon one of the bad financial deals I’ve partially gotten out of. They might seem trivial compared to some major-shit people find themselves in. Neither is the money at stake here life-altering.

But they're still good reminders to always be watchful and constantly eliminate bullshit out of your life.

LIC Whole-Life Insurance Policies

I was a naive 24 year old guy that had recently started to draw a paycheck in my first job.

And what do most Indian parents do when their kids start earning?

They push and prod their kids into signing up for LIC life insurance policies in the name of “investment”, savings and tax-benefits. They call upon the “friendly neighborhood LIC agent” and let the agent loose on the hapless youngster.

My story was no different. An agent that my dad knew showed up one fine day, spouted insurance jargon that whooshed right past my ears, made me sign a stack of forms and before I knew it, I was the proud owner of 12 different LIC policies.

I found myself having to shell out nearly Rs. 1 lakh a year in premiums, for a laughable life-coverage of Rs. 50 lakhs that isn’t even inflation-adjusted.

A few years pass, and I ask the agent why he signed me up for 12 policies instead of one. He explains to me that down the line, I’ll have one policy maturing every year and I’ll have maturity income coming in every year for 12 straight years. He made me feel smart about being financially prudent.

Well, now I know that the more policies LIC agents get people to sign up for, the more commission they pocket. The slick agent had made me his sacrificial goat.

I diligently continued paying my annual premiums of Rs. 1 lakh for 10 years before the blinds of stupidity fell off of my eyes. This was right around the time I began voraciously soaking up on FIRE ideals. I started looking into where all that LIC premium money was going.

And this is where these dinosaur businesses start exhibiting how damn obsolete they are in today’s age.

These boomer1 shops excel at making it near impossible to get answers to super basic questions like -

• Where is my money going? How much have I paid so far in premiums?

• How is that money being managed? Where is it invested?

• How has the invested money performed all these years? How does the performance stack up against benchmarks? What are the returns like?

• How much annual bonus have I been getting?

• What’s the lumpsum I’d be getting if I outlive my policy-term?

Sure, I might get these answers if I spend hours browsing web forums and pore through policy documents, punching numbers into calculators and spreadsheets. But I don’t want to work so hard to get my answers. I expect to be able to login to my online account and get these numbers presented to me in a few clicks.

After a few days of browsing and reading, I came to the conclusion that LIC whole life insurance policies are for the most part a huge scammy ripoff - you’re paying high premiums for low coverage, and the money you’re pumping in is getting hammered by inflation. It was time to get out of this bad deal.

It didn’t come as a surprise when I couldn’t do my account closures online or over the phone. It’s a boomer shop after all. So I visited the local LIC branch to get it done. And they upped the game further by stating I can’t do it in any branch, and that it has to be the “home-branch” where the policies were initiated. That’s my native town an overnight train journey away from Bangalore. Just, wow.

Long story short, I then began collaborating with my dad who fortunately still lives in our “home-branch” town, filled out endless paper forms, made back-and-forth trips to the courier office to mail the forms to my home town. My 75-year old dad made trips to the home-branch, with each visit eating up all his morning, and with some of those visits turning out to be wasteful because I missed signing some required columns on those confusing forms, which led to further running around and paper-pushing.

The project dragged on for three months at snail’s pace before I eventually got all my stupid “LIC Jeevan Anand” policies closed prematurely.

Amount I paid in premiums over ten years - Around Rs. 10 lakh.
Amount I got back after all the early closure penalties - Around Rs. 8 lakh.

Over ten years, this is money that could have doubled to 20 lakhs had I put it into fixed deposits. It probably would even have tripled if I had invested it in the stock market.

It’s still a small amount in the grand scheme of things and I’m fortunate to be privileged enough for this loss to have no real impact to our overall financial well-being.

I’d rather terminate my ties with these scammy boomer shops with extreme prejudice even if it means taking a loss. I want these legally registered robbers out of my sight and out of my life.

In my next post that I don’t know when I’ll get around to writing, I’ll talk about my ongoing struggle to get out of my second bad deal - Bangalore real estate.

Talk soon,
- Dog

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Partly because, writing the “Life in India” series bored me so much that I didn’t feel like writing for a long time.

But the main reason I didn’t show up was because we were busy preparing to welcome our second child!

It’s time to binge-listen to one of my old favorite songs to welcome new life :)

New Parents All Over Again

My wife and I welcomed our second child, a baby girl, earlier this November.

We find ourselves back in the endless loop of sleepless-nights, feeding/burping/diaper-changes and pediatric visits. Things however are so much easier this time around because we’ve got an army of people to help - cook, maid, driver to shuttle our son to school, grandparents to help around the house and keep our son engaged for sometime. And we parents get to decide when our parental leave ends :)

We also have a visiting nanny to bathe and cleanse the wife and our infant child. And holy crap, does it get tribal! What with coconut shells, saambraani smoke, special diets and other weird practises. My wife and I both cringe at these ancient rituals bordering superstition, but we play along.

Logistical Info for Interested Folks

We got a chance to compare and contrast our experiences with medical-services around pregnancy and delivery between the US (where our son was born) and India.

We consulted with the Malleswaram branch of Cloud-9 hospitals. We opted for their “Signature Package”, which falls somewhere in the middle between the primary “Deluxe” package and the fancier “Presidential” package.

All said and done, the total bill we had to foot was Rs. 2.5 lakhs. I haven’t bought any health insurance for ourselves since we came back to India and just paid it out of pocket. The source of funds was part-cash and part US travel credit cards (with no international transaction fees). I’ll pay off the card balance with my US checking account and won’t be touching my HSA money to cover these expenses. I’d like to let my HSA money continue to stay invested and grow in the US markets, and can always reimburse myself in the future for past expenses.

I’d rate our experience in India as slightly better because of the more personable, approachable human connection we felt with the doctors and hospital staff. But when it comes to infrastructure, systems and processes, I’d give a higher score to the El Camino hospital in Mountain View, California where our son was born.

Below’s a list of pros and cons I could think of that we experienced with the system during this second childbirth.

Pros

• The suite we stayed in was luxurious.

• Doctors are more personable. They don’t rush you and patiently answer all your questions. They don’t watch the clock or pressure you to leave soon as your time is up. Many doctors are accessible online and are happy to answer your queries over Whatsapp.

• Service and hospitality of nurses and hospital staff was all mostly good. We inevitably had to deal with a few bored/indifferent nurses, but then bad nurses are everywhere. We had our share of rude, even racist nurses at the US hospital.

• Quality healthcare is still very affordable for the upper-middle-class and you can get through the process without even an insurance and without having to go broke.

• The hospital helps you get the child’s birth certificate so you don’t have to suffer through running around government offices or looking for an agent yourself.

Cons

• We all know traffic sucks in Bangalore. Roads are pathetic. That made shuttling between home and hospital a hassle, even more so for late-stage pregnant ladies having to bounce in and out of uneven potholed roads.

• Parking at the hospital is sometimes tight and finding a spot is stressful. They however offer complimentary valet service sometimes.

• Appointment system is a joke. You never get attended to at the appointed times - there’s always an indefinite wait. Could be because doctors don’t rush patients as I mentioned in the pros section, which leads to extra wait times for subsequent patients.

• Broken medical equipment doesn’t get fixed for a long time. My wife’s weight and blood pressure readings were always faulty. They took multiple readings and then hand-computed the average of the readings!

• Poor orientation programs. They don’t prep you ahead of time for what’s in store during the day of delivery and after. There are no advance tours of the hospital rooms we’d be staying in.

• Hospital cafeteria food was super crappy. There’s no concept of a pantry with complimentary coffee/tea.

• Unless the husband is vocal and demands to be more involved throughout the process, the system doesn’t care about keeping the husband involved. I wasn’t allowed in during ultrasound scans and various other checkups. I was however let in during the C-section surgery and sat beside my wife behind a screen so I couldn’t see the gory procedure. But I was very curious and requested to watch what was going on on the other side of the screen, and the friendly doctor agreed. So I actually got to witness the doctors cut into my wife and the baby getting pulled out of the womb. Got some intense images seared in my memory.

• This last one is serious. There’s a tendency among doctors in India to push for C-sections. Our first child in the US was C-section, but that was after the doctors there tried everything they could for a normal delivery. Now if the first is a C, it’s highly likely that the second would also be a C, so we didn’t bother too much with targeting for normal delivery. But for first time parents in India, this mindless and needless push toward C-section delivery is very concerning. There’s a whole documentary they made around this.

Pro or Con? You Decide

• Not getting to know the baby’s gender until they’re born, to counteract the country’s systemic issue of female foeticide. We however enjoyed the suspense.

• Not having to worry about searching for a name until after the child is born. Our daughter is currently nameless and we’ve been procrastinating shortlisting names.

• I hardly have any knowledge or expertise to comment on this, but if you need to abort the baby due to medical reasons, I’ve heard the laws are relaxed in India. I’ve heard of an anecdotal incident where someone in the extended family flew from the US to India to abort their baby because despite a diagnosis of serious medical conditions, they were refused an abortion in the US.

Folks, don’t be deceived thinking we’re breezing through childcare all happy and laughing. Despite all the help, things still get stressful at times, especially with also having to manage our 4 year old who’s got major temper tantrums. Fights and arguments between me and my wife still do occur when stress and exhaustion overwhelm us.

I got a few more posts lined up. I’ll share some details on what our money situation looks like, and thoughts on trying something new for 2024.

Talk soon,
- Dog

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The entropy (disorder/randomness) of a given system always increases.

- Second law of thermodynamics.

To experience the mighty force of entropy, all you really have to do is to go on a reasonably long drive in Bangalore. You’re a saint if you reach your destination all cheerful and smiling. You’re human if your spirits are crushed as you get swept over by the swirling tide of chaos on the city streets.

Welcome to my hometown - Bangalore! The once charming garden city of Namma Bengaluru where the evening air used to waft with the delightful aroma of filter coffee and Mysore Pak, has now degenerated into an urban hellscape - a heaving mass of humanity just under 1.4 crore, a nightmarish concoction of unplanned development, claustrophobic roads bursting with slow moving traffic, air and noise pollution, and apathetic, disorganized governing bodies.

You can’t spread your arms here without them hitting another person or object.

After having been here for two years now, I can’t say I’ve gotten used to the shockingly inadequate public infrastructure in my city. I’ve only toughened up to tolerate it and to some degree - desensitized.

The only reason we’re still happy here is because we’re indoors more than outdoors. We don’t have jobs to juggle and the associated commute. A long commute would have been the ultimate deal breaker.

In Bangalore, your physical health, happiness and mental well-being is all inversely tied to the amount of time you spend on the road everyday. The less you find yourself on the street, the better off you’ll be.

Stages of Adjustment

They say the five stages of grief a person moves through are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance.

It’s ironically funny how accurately this applied to me as I settled into my new life in India after ten years abroad. I didn’t quite pass through the bargaining phase, and maybe dealt with some mild depression, but I mostly continue to hover between anger and acceptance depending on my experiences on a given day.

I was in plain denial during the initial days. We had just begun our experiment with early retirement and had gotten closer to family, which was very exciting. Authentic Indian food and sweets kept us distracted. The easy access to golgappa and masala puri every evening was beautiful.

And then as we settled into our routine, the facade of denial gradually gave way to the next stage - Anger.

I’m not naive - I knew what I was getting into by moving back to Bangalore, but knowing is still different from starting to actually live through grim realities.

The slow realization of the public conditions of the city we’d be calling home was upsetting. The crowds, traffic, noise and lack of accessible open spaces soon began fraying my nerves. Overcome by anger and despair, I began ranting on the Blind tech forum.

Here’s some screenshots of my strongly worded posts on Blind.

If people are happy in Bangalore, it’s because they have stuff going on in their own personal lives that act as distraction and keep them occupied.

I’m risking sounding like a judgemental jerk here, but I think the happy ones have some combination of the below things going for them -

• A lavish private life that keeps them lost in their own hedonistic indulgances.

• A great social circle (my primary distraction) and rewarding connections.

• An already great career/business, or one with promising future prospects.

• Deep rooted ties that makes this the only place they can call home.

• They’re actively involved in social-work (like this guy!) and are busy making a positive difference.

The rest of the folks are in the city out of necessity, or because of factors beyond their control and would probably be elsewhere if they had a choice.

If not, how else can you not lose your cool and continue on with your whistle-a-tune, sing-a-song, cheerful day when creepy shit like this keeps occuring in our city on a regular basis?

Man falls into open drain
Tree crashes on youth
Woman drowns as car gets submerged
Metro pillar crashes killing mother and child
Water tank comes crashing down
Transformer explodes

Except the last one, these freak accidents have all happened in just the last six months! Agreed that weird shit happens all over the world, but it’s worth noting the frequency with which these occur in Bangalore.

These are not your typical “normal” accidents such as collisions - India already shines bright in the regular accident fatalities chart. The links I’ve listed above are a result of urban mismanagement and blatant violation of regulations governing how infrastructure is to be built and maintained.

While I haven’t fallen prey to OCD, I do harbor some fear about something really bad happening to me or my family someday. I try to mitigate the risks and exercise the precautions I’ve listed in the above screenshot about not dying a stupid death in India.

I should probably put that ‘avoiding-untimely-death’ post on r/India on Reddit for wider reach. Who knows, I might become the reason a few precious lives don’t die young. (Update - I did post on Reddit!)

It took me a long time to make up my mind to write this, suppressing dissenting thoughts such as “Don’t do this. You’ll be upsetting people. Some of this blog readers are based right here in Bangalore. You’ll severely offend them, etc, etc..”.

And then recently came the announcement from the Karnataka State Government that there won’t be much development this year, owing to funds being set aside for all their promised vote-bank freebies.

That helped me decide firmly that ground realities had to be shared without worrying who it might offend.

So I’ll continue ranting for a few more posts, while also making sure to note any silver-linings and rays-of-hope amidst all the madness. Some topics lined up to be published in the near future are -

• Air Pollution and Traffic - two of my biggest sources of frustration and unhappiness.

• Some tips and observations on housing - things to watch out for before buying a house.

• What I do to ensure happiness and high quality of life despite the chaos that surrounds me.

I hope this negativity-oozing post hasn’t tempted you to hit that unsubscribe button, and that you continue to stick around despite all my cynicism. I just don’t blindly want to sugarcoat things and keep yapping about how awesome and rainbowy everything is.

FIRE feels rosy and gives the illusion of a “happily-ever-after” fairytale. While I don’t wanna keep painting an unrealistic picture, to some extent, FIRE is awesome!

How else could I afford to spend two blissful hours with my son on a Sunday night dissecting a bigass jackfruit, without the baggage of existential crisis that comes with having to face yet another work-week that begins the next morning?

I’d rather carry my son’s weight on my shoulders than the heavy load of workplace anxiety!

Rant soon,
- Dog

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Other Posts In This Series -
Part-1 | Prologue
Part-2 | Family
Part-3 | Conveniences
Part-4 | Public Infrastructure

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With our country's explosive population, there arises the associated tragedy of shortage of jobs with decent pay. As a consequence, you have the availability of a labor force willing to do all your dirty, grunt work - what we rich, privileged folks like to call one of the 'conveniences' of living in India.

It's easy for me to type out words and pretend to be self-righteous. Let me however admit that I'm a hypocrite and I continue to enjoy these 'conveniences', although with some guilt. Just like I'm a hypocrite for having watched enough videos on animal cruelty by the meat industry, and yet I can’t give up eating meat.

With that note of self-loathing aside, let's look at the conveniences I'm enjoying in India!

Really, if you are upper middle-class and above, and live in a metro in India, you never have to lift a finger to get your chores done. And if you aren’t careful, it won’t also be long before you invite obesity and heart conditions into your sedentary lifestyle.

Deliveries And @Home Services..

Nearly every product and service is now delivered to your doorstep.

Our parents had their dairy and newspapers delivered home. And then as my generation was coming of age, we saw the rise of e-commerce - still mostly limited to non-consumable, non-perishable products.

Now, the next wave unfolding is the app-driven delivery of perishable/consumable products and essential services to our doorstep.

You can get your groceries, raw-meat, restaurant-food, and every other imaginable product delivered home. Another perk rarely seen in western countries is that the products you want to return back gets picked back up at your doorstep for free.

You can arrange for urgently-needed essentials, share your home-cooked food and personal items with your local family and friends using services like Dunzo.

Car washes, haircuts and beauty parlor services are now offered at-home. Any large appliance or furniture that gets delivered to your home also comes with a service technician that assembles the thing and gives you a demo if necessary.

There are grocery delivery apps like Zepto whose business proposition is that they deliver grocery to your home within 10 minutes of placing an order.

To get a sense of the ridiculous levels of pampering we have available - We even recently got our blood samples collected from home for our blood work.

And then there's the lifeline of Indian households - Domestic Help!

Probably one of the largest pool of workers are in the unorganized/unregulated domestic work sector in India, and they will make sure that you never again have to deal with household chores again.

We employ a maid that does the sweeping, mopping and dishes. A cook-fairy magically appears everyday, prepares our three meals with a swipe of her wand, and magically vanishes. We have a part time driver available on-call for longer driving assignments.

Nannies could take care of your kids at your home for the major part of the day, but don’t expect any legal paperwork procedures before handing over your kids for them to care.

Living in an apartment community comes with amenities such as the on-premises plumber, electrician and various other handymen being a call away. You place the garbage just outside your door and it gets picked up daily.

We’re a society that’s very unfamiliar with the DIY culture, because we all possess a deadly skill - How To Make A Phone Call!

Me Asks - “The bathroom tap is leaking. Do you know where the wrench is?”
She Says - “Just make a phone call to the plumber, silly!”

Me Asks - “Hey isn’t that door making an annoying creaky sound? Where’s the oil, let me lubricate the hinges.”
She Says - “Uh, just call the plumber, OK?”
Me Asks - “Did you mean carpenter?”
She Says - “Yeah, whatever. Just call!”

Let’s take a moment to recognize that CubicleDog is a kind hearted Pug. He doesn’t bite.

The fact that domestic workers are one of the most abused, overworked people is something I try not to forget. We make our best effort to shun the master-slave mindset and treat our domestic help with kindness and respect. We pay her well, always on time and sometimes in advance if she so needs, and keep giving away a ton of stuff that we don’t need.

We give Sundays off to our honest, hard-working maid.

Having never experienced what a ‘weekend’ means, our maid was delighted when I offered her Sundays off. She said this was the first time someone had given her a scheduled day off every week.

Our apartment community has an app where you can write reviews on your domestic helpers. When I encouraged our maid to also request for getting Sunday off at other houses she works at, it wasn’t long before some narrow-minded uncle threw in a negative review.

I just had to respond to that. Here’s a screenshot.

You can be big-hearted while still being smart enough to ensure your domestic helpers don’t take advantage of your kindness.

Here’s a related article on this topic - Link.

The Rise of Fintech..

Let’s move on to something else that doesn’t involve one class of the society enjoying the laborings of another class - Fintech.

Fintech has exploded in India, and is an example of democratization in it’s truest form - in that, it’s not just serving the privileged.

Street vendors operating at the lowest levels have now turned digital. I barely carry any cash or cards with me anymore when I'm out and about. All I need is a smartphone with apps like PayTM linked to my bank account.

Finances in urban India are now practically functioning over smartphone apps - at least as long as you're talking white-money economy.

Many other financial services like banking and brokerages have turned fully digital, so we've gotten to the point where the tech savvy amongst us squirm at the idea of having to visit a branch.

Any new financial relationship could be initiated from your home, such as opening bank accounts, brokerage accounts, fixed deposits, etc. Some of these banks are willing to send an agent to your home to help with paperwork.

Even some of the much dreaded governmental tasks can now be done online. I got my voter ID card done entirely online, without ever stepping out of the house! Voter ID card however could be a special case. They want you to vote, so they probably make it easy.

I'll be truly impressed when I can renew my driver's license, or register property online without having to run around and bribe a bunch of lowlives.

Taking A Few Steps Back..

Let’s not get too carried away by the sickening onslaught of conveniences.

Let’s pop in a red pill.

While it's easy to get all starry eyed and optimistic, believing India is now rapidly zipping along the path toward progress and prosperity, it's worth noting the superficiality of it all.

You might want to ponder for a moment if this is all a coating of chocolate over a strawberry that's rotten on the inside.

Most of the conveniences listed above are confined to the big cities, and only to the educated middle-class and above. The tech-unempowered millions are still burning their time queueing up at banks and post offices, looking for an “educated-looking” person to help them fill out confusing paper forms.

If you descend down the socio-economic ladder, you’ll see things regressing back to the older way of life. You move out of the bigger cities and all these modern amenities drop off the map.

Much remains to be addressed in areas that are real indicators of a truly developing nation - infrastructure, employment, healthcare, effective law-enforcement, etc. And we all well know how the country fares in these categories.

The app-universe is a world run by entrepreneurs leveraging the availability of a large pool of gig workers. I have a lot of respect for these resourceful entrepreneurs that are changing the face of India, but yet, their foot-soldiers are these gig workers that barely make a decent living and as far as I know, are offered no insurance or benefits.

If a poor delivery guy falls into a carelessly dug-up hole in the road while he's rushing to meet your 10-minute grocery delivery deadline, good luck to him. He's now on his own, and the ‘disruptive’ startup will have nothing to do with him.

The more these conveniences become available to me, the more I perversely feel like I'm playing a small role in the exploitation of the dirt-cheap labor force, just because I'm too rich, lazy or busy to run my own errands.

While I continue to enjoy these amenities with a hint of guilt, I address my guilt with a few passive cover-ups:

• I don't use 10 minute delivery services. I really don't want some poor chap driving recklessly on these roads just because I'm too precious a snowflake that'll melt away if I don't get my gourmet almond milk in the next ten minutes.

• I tip service people as reasonably as I can.

• I treat them with dignity, and don't turn into an entitled jerk if they're running late or make minor mistakes.

• I take the time to leave a good rating to the service person, if I feel they offered good service.

• I honor the work-life boundaries of our apartment maintenance crew by not calling them during weekday-evenings and not bothering them on weekends.

• As a tiny measure of respect, I address even younger looking working-class laborers with honorifics. (Neevu instead of Neenu in Kannada, Aap rather than Tum in Hindi.)

• As I mentioned earlier, I give Sundays off to our domestic help and our cook.

That’s all I’ve got for this part in the “Life In India” series!

In my next post, I’ll try to throw in some comments on big systemic issues in India - Infrastructure, traffic, pollution, etc.

Talk soon,
- Dog

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Let’s take a dig at one of the more important motivators for Indian expats to return back to the ol’ country - Proximity to extended family.

It’s important to approach this topic from various angles. As experience might tell you, a family could be a comforting source of love, care and support. But that however could only be one part of the story. The other part gets into the dark underbelly of misunderstandings, games of ego and jealousy, petty politics and the conflict of mindsets between generations.

The wise guys after all came up with a timeless maxim to capture the essence of this latter part of the story..

Distance Makes the Heart Grow Fonder.

The value you’ll get out of getting back closer to your larger family circle depends on how much you're invested in your people, and whether there are healthy boundaries in place.

Leveraging the easily accessible support system of extended family might do wonders to your well-being, especially for someone beaten down by the loneliness and alienation of living in a foreign country.

You get to enjoy a readily available social circle with minimal effort from your end. This could make your life easier, especially if you're someone like me that lacks the energy and motivation to constantly cultivate new friendships, or even maintain existing ones. I sometimes find the task of "keeping in touch" with friends more like a chore. Because I don’t often take the trouble to do that, quite a lot of my old friendships have faded away.

With extended family, you don't have to keep in regular contact and yet the connections still remain intact.

Extended family could be invaluable if you have little kids.

My son is now very attached to his grandparents and his uncles and aunts. He gets to hang out with his cousins his age. So the one big advantage we get to enjoy here is his socializing with a larger circle that extends beyond just us parents.

It also frequently gives us parents a much needed break from constantly having to entertain our kids ourselves.

This alone could be reason enough for me to justify that my return back to India has been worth all the trouble and other compromises I’ve had to make.

Beyond all the fluffy goodness, I have to admit that personally, I’m not much of a family guy.

While I wish the very best for everybody in my extended family, I cannot bring myself to care about being deeply involved in people’s lives. Neither do I want anyone to take a keen interest in my life. I just want us to keep showing up as an occasional blip on each other’s radar.

This applies at a smaller scale even to people in the more intimate inner circle such as parents. No matter how much you love them, once you’re a fully grown adult and have a family of your own, some space between you and your parents is much needed.

It's nice that we're all now geographically closer and get along well, but I’m still uncomfortable being cooped up under the same roof with people longer than necessary. Whenever I’m stuck with elder family folk longer than a few days, I begin to grapple with the disruption in my daily functioning.

Our personal space and privacy goes for a toss. My wife and I can no longer have deeply personal conversations, we can't yell and vent at each other if we get mad at one another. We can't openly talk finances. The range of conversation we could have with visiting friends becomes restricted. We can't freely indulge in things we enjoy - say for example, to pop open a bottle of wine for dinner.

With the orthodox elder generation around, you're obliged to put on a mask of fake personality that's in sync with their social conditioning.

If I'm coming across as a selfish, self-centered individual, I actually wouldn't disagree. I'm more than willing to make sacrifices when someone I care about is facing an emergency and is in desperate need for urgent help. Outside of such rare situations, I really don't see the need to make compromises and sacrifices under normal circumstances.

It's worth noting that despite your getting along well with your family, your spouse might not, and vice versa. Let's admit it - isn't there always some sort of tension between you and the inlaws? Do you have a tiny little smile of approval on your face right now? :)

Bringing the spouse and in-laws closer is something to be cautious about. If you're fortunate, it could all work out fine. But at its worst, you might risk marital disharmony if there's excessive disruption in your relationship dynamics. It could so happen that your spouse begins to feel suffocated, while you thrive.

Sometimes, placing an ocean or two between you and the family might just give you the much needed breathing space.

Maybe I’m failing to appreciate the value of family here because I’m not that family-oriented, or because I now take their easy availability for granted and the novelty has worn off.

But with the hindsight of two years behind me, I think getting closer to family should be one of the few motivators, and not the topmost driver for your decision to return back to India. Your joy and the novelty of it all could be short-lived, as you quickly get used to it or grow disillusioned.

Or if you wish to come back to care for your ageing parents, that’s a noble cause no doubt. But then once they depart, you’ll again have to deal with the emotionally draining dilemma of deciding whether to stay back or pack up and move abroad all over again.

As always, it’s good to remember that overthinking undoubtedly leads to inaction. My approach toward major life decisions is to quickly think through the big picture, and then make the leap of faith without sweating the tiny details. And if you later find that you didn’t make the best decision, then you begin course-correcting. Most things in life are reversible - returning to India and then learning you are no longer cut out for life in India is a reversible situation too. In the end, you’re always richer for the experience.

This approach is what gave me the courage to quit my job, uproot my life in the US and move back to India. Had I sat on my hands debating every little what-ifs, I have no doubt my routine grind in the US would have continued, and nothing would ever have changed.

And that’s my incoherent, inconclusive take on the topic of family.

In my next post, let’s tackle a lighter topic. Something that doesn’t reach into the deep corners of your conscience and open up cans of worms, such as this touchy topic of family might have.

Next week, I’ll make a passthrough of all the conveniences I’m enjoying in India!

Talk next week,
- Dog

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Toward the end of my stay in the US, I was battered. After 10 years in the country, I could no longer appreciate anything good about life in the United States. I was burnt out of everything - the unending cycle of work, the ever growing list of mundane chores, the suffocating restrictions around H-1B visa, and the growing internal and external pressure to put an end to being renters and buy a house that’d very likely be overpriced and then getting stuck in the spiral of mortgage payments.

Add to that the fact that we had just become parents, and the demands of infant care amplified our exhaustion.

Thankfully, my wife and I had a good, stable marriage. Still do! I dread to think what it would have been like to also deal with a strained marriage on top of everything else.

We badly needed a complete turnaround in our lives. A short vacation getaway wasn't gonna cut it, and it’s not really a vacation anyway with an infant. What I really needed was to drop off this vicious grind and slow down for a while.

While on an H-1B and no green card in sight anytime soon, this option wasn’t available to us in the US.

That left us with having to return back to India.

So yeah, we did not return just because our net worth hit a certain milestone, or because we wanted to be closer to family. They were enablers no doubt, but the biggest motivation was to escape the brutal grind of routine life.

To enjoy the unfettered freedom and peace of mind that comes with not being tied to a restrictive work visa. To put a pause on running the hamster wheel of employment and kick back for a while.

For new readers, if you're interested in reading more about our move back to India with all the details around logistics and financials, check out the links to my older posts below:

Return To India (Part 1)
Return To India (Part 2)
Return To India (Part 3)
One Year FIRE Update

For long, I wanted to make a series of posts covering a few aspects about life in India. I kept putting it off because writing about open-ended topics such as these is hard, and also boring! But one of the blog readers (Hi Shubho!) emailed me pondering similar thoughts which finally motivated me to begin typing away.

Please do consider whatever I say with giant grains of salt. I'm after all a left-leaning, atheistic, introverted, 37 year-old with a 3 year-old kid. We live in Bangalore and our lifestyle is upper-middle-class (that means not too fancy a car, no full-time driver, no stay-at-home maids and nannies, no closets stuffed with designer bags and shoes).

I look Indian and speak with an Indian accent, but I probably don't relate a whole lot to my Indian heritage anymore. Please be assured it's not stemming from a place of arrogance. It's more of a personality type where you're just deeply individualistic and your identity isn't tied to your nation, religion or culture. Pretty much the only Indian elements I hold close to my heart are friends and family, Indian food, my first language Kannada, and Cricket. I'm indifferent to everything else Indian - that includes things like festivals, culture and customs, entertainment, politics, and current affairs.

So there's a limit to how much someone younger or older than me, with a different personality and lifestyle, with no kids or older kids, with contradicting values and priorities can relate to me.

Your experiences living in a different place in India might also vastly differ from mine in Bangalore.

Feel free to blatantly disagree and dismiss my observations as irrelevant to you.

For the next few weeks, I’ll put out a weekly post every Saturday at 6 PM IST. Some topics coming down the pipeline are -

• The upsides and downsides of getting closer to extended family.

• Some notes on modern conveniences I’m getting to enjoy in India.

• Thoughts on living in a high-rise apartment in a metro like Bangalore. I’ll also offer some suggestions, and some cautions to exercise before buying apartment units.

• Experiences with systemic issues like infrastructure, traffic and pollution.

• Am I happy having returned or do I regret it? In hindsight, what would I have done differently?

I better go load up on caffeine, got a lot of writing to do!

Talk next week,
- Dog

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Al Pacino - “I don’t know how to do anything else.“
Robert De Niro - “Neither Do I.”
Al Pacino - “I don’t much want to either.”
Robert De Niro - “Neither Do I.”

- Scene of conversation between the cop and the gangster. (Movie - Heat)

This above exchange of dialog captures the essence of this post.

When you have complete control over your time, there are two options to choose from while deciding how best to utilize your time and energy.

Which of the below two equally-worthwhile, equally-fulfilling ideals do I want to pursue?

Should I aspire to be a Renaissance Man?

Or, am I better off not spreading myself thin, and go all-in into one or two pursuits?

In other words, am I better suited to be an Idiot Savant?

I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m better off trying to be the latter - an idiot savant.

To all you FIRE enthusiasts day dreaming of your post-retirement life of fantasy, I hate to be a buzzkill but I have to be one. If you believe that once you FIRE, you’re gonna fill your days up absorbed in all your unexplored interests such as music, arts and crafts, learning a new language, and other hobbies, it won’t be long before disillusionment sets in.

Fact is, most of your interests are likely superficial. You’ll dabble for a few months, get your fulfillment, flush that curiosity out of your system, and then run out of steam. You’ll write that song you’d always wanted to write, or set up your new blog and dump a couple articles, or put up a handful of paintings or digital art on your new Instagram account. Maybe you’ll learn some rudimentary French, German or Spanish for three months. And that’ll be it. The fourth month rolls by and you realize you don’t wanna continue doing it anymore.

There will always be exceptions and a very few committed ones will completely reinvent themselves in a totally unrelated field. But for the vast majority, early disillusionment is unfortunately the most likely outcome.

Speaking from first-hand experience here…

I hit the wall of disillusionment quite early on. I thought I’d be diving into music, vlogging, animation, guitar, comedy, writing, you name it. And I did dabble in them all.

Since I’m feeling ballsy today, I’m gonna briefly take off my cloak of anonymity…

Here’s a tiny portfolio of all my work in the above mentioned creative endeavors on my YouTube channel.

So, I dabbled in all the above mentioned areas (music, vlogging, animation, guitar, comedy) for a little bit and then I was done.

I’m deeply committed to learning the Guitar well, and yet I can’t imagine practising Guitar five hours everyday or pick up the instrument the first thing after getting out of bed. I can only do it for maybe an hour or two at best and only after I’m done with my “major tasks” for the day.

As an early retiree, it’s very important to figure out what those “major tasks” are. This is crucial for you to maintain your sense of self-esteem. Without this, you’ll soon find yourself falling into the hell-hole of listlessness and depression.

It’s clear to me that my major calling is good old software development.

In the last couple years, I’ve proven to myself beyond doubt that I can only be a software developer after all. Everything else is a passing fad, a superficial curiosity that’ll be very short-lived.

So in the last one year, I have:
- Picked up the Golang programming language.
- Did a complete source code study of BoltDB (a B+ tree key-value store written in Go).
- Brushed up my C++ and caught up on the latest feature additions to the language. (Shoutout to learncpp.com - Such a well written, comprehensive tutorial!)
- Read the book “Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA)” cover-to-cover.

And there’s a lot more of study I have lined up, such as:
- Read a bunch of papers (BigTable, Chubby, Spanner, F1, the list is long..)
- Complete source code study of LevelDB and RocksDB.
- Learn PostgreSQL and Prometheus.

The one thing I most definitely won’t be spending any time doing is Leetcoding. Only real engineering work, there’s no place for toy programming and cheap trickery.

I might come across as a fool here. One might think - “this guy saved up, quit his dev job in the US, returned to India to FIRE, and he can’t think of a better way to spend his time other than doing software all over again? What a naive, one-dimensional idiot! Get a life, Dog!”

I don’t blame you for thinking something like this. It does sound sad, but only to someone sick and tired of the hi-tech corporate grind, and hoping that FIRE will help them get on a different course in life.

However, things feel different from my perspective. The joy of pursuing software purely as a craft, without being dragged down by all the bullshit you encounter in a high-pressure, office-politics-infested company is just different.

The Renaissance man ideal can wait. For now, I’m gonna focus on trying to be an Idiot-Savant software developer.

Until next time,
- Dog

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I live in a decently equipped apartment in Bangalore in the Rajajinagar area. It’s gated, has round-the-clock security and typical modern amenities - swimming pool, gym, kids play area, library, etc.

Life is good as long as I’m within the confines of my cozy home and I don’t look at what lies beyond the gated walls of my apartment community.

Because, truth is, I’m living in an oasis, that's surrounded by a shithole…

This is the reality of most apartment communities in India’s major metros. You’ve got fancy high-rise apartments reaching for the clouds on one hand. At the same time, you’ll find impoverished slum dwellings, or monstrous sewage systems right in the neighborhood of said apartment complexes.

The people that occupy our neighborhood slum like to drum (rhyme unintended). They drum during celebrations, festivals, religious holidays and many other occasions. And they drum when someone in their community passes away, which happens every few weeks.

One unavoidable charm of living in Indian metros is the intrusion of public noise and nuisance invading your private space. You have to learn to tune it out and get on with your life. We apartment dwellers have grown used to the drumming.

I do feel sorry for those that are working from home and have to dial in to meetings during the drumming days.

Having guests over at your house during such days can get embarrassing too.

Recently one day, the drummers in our area slum, that had been drumming since afternoon, decided to push their limits and continued drumming late into the night.

The clock whizzed past 9 PM, and then 10 PM and then it was 10:45 PM. And these lowlives were continuing banging around with no signs of stopping.

It was past my son’s bed time and he wouldn’t fall asleep in that kinda noise.

I was brimming with anger.

I felt helpless because I was powerless to do anything about it. I’m not a brave man to walk up to this street-gang and fist-punch holes into their drums.

I googled around for what can be done for noise disturbance and came across articles about visiting the local police station and filing a complaint.

I’m not cut out for such undertakings either. That seemed like way too much of an escalation.

The other option was to make a call and report the disturbance. 112 is the Indian equivalent of 911.

So I call up 112, and as I was bracing to hear the grumpy voice of a bored, indifferent policeman grunting 'Yaarree Adu?’ (Who the hell is it calling), I was surprised to hear the call-center like voice of a lady on the other side.

She greeted me politely and asked for the reason for my call. I reported the disturbance. She asked me details about the locality and the police station that has jurisdiction over the area.

Then she asked for my name. I panicked because I wished to be anonymous, but I couldn’t assert myself and gave out my name.

She then said she’ll have the beat-patrol police (called Hoysala, in Bangalore) dispatched immediately, thanked me for calling and hung up.

I was very skeptical about help arriving. I was thinking maybe if it was a case of bodily harm, police assistance could be expected. But noise complaint? In India? That’s a long shot, I thought.

Within the next ten minutes, a police car with flashing beacons showed up near my apartment. I was delightfully surprised about the fact that the system I was skeptical about, actually works.

I received a call from one of the cops in the car and he asked me to come up to their car and take them to the source of disturbance.

That’s suicidal, isn’t it? I live in the area and keep walking around for local errands. If these street goons learn that I reported them to the cops, then they’ll ambush me someday and chop me up while I’m innocently walking back home with some tomatoes.

I made it clear to the police saying I’m not showing up citing my future safety as excuse. The guy was understanding. I then gave out some directions on the phone and hung up.

The police finally approached the drummers and immediately put an end to the menace. There wasn’t any action. The cops walked up to the drummers, had some exchange of words, and the drummers dispersed immediately.

And then we had the gift of blissful silence. My son was dozing away in the next few minutes.

I was watching it all unfold from the safety of my 15th floor balcony, and in total darkness so I couldn’t be spotted if the cops or the drummers turned their heads up.

Sad fact - I hide my face behind a blur on this blog, I hide behind a cartoon on my YouTube channel. And now, I also hide in darkness in real life. Boy, I’m a loser, aren’t I?

I’m so naive that I was delighted with the outcome of this little incident, and was shivering with adrenaline. I called the cop back on his number and thanked him. He sounded surprised with my gratitude. Maybe getting appreciated feels weird to these folks, stuck in their thankless jobs.

The next day, I got a call from the call-center and they asked if I was satisfied with the service and if I had any feedback to give. I expressed my happiness, while also letting them know that some callers would prefer staying anonymous through it all, and wouldn’t enjoy getting callbacks from the cops and being asked to show up to their patrol car. The call-center rep told me that I can request to be anonymous when I first call to report the incident. Good to know that!

So what to make of all this?

While it looks like the system works, we need to take it with a grain of salt.

Police effectiveness largely depends on who they are targeting.

The people I reported were a bunch of nobodies in a godforsaken slum. The cops could easily go shoo them away and resolve the issue in an instant.

If the source of disturbance happens to be some influential local politician that’s running a late night celebration, and I report such incidents to the police, I’m quite sure nothing’s gonna come out of it. Worse, it could backfire and I could become the target of these powerful people for trying to disrupt their party.

In India, I have to be careful about who I’m dealing with. You’re better off not messing with powerful goons, unless you’re an even more powerful badass yourself.

For now, I can rest assured that the next time these bands of drummers get together for a night time jam session, I have the power to make a phone call and destroy their concert, all from the comfort of my balcony…

…While I hide in the dark.

Until next time,
- SlumDog Millionaire

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It was a vacation alright, but with a difficult child.

And it wavered between some semblance of enjoyment and a long nightmare. There was a hard lesson we learned here -

We just returned back from a 6-day vacation in the picturesque islands of Maldives. This was our first major trip since we FIRE-d a little less than two years back, and it also happened to be our first vacation with our 3-year old son. I couldn’t have wished for a better setting - great weather, a plush all-inclusive resort opening up to a turquoise blue lagoon, amazing food and drinks and friendly resort staff offering best-in-class hospitality.

Better yet, vacationing feels different when you don’t have to contend with the gnawing anxiety of workplace obligations waiting to eat you alive once you clock back in to work after your holiday.

Wasn’t the case with us, though...

When you’re traveling with a 3-year old that is prone to outbursts of anger and is too young to enjoy a change of scenery, chances are high your vacation will turn out to be a nightmare. And we did have plenty of moments where we regretted even planning something like this.

Our son dearly missed the familiarity of home, his daily routine and his toys back home. He frequently threw temper tantrums and demanded to meet his grandparents back in Bangalore. His appetite went for a toss and he junked out on biscuits and chocolates. I felt extremely uncomfortable when he created scenes in public and yelled and screamed, as other holiday-makers looked on - some with anger and annoyance, others with pitiful empathy.

At times, the situation felt so hopeless that my wife and I seriously debated if we should just cut our vacation short, check-out early and fly back on a new airplane ticket.

But we somehow stuck it out and survived our 6-days away from home. We’re glad we did because a pre-mature end to our holiday would have left behind bitter memories of a ruined vacation. While at our wits end to keep our son happy and entertained, we adults still managed to make the best of our holiday.

Trip Report

We stayed at the Hard Rock Hotel on an all-inclusive package. We opted for this resort out of many other choices because it’s a kids-friendly resort and is a short 20 minute boat ride from the Malé international airport.

During the course of our stay, we enjoyed top-notch hospitality from the friendly resort staff and the food was just great. The breakfast spread was unbelievably diverse and coffee flowed abundantly.

We had a wide array of restaurants to choose from for lunch and dinner. Having been in Bangalore for the last couple years, my wife and I have been dearly missing many of our multi-ethnic food favorites that were so easily available in the US. Now in Bangalore, these cuisines either aren’t found, or the authenticity of what’s available sucks.

My wife loaded up on Buffalo Chicken Wings, Thai Tom-Yum soup and Chinese fares, while I cut into medium rare Ribeye steaks and New York cheesecakes.

Onward with the trip report…

My son, when he was in a good mood, enjoyed wading in the shallow blue waters on the beach, chased crabs and collected corals and seashells. He enjoyed zooming down the water-slide and plunging into the pool with me.

When my son napped in the afternoons, my wife and I grabbed the opportunity to sneak in photo-shoots at the beach and I snapped a few stunning pictures of my wife.

We also arranged for a professional photo shoot with all of us together.

I especially enjoyed the unlimited drinks as part of our all-inclusive package and hardly stopped sipping wine throughout our stay.

Late into the night, as my family went to bed, I’d slip out to the nearest bar, get myself a shot of whiskey and hit the dark, empty beaches and find myself a nice spot to sit down for some alone Bourbon-and-Contemplation time. With no urban lighting to ruin the view, the night sky glittered with mighty constellations. It had been a while since I looked up at the Cosmos and witness the grand spectacle of the night sky. You don’t get to experience such moments in the blinding city lights of Bangalore.

We did not get to see much aquatic life, but that’s because Hard Rock resort faces a lagoon and not the open ocean. There’s hardly any reef within the property’s waters. Without an expansive reef bed, you won’t attract much ocean life. So this wouldn’t be the best spot for snorkeling around or diving. You could however go on off-shore excursions deeper out into the sea. Our schedule wasn’t flexible enough to accommodate such activities.

While our little son surely gave us a very hard time with his temper tantrums and his yearning for home, we managed to pull off a decent vacation. I’ll be looking forward to visiting the Maldives again in the future as my boy grows up and starts opening himself up to new experiences and adventures.

Coming Back Home Sucks…

As our vacation drew to an end, the thought of getting back to our lives in Bangalore did not sound appealing at all. My wife and I talked about how there’s hardly anything to do once we get back to this noisy, crowded and claustrophobic mess of a city.

I have to admit that I don’t at all like where I live. I want out…

During my working years in the United States, returning back home from a vacation gave me shivers of dread as I grimly recalled what awaited me - a mountain of emails to clear through, the drudgery of meetings, standups and 1:1s, the same old bug pile-ups and uninspiring feature requests. Above all, the soul-crushing small-talk I had to participate in with coworkers that I couldn’t connect with.

I no longer have these annoyances now that I’m a corporate drop-out. I don’t have a laundry list of work obligations to return to. I’m very grateful for the fact that I continue to be able to claim my time to be my own even after my vacation ends.

But what in the freaking hell does my city have that I can actually enjoy? I got no mountains, lakes, trails and parks anywhere close. All I have is a crumbling, crowded, pot-hole ridden, trashy city enveloping me in all direction, drowning me out with its unending cacophony.

Our last few days in Maldives put us back in touch with nature with fresh air to breathe and pleasant wooded areas to stroll in. I enjoyed quiet mornings and peaceful evenings where I could actually hear myself think. I had lots of personal space without another human around me within earshot, except for my family. All these privileges felt routine during my years in the US and I took them for granted.

I no longer get to enjoy the above mentioned blessings in my current environment. I’m not cut out for big city life in India.

I’ll be spending a decent chunk of time in the coming days thinking about what I can do to leave this urban hellscape.

I have a pretty lengthy, very negative, rant-infested blog post brewing in my head about all the things I hate about my life in India/Bangalore. Have to warn you - on reading that post, you’ll either be deeply offended, triggered or disappointed. In case you’re planning to return to India, my post might be tremendously discouraging. Or, my post might make you feel relieved that you’ve built your life in a far better place.

Whatever it is, I owe you the truth. Keep an eye out!

Until next time,
- Dog

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Hey good people! I'm back with a whole lot of updates after a year of FI in India. As always, I'll be going over things in detail. I turned 37 this August.

Below is the link if you’d like a recap of my “Return to India” series…

For those in hurry, here's the TLDR of this post…

• Basic living expenses (kid's education, accomodation, essential supplies, domestic help, utilities) averaging about Rs. 50K a month.

• Very happy with FIRE and enjoying our leisurely private lives.

• Not very happy with Bangalore's infrastructure, traffic, air quality, etc. Missing the quiet suburban life and outdoor recreation. I'm beginning to doubt if I’m cool with living in Bangalore long term!

Getting on with my updates now...

Expenses

I don't wanna be a loser that obsesses over spending budgets and tracks every last penny spent. Getting the big picture right is more important to me than closely tracking tiny expenses. With that said, below is the breakdown of expenses we incurred in the last 1.5 years. I did not track it throughout the year, just looked it all up now for the sake of this post.

For those interested in a more detailed breakdown of our expenses, here's a screenshot (Link).

We haven't bought a car yet because our family had an extra car that was sitting unused. That's a big one-time expense we haven't had to incur yet. So if you exclude the one time expenses, our recurring yearly expenses should easily be well under Rs. 10 lac a year. Even if we double our expenses to Rs. 20 lac a year with a fancier lifestyle and vacations, that would still keep us at around $25,000 a year. Assuming a withdrawal rate of 3%, that's sustainable with our current net worth. I feel secure about our finances as I write this.

We started out in India with Rs. 30 lac in our bank account and we've used up Rs. 20 lac so far. We have another 10 lac to burn through before I have to tap into our funds in the US.

Paytm Fixed Deposit

Instead of letting our money in India sit in a savings account earning 2.5% interest rate, I opened up a fixed deposit account with Paytm Payments bank and threw in Rs. 10 lac there. This money earns 5.5% interest per year and I can break the deposit anytime penalty-free. Since this is money I need near-term, it can earn more interest in an FD than a savings account, and FD is safer than putting it in a market-risk bound instrument.

Paytm FD is convenient as you can set up an account all through your phone app, without ever having to visit a branch. Any boomer shop that makes me run around town filling paper forms and making endless photocopies of my adhar and pan card gets my longest finger. I like doing my finances sitting on my bed.

US Financial Accounts Consolidation

We had brokerage accounts in Fidelity, Etrade, Vanguard and Robinhood. To simplify account management, I consolidated all our accounts into Fidelity. This required transferring our holdings in other accounts "in-kind" into Fidelity. You initiate this transfer by placing a request in Fidelity and they take care of the rest. Most brokerages charge an account transfer-out fee of about $75. However, you can later file for a reimbursement with your target brokerage. Fidelity reimbursed me for all transfers.

You might want to do this before reporting your non-resident status to your brokerages. Once they update your file to non-resident, a bunch of restrictions are placed on your account. Here's the letter of restrictions Fidelity sent me after I submitted my W-8BEN (Link).

Reporting Non-Resident Status to US Financial Institutions (Form W-8BEN)

We returned to India in April 2021. That made us US residents for tax purposes for the full year. So I did not report our change of address to any brokerage until 2022 rolled around. I had a friend's US address on file during 2021.

Once you become a US non-resident, you report that to your brokerages by submitting form W-8BEN. Consolidating all your accounts into one like I did in the previous section makes your life easier because then you don't have to submit five different W-8BENs to your five different brokerages.

RNOR Tax Status In India

On returning to India after a long time abroad, you're granted a special tax resident status called RNOR (Resident/Not Ordinarily Resident). In my case, I get to be RNOR for two financial years (FY 21-22 and FY 22-23). While an RNOR, you don't pay India taxes for income earned abroad. This opens up two opportunities:

• Liquidate your investments abroad and bring them in to India with no India tax obligations.

• Reset your cost basis on US stock investments and lock in all your profits without having to pay capital gains tax to either the US or India. This way you continue to stay invested in the US markets, and drastically bring down your future capital gains tax obligations when you eventually sell. More on this below. (This is my preferred choice.)

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Resetting Cost Basis

The US doesn't impose capital gains tax on non-residents. And India doesn't tax income earned abroad while you are RNOR. This gives you a window of opportunity to completely eliminate tax obligations on the unrealized capital gains you've made so far. All you have to do is to sell your profitable stock holdings, and then buy the same stock back or any other stock of your choosing. Here's more information. (Note - I have not consulted the Galactic Advisors or have any ties with them.)

Things to keep in mind here:

• Be very careful about making absolutely sure that you are a US non-resident + India RNOR when you do this.

• On reporting non-resident status to your brokerages, they place restrictions on your account. Fidelity now doesn't allow me to buy index mutual funds. So, I can sell my VTSAX and FSKAX shares held in Fidelity but I can't buy them back. So I'm now buying VTI instead, the ETF equivalent of VTSAX.

• Spread out this process over time so very large transactions from abroad don't mistakenly get flagged as fradulent transactions by your brokerage. I'm not sure if this is even a concern. Maybe it's not but I'm just playing it safe.

• Importantly, don't sell your investments that are at loss and buy them back. That achieves nothing and would become a wash-sale.

Although I understand I'm an insignificant little fish among Fidelity's client pool of multi-millionaires, I'm still nervous about applying this method to our $1+ million worth of shares. I get to be RNOR in India until March 31, 2023. So I'll spread out this task evenly over the coming months until my RNOR status runs out.

I also need to look into whether resetting cost basis makes sense for retirement accounts like IRAs. The US doesn't impose capital gains tax on future IRA withdrawals so no concerns there. I haven't read up on how India taxes IRA withdrawals. If it taxes capital gains instead of treating withdrawn money as ordinary income, I'll have to reset cost basis in my IRAs as well while I'm RNOR.

Traditional To Roth IRA Conversion

With only 3 months of salaried income in 2021, we fell under the 12% tax bracket for US tax year 2021. I ran some numbers to compute how much money I can convert from traditional IRA to Roth, while still staying within the 12% bracket for 2021. I ended up moving $41,000 and associated earnings from traditional to Roth IRA.

The conversion process with my Fidelity IRA accounts was simple and entirely online. You specify the principal amount in Traditional IRA you want to convert to Roth and they compute the associated earnings and roll the total amount over. For this conversion to apply for a given tax year, the deadline for the conversion is December 31 of that year.

I need to look into whether doing another conversion for US tax year 2022 and one more for 2023 makes sense, while I'm still RNOR in India. This way, I don't need to worry about India tax implications arising from such conversions. I don't yet know what the US tax implications for conversions are for non-residents. Something to look into in the coming weeks.

NRE/NRO Account Conversion

It isn't very clear at what point after returning to India you have to convert your Indian non-resident accounts to resident accounts. Some recommend doing it soon after returning to India. Others say you can continue to maintain non-resident accounts as long as you are in RNOR status. I was undecided for nearly six months and then finally decided to convert my NRE account to a resident account.

Note that most bank employees are terribly ignorant and misinformed about rules concerning NRE accounts. My SBI branch manager misguided me saying they can't convert my account until I've stayed in India for one full financial year. I believed him at the time and went back home. Then on further reading, it was clear to me that he's mis-stating facts and I raised a complaint online on the bank portal. That got their attention and they swiftly completed the conversion task.

Despite this little episode, I've been happy with the services of SBI. Their online banking portal is solid and I've never encountered downtime.

Son's Schooling

Our son started pre-nursery in June 2021 at the age of 2.7 years. We could have delayed his school by another year but he was getting increasingly bored at home and we were getting tired keeping him engaged. We've admitted him to the pre-school "KLE The Banyan". The school expenses come upto 1.5 lac rupees a year.

I'm not a believer in the generally held opinion that more expensive schooling equates to better education. I simply can't relate to people that say they'll have to shell out Rs. 1 lac per month for "top-notch" schools in India. Maybe such claims hold true for higher education but I feel strongly against super-fancy schooling during the kids' younger years. I'm averse to the typical Indian mindset of obsessing over competitiveness and prestige. I couldn't care less if my son's school doesn't offer pretentious programs such as horse riding, archery, French or whatever else it is that the fancier schools offer. My son getting to enjoy a happy, stress-free, fun-filled childhood is far more important to me. He's having a good time at his school, loves his friends and teachers and is learning a lot in a no-pressure environment. There's plenty of emphasis on skills beyond plain academics. We're very happy with his school.

I'm done with my logistical updates for this year. In my next post, I'll talk about how life in Bangalore has been in general, our social experiences, thoughts about future and other odds and ends.

I could be painting an inaccurate picture for you here, dear reader. If you're beginning to think that we've been having a great time and it's all been nothing but pure bliss for me and my family, I'll have to let you know that that is not the full story. Our private life has been awesome no doubt. We feel blessed with easy availability of domestic help (that we pay well and treat with respect and kindness), a strong social circle with the extended family, and a slow paced, relaxed life with complete control of our time.

But I'm not very happy with big-city life in Bangalore and dearly miss the quiet suburbs, wide open spaces, and outdoor recreation that I cherised so much in the US. I'm craving to live in a peaceful neighboorhood that's closer to the mountains and lakes. I'm wondering if Bangalore is a good choice for us to live long term.

More on these thoughts in my future posts!

Until next time,
- Dog

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