Thoughts on meandering through some days

I suppose the process of bringing up a child is also about growing up yourself. You start looking at things, and yourself, differently. 

If you set aside the sheer exhaustion of running behind a child and making sure he doesn’t hurt himself during mid-life, there is a sense of wonder in how they begin to realise things, what they notice, how they explore, what they repeat, what they find funny, what they want to do when. They may have all the things in the world, but all they want is you by their side when they explore it. 

It is in the process of bringing up V that I’ve been exploring the how of it. I was reading an article on the Reggio Emilia philosophy, and what stood out for me what the fact that kids need to be left to explore, experience and learn things for themselves.

Bells, which typically indicate the end of a learning session, teach children that nothing needs to be completed, and everything can be interrupted and done piecemeal. There’s no exploration.

One thing I remember my dad telling me was the feedback he got on me as a child was my ability to focus. A complaint I used to hear from relatives when I was a child was that I would immerse myself in reading. In school, as a part of arts and crafts, I chose stone sculpting, which was a solitary activity requiring focus.

I realise now that much of what I’ve done as a grown-up has been built around the idea of exploration through immersion. Writing for a living has allowed me the freedom to go down rabbit holes.

The Reggio Emilia philosophy is built around the idea that there are sufficient things for children to do and explore, but what piques their curiosity and what they end up doing has to be left to them to determine. It teaches them the ability to make decisions for themselves, and there’s an idea that they need to be protected from a strictly regimented life driven by the bells that ring between study periods in school, and allowed to explore.

I’ve been thinking about how this might apply to me. For many days, my life is living one calendar block to another. I plan my week on the weekend, and map out a few days with time-blocks and tasks. I leave enough room for spillovers, have the freedom to move things around, including to the next day, but I get a lot done in this period. One thing that happens, though, is that while I’m doing something, I’m always aware of the next time block, which invariably pushes me to complete something and move on. I have friends who live by the calendar, and whose lives are often determined by who they’re meeting. 

There’s almost no room for immersion and exploration on these things. Just a focus on getting things done. A few weeks ago I decided to create a daily list of creative things that I could do as a break. It  could be about writing something, or building something. I realise that the act of creation, of building something, is what brings me great joy.

Since then, I’ve written articles, AI prompts, set up websites (including this one), and written blog posts. If I look back, the act of creation has been the most fulfilling part of my day in the recent weeks.

I’m now beginning to wonder what an unscheduled life would look like: how can I immerse myself in something without an end in sight, and whether that would be more meaningful for me than a meeting where I want something from them or they want something from me. How many of our interactions these are are meaningful, and how many are about the exploration of a connection with someone? I’m not surprised that people don’t make new friends as they age: we’re just to busy or focused to be open to exploration. When do we allow ourselves to meander aimlessly?

My friend Rafat, after he sold his business (paidcontent.org), travelled the world, going to places that I had never heard of. He did something I had never contemplated before he told me about it: landed up somewhere without a plan. He looked around, explored, spoke with people once he was there and tried things out. I’ve done that on occasion now, most recently in Riga (Latvia), where I gave myself a couple of days to do nothing after a conference. I wonder if I can do that with my day, my week or my year now.

That would be a luxury, to begin each day anew with nothing to do and everything to explore. Right now that’s a distant dream, and I wonder if this is just a phase for me to get over. 

The Reggio Emilia approach relies on giving the child the choice regarding what they want to do, observe and explore, but focuses extensively on controlling the environment they’re in, especially from the perspective of safety. 

Perhaps one approach here might be to make a long list of things for myself to do, and on a day where there isn’t any meeting or any deadline, give myself the freedom to explore one of these things, something different or nothing at all.

To go down rabbit holes, if only for a day. 

Looking forward to 2025

I have 2 resolutions for 2025:

  1. Write weekly
  2. Get healthy

I’ve had no resolutions for the last few years. Only targets. I’ve done well with some of the targets: primarily the financial ones, and they’ve brought in a weekly discipline that has served me well. Doing personal reviews every week has helped me stay on top of things. My health goals have not been met for a few years: it is difficult and even when I’m progressing well, I end up caving. This quarter begins with a renewed focus, and I have set myself a high target that I probably won’t meet, but I work better with tough targets rather than easy ones.

The write weekly target is important as well. I’ve found that writing helps me focus, think and ideate. While I maintain notes well, I’m reading (social media, unfortunately) much more than writing. A writing discipline is also important: it enables thinking that stacks up, and builds upon itself. Writing is also my preferred art form, and the soapstones I have kept remain unchiseled.

2024 was a mixed year for me. The positives:

  1. Spending time with the boy, especially reading, and seeing him learn to walk, talk develop motor skills, and his ever expanding vocabulary. I can’t wait to teach him concepts, explore art, and how to think about things.
  2. Travel: New countries visited include Brazil and Austria. I really enjoyed a short break at Paraty, and spending time with my friend Thomas in Rio and Vienna. The return to Riga (Latvia) was unexpected: I had never thought I’d go there twice in a lifetime, and I thoroughly enjoyed the trip. The end of the year in Singapore was wonderful, spending with my Asia21 friends, and meeting old friends again. I’ll be back in Singapore in 2025, for sure.
  3. Speaking: my highlight was speaking on India’s ban on Tiktok at NATO Stratcom’s Social Media conference in Riga. Speaking on Net Neutrality at the conference in Brasilia and on Data protection and Digital Sovereignty in Rio were fun. I couldn’t make it to Saudi Arabia, but speaking at the IGF on journalism and big tech, especially on AI and its impact on Media was a lot of fun. Moderating at discussion on AI at the Asia21 conference in Singapore was great and I got several pings regarding how much people appreciated my moderation.
  4. In terms of papers, I wrote one on the impact on AI on Media.
  5. Work began regarding the launch of some AI projects that still in stealth mode. We’re moving slowly with this but I think we should see a launch in 2025. It feels good to start something new.
  6. I taught two workshops to journalists on how to use AI for work. This was very well received and I realise now how much I enjoy teaching. Not a priority for 2025, but who knows 🙂

The plan for 2025:

  1. Get healthy. It’s about time
  2. Write more: more editorials, more columns, more blog posts, more tweets and linkedin posts
  3. Reimagine Medianama’s editorial, and roll it out. Start over, and prepare for the impact of AI.
  4. Build out the AI business and learn something new.
  5. Create a finance course for my nieces, helping them understand money and economics.
  6. Travel more. Jump into the ocean at least once this year. Get healthier because I want to do scuba diving next year.
  7. Take the boy to the zoo, to museums and for music. Not sure if he’ll be able to play cricket in Y2/3, but football should be easier.

Expect Imperfection

Yesterday, I built a custom AI chatbot to help me pack for travel, starting with making plans for an upcoming long trip to South America.

I’ve typically used spreadsheets for this, with variations based on type of travel (work, holiday), number of formal occasions, type of location (beach, mountains) among other parameters. The output is imperfect, and it does make mistakes with simple calculations, but then my spreadsheets are imperfect too: they’re all something to use as a starting point.

This is true of all AI chatbots: if you expect perfection, you will be disappointed. But if you expect a base to build on, you’ll save a lot of time.

Basic rule with AI and automation: build for small repeatable use cases and expect imperfection.

The story behind the design

When we organised our first conference #NAMA — and that was the only one we did — it was almost in defiance. For a tiny little team like ours (4 or 5 people then), the idea of running editorial and then organising a large conference, was scary. We knew all potential speakers and all potential speakers knew us. We had never figured out costs for a large conference, never negotiated with a hotel. We had done small events where we had left it to the sponsors to pay the venue directly, and we took a management fee. So it was all new. It was all scary.

How we made that happen is a story for another day, and I’ll tell it sometime, but in my mind it wouldn’t have happened if Vijay Shekhar Sharma hadn’t gone out of his way to come and see me in CP, and help me clear my head and literally made a plan and an agenda on the fly. Vijay is a yaaro ka yaar, as they say, and he came through for me that day.

In the middle of all of this chaos, I wanted to define an identity for MediaNama’s conference: for it to be an annual conference on the lines of the D Conference (which, for me, was a benchmark), and for it to be something that people remembered us for. The name that I had been thinking about for years was “Converge”. It represented the fact that we wanted to be a conference were people come together, and convergence is a telecom+internet phrase. I had an intern design a futuristic logo as well, in 2009. But somehow, it didn’t quite fit for me. There were several conferences globally called converge or convergence, and then there is an Indian conference called “Convergence India”. Finally we zoomed in on NAMA. People referred to MediaNama has Nama in conversations, and the first person I remember calling it Nama in a conversation with me was Sameer Pitalwalla, another old friend in the space. But what made this different. I also thought that we needed a visual symbol, and looked to incorporate the hashtag. At that time, MediaNama’s primary focus was tech, and not tech policy, so we thought we could extend the brand. So the conference was called #NAMA, and if we ever did something on the video industry, that would be VIDEO#NAMA, or on music, would be MUSIC#NAMA. I had some of these domain names, so building independent brands wouldn’t be bad idea. We never did this.

But back to the design, I wanted a design that would stand out. My first plan was a repeated hashtag. So I pinged a designer friend, paid an initial amount, and filled out a long brief within a day about what we wanted. Then she went AWOL. After a few days I got awful designs that in no way reflected how I thought about it. By the time I got through with this designer, we had lost 10-12 days, had 20 days to go for the conference, and with a small team, with mostly me trying to figure out speakers, sponsors, designs, speaker gifts, and much more, without what I wanted as an iconic design in place, I thought it was all falling apart. That evening, after I politely told the designer that we would go elsewhere and she can keep the deposit, I called up another designer friend: Himanshu Khanna of Sparklin.

30 min after my call with Himanshu, I got a lovely, calming email from Deepikah, who led design there then, telling me that she’s got it covered. A few days later, we met at a hotel to discuss it, and she already had 3 options of design that I liked. The backdrop was a bright yellow, with repeated hashes of white, offwhite and yellow. Another had a yellow background with strange pipes of sorts all across the design. The third had a yellow background with all sorts of internet centric emoticons combined.

I looked at all three, and I liked what they brought to vibe of the design. Much to Deepikah’s shock, I asked her to combine the three. I wanted chaos and unpredictability in the design. I didn’t want the basic boiler plate designs. Like an intricate piece of art, I wanted that people to spot something new every time they looked at it, or every part of it that they looked at. Something, that even if people saw without the logo, they’d know its ours.

It’s something that I will always be thankful to Himanshu and Sparklin for: they didn’t just save us at a time when we were left in the lurch, they also gave us a design that I personally love. To me it’s art.

We’ve done several MediaNama events since, and the design, at least offline, has remained the same. It’s been difficult to make this design work over a period of time, for venues of different sizes, because of the lack of repeatability.

So we’re simplifying it now…there’s enough chaos in our lives already, isn’t it? 🙂 I just wanted to leave this here, as a matter of record. I still love this design.

The problem with what’s new?

A question we ask in the editorial team is: is this news? Within that question lies another one: is this new? When a news organisation reports, the focus is often on what’s the latest. It’s what defines what news channels report, what makes the front page of a newspaper, and the home page of a news website.

This is perhaps because people attach a great premium on what is news. Reuters was built around the idea of reporting the news faster than anyone else. The Bloomberg terminal does this too. Short, sharp. New. The short news business does this too.

Two things: Firstly, there’s a significant premium that people attach to what is new. They have a need to know something before anyone else. It moves markets. There’s money there. It’s a favor someone can trade: you tell someone something important that they didn’t know about, and there’s perceived value in the fact that you provided them with some new information.

The problem here is that the value of many things that are new is limited: what works is the dopamine effect it causes, and people then have an addiction to staying on top of everything. The problem for publications is that what is new brings commodified audiences, and the news gets commodified very quickly as well. The new-ness has a transient lifecycle, a very low shelf life. So because people keep chasing what’s new, publications have to keep chasing it too.

Not enough people value what’s deep.

The index is not the market

Over dinner yesterday, an uncle of mine posed an interesting question: if the Sensex, which is an Indian index covering 30 stocks, when up from around 57k to 58k last year, why is it that most investment stock market related mechanisms/instruments, whether ETFs, Index funds, Portfolio Management Systems were down?

The index is not the market: a collection of 30 stocks, (or 50, if you take the NIFTY), can’t account for the price performance of the entire market. It remains representative of only the stocks in question. Apart from this, most investment instruments would have a mix of index and non-index stocks, they might also buy and sell stocks through the year (they don’t just sit and wait), and many will not have the same shares in the same proportion as their weightage in the index.

I was thinking that this statement, of the index not being the market, could apply to other areas as well: for example, the consumer price index or the wholesale price index are also not necessarily an accurate reflection of market prices of products. Naukri’s JobSpeak index is an indication of job posted on Naukri.com, and not the state of the job market in India. These are mere indicators: they’re useful, but they’re not the market.

There is no *real* Evernote alternative

Update: It took a while, but I realised eventually that I was wrong about Obsidian: it does have a hierarchical structure that allows you to store your notes in nested folders. Over this weekend, I’ve managed to switch from Evernote and NotesNook to Obsidian. Firstly, I’m glad to be free of the complications of NotesNook, but more importantly, I’m glad that there is a simple enough tool that gets the basics of moving things around right, even though it lacks a proper quick capture tool, and I still haven’t been able to figure out storing PDFs. I’m also not sure if I’ve done the importation right. Setting up syncing across devices using syncthing was fun 🙂 There appear to be some functionalities missing, but it looks like this was what I was looking for, and then some more.

What’s also cool about Obsidian is the plugins. There are a couple of AI plugins to look into, that add an AI Assistant that uses your Obsidian notes as base. I’m planning to try out bi-directional linking soon, and it should be fun going through YouTube videos on Obsidian.

The “why” I’m obsessing over note-taking is important. In my work, structured notes are a superpower. Connected notes even more so. I was all over the place with notes before Allwin introduced me to them, saying specifically it’s something he thought I’d benefit from. He was right.

The “Why” of note-taking: Structured note-taking enables me to write better, find information, prepare talks, note down some developments for reference. I’ve become so much more efficient at thinking about things and creating outputs because of my note taking. As an example, if I’m called on TV once the data protection bill comes out, I have comments I’ve made on data protection over the past 4 versions, all in Evernote. I’ve got some 70 odd notes for things I’ve said on TV, so basically I can talk about any issue at any time, because it’s easy for me to build on my previous work, by either referencing it for new points, or pointing out how things have changed. The act of going through these notes trigger new ideas or lines of thought. At times, they’re a reflection of what I was prioritising then in what I was going to say. It’s also a dumping ground for useful things: I must have saved over 200 tweets to go through on AI.

July 22: I’ve been experimenting with Evernote alternatives, essentially looking to exit Evernote once and for all. I’ve tried Notion, AnyType, SimpleNote, NotesNook, Obsidian and so many more.

I take notes like a maniac: both written and digital, having been urged to do so repeatedly by both Rajesh Jain and Sanjeev Bikhchandani.

I’m using a modified version of Tiago Forte’s PARA method (I’ve merged Areas and Resources, under Resources, and I’m using “Action” instead…kinda like a someday list of things to do: articles to write, videos to watch, articles to read etc. In addition, I have an “inactive” notebook for projects that are on hold for the time being. This method changed the way I process and store information, and has made me much more effective in my work. When I quick-capture something I move them into inbox, and then every couple of days (though sometimes, it’s a weekly exercise), I move notes from inbox into a notebook…often, into a project note. Once a project is completed, I simply move the entire notebook from Projects to Archives, or if incomplete, into inactive.

Here’s what I need:

  • Quick capture into a basic notebook
  • Cross platform availability, whether Windows, Mac, iOS, Android. I use all of these.
  • Hierarchical structure: Evernote’s hierarchical structure of Stacks > Notebooks > Notes is ideal.

Notion and Anytype are far too complex for simple hierarchical note-taking, Simplenote and Google Keep don’t have hierarchies, Obsidian seems linear too, although notes are interconnected. I don’t like OneNote: it’s too clunky.

Notesnook is the closest I’ve seen to Evernote. Its hierarchy appears to be Notebooks > Topics > Notes, although you can add notes in a notebook without attributing a topic to it. It’s not as intuitive to operate:

  • Moving notes and projects(as topics), in particular, is messed up:
    • There’s no drag-and-drop functionality to move notes around.
    • The hierarchy isn’t visible in the sidebar, and it takes too many clicks to move anything anywhere. Just slows down everything.
  • If you’re doing a quick capture into an inbox notebook, you can’t move it around: Notes here can belong to multiple notebooks, so with each instance of moving a note, you have to add it to a topic in a notebook, and then remove it from another notebook. Double the work for something that should have been drag and drop.

I’ve spent the last half and hour trying to process a weeks worth of notes, in terms of moving it to the correct notebook on NotesNook, and I’m fed up. On an average, I take around 5-10 notes a day, and this is just too painful.

While I still haven’t found something that works, I know that NotesNook is my (painful to use) replacement for the time being. I’m not averse to paying for something here: at present I’m paying for both Evernote and NotesNook.

Evernote has gone downhill over the past few months: it isn’t syncing as well. I’ve lost notes that I’ve typed on a flight, including notes that I culled out notes from a 100 page document, as soon as I’ve come online. Evernote customer service wasn’t very helpful there. In addition to this, Evernote is increasing prices: I really don’t want to pay more for a service going downhill.

I was keen on figuring out AnyType, but their onboarding is non-existent. I still can’t figure out the distinction between Sets and Collections in AnyType, and unfortunately, for both AnyType and NotesNook, there are no tutorials, posts or YouTube videos explaining how to set up the PARA method. AnyType doesn’t even have quick capture.

Meanwhile, earlier this week I decided to stop adding new notes to Evernote: I’ve replaced the quick capture button for Evernote with that for NotesNook on my phones, and removed Evernote from my phone homepage. Now I need somewhere to transfer all of those backed up ENX files with around 5000 notes to shift.

In case anyone has suggestions or a solutions, do let me know. My email address is [my twitter handle] AT gmail DOT com.

Because we’re collateral damage

I was up till late last night trying to make a digital payment for MediaNama, for a critical piece of software for our functioning. The payment was declined twice, despite entering all details, and receiving an SMS for an OTP which I provided.

I called up HDFC Bank customer-care, and after jumping through several hoops — they’ve added an absolutely useless voice to text layer that doesn’t work — when it finally directed the call to a customer care executive, it kept me on hold for an extended period of time before disconnecting the call.

In the meantime, there was nothing from the bank about why the transaction was decline: no email, no message.

Switch to today morning: the transaction gets automatically declined without even soliciting an OTP, and I get a message on email indicating that the merchant doesn’t comply with RBI guidelines for card payments. This is, of course, not new. We’re unable to also use Gravity Forms at MediaNama because they’ve declined to accept Indian cards because of the RBI guidelines on tokenisation.

Surprisingly, the same transaction that was declined by HDFC Bank went through with another bank. Why? Whose responsibility is it to ensure uniformity in application of guidelines? Did the RBI take into consideration issues that Indian companies might face when trying to sign up for global software? Where was their public consultation process?

This is what happens with top-down policymaking, with myopic regulators with limited understanding of how global markets and operations function, ending up stifling and inconveniencing those for whom the impact is the greatest. For all the talk about Digital India and Startup India, we’re still only regulating keeping global Big Tech in mind.

If you think this RBI issue is bad, think of the impact that data localisation will have, where even free-to-use software will stop functioning. What doesn’t help, of course, is a government with China envy, and pliant billionare founders trying to suck up to the powers that be. One spoke at India Internet Day a few years ago, making an emotional case — because a logical case is hard to make — for data localisation. Another wrote a blog post.

Meanwhile, others suffer. We’re just collateral damage.

Bring on the unpredictable

The world is rapidly getting inundated with automated content: We’re seeing faceless YouTube videos grow, TV channels are deploying AI anchors. Some services that can ingest hours of someones audio, in order to generate new speech with their voice and intonation. Others allow you to get your entire body mapped to create a lifelike digital replica. The world of deepfakes is here.

The problem here is predictability and lack of personality. What often makes us interested in other humans is not the predictable part of their behavior, but what surprises us about them: what will they say, ask, or do. Some amount of predictability is important for comfort, but really what hooks us is the unpredictable.

The voices may no longer be robotic, the facial movements might now be in sync with the audio, but I’d like to believe that there are some things in a human being that are human, and inspire intrigue and trust at the same time.

So in a world of people playing it safe with AI generated content, with mass generation of how to videos made from scraping Reddit and Wikipedia, I think there’s going to be comfort in personalities, because they are both predictable and unpredictable, in predictable and unpredictable ways.

There is, of course, talk of Artificial General Intelligence that can replicate this human behavior. I’d like to believe that it can’t, for example, replace me. I suppose you’d like to believe that too.