Weekly Notes 10/2025
Appa was down with a fever and an upset stomach for a couple of days. He recovered pretty fast. Now that Uma can make sentences of two or three words from different languages, their conversation is fun to hear. She probably has a combined vocabulary of 100 words in Malayalam, Kannada, and English. She combines words from all three without hesitation and with ease.
- At work, it was a busy week. We are traveling to a different timezone next week, so I had to clear as many tasks as possible—so many more reviews, merges, deployments, meetings to remove blockers or dependencies, etc. While I'm usually available when traveling, my teams are reliable, and they rarely contact me on vacation, which makes me feel more responsible.
- I talked to a bunch of folks about open data and its availability in India. It's good to be back talking about Open Data.
- Subscribed to Anil Radhakrishna, thanks to Anand's post. I subscribed to another bunch, thanks to Sai's post. I am yet to update the blogring with these discoveries. I will this weekend.
- I don't understand why we idealize kings and queens in the 21st century. They were self-appointed rulers who did whatever it took to stay in power—killing siblings, subjects, soldiers, and rivals. It was just business as usual. We are born and living in democracies and republics. We should strengthen these systems instead of fighting over monarchs and dividing society. Studying history is essential, but its lessons should be used to build the present society, not destroy it.
- I've been reading Mike Masnick and TechDirt for over two decades. I love their coverage of tech, copyright, licenses, and the public domain. In a recent post, he noted that every tech discussion now is about democracy. I agree, but for us in India, this has been the case for over a decade. You could see the shift as soon as Aadhaar was forced upon us.
- From a TED Talk by Simone: Certainly, we are all more than just workers. We're parents and friends and citizens and artists and travelers and neighbors. Much like an investor benefits from diversifying the sources of stocks in their portfolio, we, too, benefit from diversifying the sources of meaning and identity in our lives. But how do you actually go about doing so? I agree with Simone; we are a sum of many roles we play in this life.
