Imagine 10,000 years in the future. Two archaeologists are digging a site, and they find the remains of human bones. They take those remains to the lab, perform tests on them, and try to reconstruct the habits and lifestyle of that human. Say those bones belong to me. They are trying to find out my story, how I lived, what I ate, where I traveled, etc. Once they find all the info they need, they toss it into a museum where they store all other such ancient human remains they find. I was essentially one data point to them in trying to understand how humanity evolved over time. Or I can also call myself a “datum”, the singular form of data, literally one piece of information to solve a bigger puzzle. Honestly, I don’t need 10,000 years to become a datum. I am already a part of several datasets people use these days to study many things. So for that objective learner, I am already a datum. Now let me get to how I got the dumb part of it. I have had an interesting and eventful life so far...
I grew up in a middle-class household where we had enough to get by with daily necessities. So I never experienced sleeping on an empty stomach, and I was a bratty kid. I was always devising schemes to skip school. I had zero interest in anything remotely related to studying. My father was a wise man. He saw through all this and decided to set me straight after I grew up a little. One of the interesting things he did was to make sure I experienced both how poor and rich people eat. Some days, my mother would try to make me eat some vegetable, and I would furiously protest because it didn’t taste good. Then my father would tell me stories from his own childhood - usually something like they didn’t have the means to eat that vegetable regularly back then, and it was considered a delicacy by them. And here I was, being a little brat, refusing to eat it. That sometimes set me straight and I ate it, and after a while I got immune to it and didn’t stop protesting. He also sometimes took me a...