The Dumb Datum

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Running with Questions

Last month I ran back-to-back 50 mile weeks. So, it naturally gave me this idea of how would it feel if I run three continuous 50 mile weeks. I am happy to report that I now know how it feels. With my morning run today, I had completed running 161 miles in the last three weeks. The first week felt the most difficult. I was exhausted and also was dealing with a mild sickness. The same week, I also ended up burning the popcorn in my microwave, which I thought was a good figurative representation of the burnout I was feeling. The second week started no different, I was very exhausted initially. But at this point, I also actively started thinking about the problem of burnout – how do I solve it using the tools I have under my control? It helped that I have been reading multiple books over past month, spread across genres like autobiographies, philosophy, and neuroscience. By the end of the second week, it all finally clicked to me. Running usually poses three types of questions...

Singing dreadful songs about summer

Cool weather is here in Dallas. Only difference it makes to me is that now I have to keep my shirt on while running, and sometimes I will even have to layer up. But one other fact I observed is that when it isn’t freezing cold, there are usually many couples out on the trail. Some are old couples who clearly have been with each other for a long time. Some are young couples who are experiencing the taste of a budding romance. Sometimes they are engaged in deep conversations, which I understand based on the look of serious concentration on their faces, but sometimes their conversations are just silly and playful. There are also couples who walk in a pin drop silence, maybe because they have found comfort even in a shared silence and stillness. Only commonality between all these different couples is that they walk slowly, holding each other’s hands, and that’s how I decide that they are a couple. On the same trails where these couples are walking, I am usually running by myself, immer...

The Backup

I realized it has been 8 years since I started working in tech. 18 th May 2018 was my first day as an associate software engineer at Accenture. I remember meeting people with 8 years of work experience in my first week there and thinking, “man, they are really old.” I regret it now. My first manager, who was definitely old, took a look at me and foretold “this is the boy who is going to be the backup.” Backup is one of those ubiquitously used IT industry terms, because people ran out of words in their word bag to describe someone who is secondary to a main guy working on a project. They could have called me a rookie, but they don’t want to, because rookie makes me sound cool and they know I am not cool. Over time I gained the trust of both the manager and the main guy, and I was later assigned as a backup to three other main guys. I was even once the backup for a backup. By the time I was about to become the main guy myself, a global pandemic punched me in the face and knocked m...

Irresponsibility

I think about this one story I read about Feynman a lot, especially during the times when I am going through burn out in my personal and professional life. I am unfortunately not blessed with a good memory, so I am fairly certain I get many facts wrong in it, but I can recall its essence very accurately. After Feynman was done working on atomic bomb during the war, he was offered a hot shot professor job in some big school, Cornell, I think. And he kept getting better offers from all other places because everyone wanted a piece of him. But he was also depressed and burnt out. He worked in a very intense environment in Los Alamos for atomic bomb, and around the same period, love of his life and his first wife, Arlene died due to sickness. So later when he started working in Cornell, he was barely scraping by at work, and he spent time reading Arabian nights (early version of doom scrolling). He felt guilty and he felt like a fraud, because all were saying wonderful things about him,...

Miles 1377 - 1387

1. It has been so dark lately when I get out of my home early in the morning to run. Usually, people aren’t out on the streets yet, so my first sign of contact with life in that new day is a cat which lives inside a ditch near my home. I named it Garfield because it is a yellowish and a funny looking cat. Whenever I try to go near it, it gets antsy and hides inside the ditch. Today I thought I saw Garfield and tried to approach it, but I found a raccoon instead, yikes. I wonder if Garfield's doing alright. 2. One mile into my run, I enter a nice street with expensive houses. I sometimes see people walking their dogs there, but no one ever bothers to reply to my good morning. But there’s this one old lady who I see walking with a cane almost on my every run, she recognizes me now and we started waving to each other. This is how you make friends while running solo. 3. I ran a 22-minute 5k today. It is cr...

Religion and Spirituality

Growing up in a secular India, I was fortunate enough to have been exposed to different gods. When I was a child, my family lived near a Hindu temple which served delicious food on Thursdays, so I never missed an opportunity to tag along with my friends when they visited the temple. God there had a bronze statue. I used to diligently stand in front of the statue with folded hands, and put my wish list in front of the God – “please help me convince my dad to buy a new cycle”, “please help me get good marks in the next exam” etc. I genuinely believed God somehow had a communication channel open with that bronze statue. Then I went home and saw my mom praying to her god, but there were no folded hands with a standing posture. She instead performed a sequence of postures that ranged from standing, kneeling, falling to ground etc. And God my family believed had no bronze statue, in fact no shape at all. There used to be a Muslim tailor near my home who always wore a taqiyah (Islamic sku...

A better world

Today I learned that October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. This is a deeply personal topic to me, and I ended up writing a long essay about it. I've decided to keep most of it private, but there's one paragraph I want to share: "We all have our personal demons inside our heads, but they never justify physically or psychologically abusing another human being. Each of us is carrying a huge knapsack filled with the burden of responsibilities and emotions, and struggling to haul it all up this big mountain we call life. So, the least we can do is be kind to each other. When our time on this planet inevitably comes to an end, I hope we leave a better world filled with more stories and fewer scars."