diff --git a/content/posts/Reading/empire-of-pain.md b/content/posts/Reading/empire-of-pain.md index ad74fb2..75ddefa 100644 --- a/content/posts/Reading/empire-of-pain.md +++ b/content/posts/Reading/empire-of-pain.md @@ -1,5 +1,5 @@ --- -title: "Empire of Pain" +title: "Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty" date: 2023-06-21T08:49:32+05:30 summary: "If you want to understand how the opioid crisis began, read this. Recommended." categories: ["Book Notes"] diff --git a/public/archive/index.html b/public/archive/index.html index 347c4ba..1335f4e 100644 --- a/public/archive/index.html +++ b/public/archive/index.html @@ -195,10 +195,10 @@

June  1

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Empire of Pain +

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

🗓 June 21, 2023     1 min     🔖  non-fiction ·  audiobook ·  public-health
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diff --git a/public/categories/book-notes/index.html b/public/categories/book-notes/index.html index cea18ab..0efbf24 100644 --- a/public/categories/book-notes/index.html +++ b/public/categories/book-notes/index.html @@ -151,14 +151,14 @@
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Empire of Pain +

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

If you want to understand how the opioid crisis began, read this. Recommended.

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diff --git a/public/categories/book-notes/index.xml b/public/categories/book-notes/index.xml index 28f4a8f..416eff4 100644 --- a/public/categories/book-notes/index.xml +++ b/public/categories/book-notes/index.xml @@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ en-us Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:49:32 +0530 - Empire of Pain + Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/empire-of-pain/ Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:49:32 +0530 diff --git a/public/index.html b/public/index.html index ecbc78e..d6d7dc6 100644 --- a/public/index.html +++ b/public/index.html @@ -205,14 +205,14 @@
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Empire of Pain +

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

If you want to understand how the opioid crisis began, read this. Recommended.

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diff --git a/public/index.json b/public/index.json index f817ca1..4f8d426 100644 --- a/public/index.json +++ b/public/index.json @@ -1 +1 @@ -[{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nI remember first knowing about the Sackler family when Jon Oliver did a segment on them, and I remember feeling infuriated. Little did I know about the empire that they had created, riding on the wave of people\u0026rsquo;s addictions, creating and fueling the opioid crisis and absolving themselves of all the blame while at the same time, putting up their names on all the Ivy league buildings.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s sickening to learn how the rich always get a preferential treatment by law and society.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/empire-of-pain/","summary":"If you want to understand how the opioid crisis began, read this. Recommended.","title":"Empire of Pain"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nThis book falls into the category of books that I like to call \u0026ldquo;Fast-food books\u0026rdquo;. They won\u0026rsquo;t necessarily make you healthier or your mind sounder, but it\u0026rsquo;ll feel really good while you\u0026rsquo;re eating them. There\u0026rsquo;s only so many anecdotes you can digest. The most common criticism that people have with these kind of books are that they could\u0026rsquo;ve been summarized in a much shorter format - probably a blog post or two. The same applies here - only the irony is that it is BECAUSE of those blog posts and the reaction it generated that prompted the author to write a whole book about it.\nProbably should have let the blogs say it all.\nWell, now that my rant is over, I\u0026rsquo;d like to list some of the positive things that I got out of this book. While tiring at times, reading through the different stories and the paths ordinary people take to become successful made me appreciate the importance of THINKING about your career. For people in my field (software developers), it can be a daunting task to get ourselves out of the autopilot and start questioning things - which includes the choices that we\u0026rsquo;ve made for our own careers. But doing exactly that is an important and necessary step towards achieving a fulfilling career.\nGive this one a read if you haven\u0026rsquo;t obsessively read all those countless Quora and Medium posts. Otherwise, skip it.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/so-good-newport/","summary":"A series of blog posts that unfortunately became a book. Not recommended.","title":"So Good They Can't Ignore You - Cal Newport"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nNothing extra-ordinary in terms of content, but special when you think of the book as a compilation of useful frameworks to think about time.\nAlas, I stumbled upon Four Thousand Weeks at such a point in my life where I\u0026rsquo;ve already been a productivity addict for so long that it\u0026rsquo;s impossible for me to make a fresh start. The central theme of the book - that you won\u0026rsquo;t ever get to do all the things you\u0026rsquo;ve set out to do so you should consciously choose and be happy about your choice - is such an aphoristic statement that no matter how you spin it, it always feels bland.\nHaving said that, the self-help ocean that this book is a part of, is filled with heaps of garbage books, so stumbling upon this one is like finding a needle in a haystack. Few ways of thinking about time and choices that I found interesting:\nDon\u0026rsquo;t think of these things as life hacks - don\u0026rsquo;t treat life as a faulty contraption in need of modification.\nA spin on FOMO (Fear of Missing Out): missing out is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place, every decision to use a portion of a time on anything represents saying no to every other thing that you could\u0026rsquo;ve done but you didn\u0026rsquo;t.\nThe anti-skill of staying with the anxiety of never having time to do everything.\nPicking one item from the menu represents an affirmation rather than a defeat. The fact that you could\u0026rsquo;ve chosen a different and perhaps equally valuable way to spend this afternoon bestows meaning on the choice you did make.\nA hobbyist is a subversive: they insist that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/four-thousand-weeks/","summary":"A book about time and our relationship with it. Recommended.","title":"Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman"},{"content":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Check it out on Letterboxd\nCan there be a more difficult task than being asked to select a single memory from your life that you want to carry forever? As humans, we contain multitudes and we want to resist any attempt to put us into a box. But what happens if you\u0026rsquo;re asked to choose something which you\u0026rsquo;ll cherish for the rest of your life - would you let go of all the times when you were sad, angry, bitter, hypocrite and a bad human being? Would you like to remember your life as having lived a happy memory or would rather prefer a kaleidoscope?\nThere are no right answers to these questions.\nAs I read somewhere few hours ago:\n\u0026ldquo;Film editing performs on the material of a film, the operation that death performs on life - that is, giving a sequence of uncertain and unstable events a coherent form and meaning\u0026rdquo;.\nWatching the film unfold was like leafing through the pages of my own life. In fact, I think the characters are universal - everyone can find at least one person (or their memory) here that they\u0026rsquo;ll relate to. The most intriguing case being a young man who has left the world before his cynicism could turn into quiet acceptance. After refusing to select one memory from his past, he says in one of the conversations:\n\u0026hellip; But those are just memories. And ultimately, we end up turning memories into our own images. Of course, it really happened so it feels very real, but, Say I construct the future, as though I\u0026rsquo;m making a film about it. As I imagine all kinds of situations, I think what I create, would feel a lot more real than some memory. That\u0026rsquo;s a lot more meaningful than looking back at the past\u0026quot;.\nRather than giving you answers, Kore-eda takes you on a journey of discovery with questions. After all, how often do you think about death, memory, legacy and afterlife?\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema/after-life/","summary":"An interesting take on life, seen through the lens of afterlife. Highly recommended!","title":"After Life (1998) by Hirokazu Kore-eda"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nOne of the principal joys of reading is to discover the magic hidden in the seemingly banal things in life. I would\u0026rsquo;ve never cared to think twice about the intricacies of designing buildings and urban spaces, had it not been for this book. This serves as a gentle introduction to the fascinating study of how subtle differences in design of public spaces affect interactions on a much more broader scale.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/life-between-buildings/","summary":"A gentle introduction to the study of buildings and the way they enable societal interactions.","title":"Life Between Buildings by Jan Gehl"},{"content":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Check it out on Letterboxd\nWe are all empty houses, waiting for someone to open the lock and set us free.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s something romantic about living on extremes. This applies as much to my film taste as it does to my day-to-day life. Nowhere is this more evident than in a crucial element of cinema - dialogues. On the one hand, you have Celine and Jesse showing us the entire world through their words, while on the other you have Sun and Tae doing the same thing without speaking a word. Both are equally satisfying for the soul.\nA lovely introduction to the cinema of Kim Ki-Duk.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema/3-iron/","summary":"A film where everything is conveyed through glances.","title":"3 Iron (2004) by Kim Ki-duk"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nEthics is hard.\nIf I\u0026rsquo;ve learnt something all these years, it is this universal maxim. Everybody wishes they\u0026rsquo;d make ethically sound choices in their lives, but more often than not, ethical choices are in contrast with cost and convenience. Nowhere is this more apparent than the way we consume food.\nThere are a lot of similarities between food and religion. Both are deeply personal choices which are erroneously thought of as having a clear, set winning answer. Both divide people into disjoint sets where they vehemently try to outdo one another in following \u0026ldquo;The Right Way\u0026rdquo;. And of course, both are deeply political.\nMy personal journey in food, as in religion, has been quite tumultuous. Coming from a vegetarian family, I used to feel discomfort in sitting at the same table where somebody was eating meat, used to scoff at the smell of eggs and couldn\u0026rsquo;t go near anything related to fish (this is still the case). Then somewhere along the way, I decided that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a right to reject things which I haven\u0026rsquo;t experienced myself and started indulging in this forbidden fruit. I tried everything I could get my hands on, but never reached that stage where I could appreciate the hype. Having gotten a taste of the other side, I made the decision to quit everything and slowly move back to being a vegetarian/vegan.\nThis was the point where I started to seek out reasons to convince me of my choice, and came across this book.\nI wouldn\u0026rsquo;t call this a balanced book in the sense that the authors\u0026rsquo; convictions are clear from the start, however where this shines is the way they use evidence to reach their conclusions rather than playing on guilt and shame. The basic fact remains, and this I have confirmed with many of my non-vegetarian friends as well, that we know too little about where our food comes from and our choices would be different if we were armed with this knowledge. The authors visit few American families and observe their eating habits, and then take us through some factory farms where the brutalities are quite graphic and sometimes hard to read and difficult to digest.\nHowever, one qualm that I had while reading through these chapters, was the over-importance of ethics in our everyday choices. Not everyone wants to live a Kantian life full of moments filled with questioning their every choice. Life is hard to live anyway. I was delighted though to find a section dealing with this exhaustion:\nSometimes the very success of the ethical consumer movement and the proliferation of consumer concerns it has spawned seems to threaten the entire ethical consumption project. When one ethical concern is heaped upon another and we struggle to be sure that our purchases do not contribute to slave labor, animal exploitation, land degradation, wetland pollution, rural depopulation, unfair trade practices, global warming, and the destruction of rain-forests, it may all seem so complicated that we could be tempted to forget about everything except eating what we like and can afford.\nI\u0026rsquo;m facing this situation myself when I eat eggs and drink milk in the morning - if every time I consume an animal product, I have to think about where this is coming from and whether I\u0026rsquo;ve unintentionally hurt an animal - to say that my day-to-day life would be unpleasant would be an understatement. However, we should be cautious of throwing the baby out with bathwater - the choice doesn\u0026rsquo;t have to be between over-indulgence and starvation; we just need to be a bit more conscious of what we consume. To borrow an economist\u0026rsquo;s favorite phrase: there\u0026rsquo;s always a trade-off. We just need to be aware of the ones we are making.\nAll in all, I found this to be quite an informative read, albeit a bit dry in places, but would definitely recommend.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/the-way-we-eat/","summary":"The ethical dilemma of eating. Highly recommended!","title":"The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nNow that I\u0026rsquo;ve moved away from reading fiction, I find that I face a lot of inertia to pick up something purely for pleasure. Maybe this is a nasty by-product of wanting to be as \u0026ldquo;productive\u0026rdquo; as possible. But the more I have drifted away from reading for pleasure, more mechanical the whole process has become for me. Partly to avoid this feeling, and partly because of my shame at seeing my bookshelf filled with dusty unread books, I picked up this one to assuage my feelings of guilt.\nI had not expected the journey to be this beautiful!\nSalman Rushdie doesn\u0026rsquo;t need an introduction. He has been routinely hailed amongst one of the best contemporary writers of our time. It only speaks of my ignorance that I had only heard about him because of his controversies - outcry for Satanic Verses, fatwa issued against him - and only knew that one of his novels, Midnight\u0026rsquo;s Children, had won a Booker Prize. I don\u0026rsquo;t have a fond memory of reading Booker Prize winning books, bitter from the day I read The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. But as I got sucked into the universe created by Rushdie, my initial skepticism gave way to awe and admiration.\nRushdie has a peculiar way with words, an authoritative stance where the sentences bend over backwards to dance to the master\u0026rsquo;s tunes. He weaves them in and out and creates intricate relationships between the story, storyteller and reader. You need to be acquainted with the history of India and Pakistan, or at least be familiar with the events surrounding the partition, in order to grasp fully what he has set out here to do. The book is filled with brilliant uses of metaphors and similes, creating a parallel universe of Pakistan during the tumultuous years after partition. The sentences are measured and precise, neatly packed with an intricate plot and the social commentary (with a tinge of satire) leading you towards the destination.\nIf it\u0026rsquo;s not yet clear, I unashamedly loved every part of Shame and I\u0026rsquo;m excited to dig more into Rushdie\u0026rsquo;s works!\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/shame-rushdie/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nNow that I\u0026rsquo;ve moved away from reading fiction, I find that I face a lot of inertia to pick up something purely for pleasure. Maybe this is a nasty by-product of wanting to be as \u0026ldquo;productive\u0026rdquo; as possible. But the more I have drifted away from reading for pleasure, more mechanical the whole process has become for me. Partly to avoid this feeling, and partly because of my shame at seeing my bookshelf filled with dusty unread books, I picked up this one to assuage my feelings of guilt.","title":"Shame by Salman Rushdie"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nPain is inevitable, suffering is optional.\nI have no affinity for running, even for short jogs, and much less for wanting to run long distances. Although this is not because I hate exercises - one of those rare things that I figured out early in life was my desire to remain healthy as long as possible and that of course means I need to keep myself fit - but probably my distaste for running stems from the monotonous nature of the activity. You keep pounding your legs with a short breath and no rest in sight, what is there to enjoy and look forward to?\nMy girlfriend on the other hand, loves running.\nIntrigued by her passion, I began to take a more compassionate look on the whole idea of running, shunning my former dismissive attitude. What is it that motivates people to run marathons, putting their body through excruciating pain for an uncertain reward? It cannot be as simple as just the competitive spirit. In fact, running is exactly opposite of a team sport, it\u0026rsquo;s as solitary an activity as thinking and dreaming. Can it be that the monotonicity itself is part of the charm?\nIn this book, Murakami tries to give an answer to this. Or more accurately, he dissects his own emotions and gives insights on how (long distance) running has been crucial to his writing. Both involve perseverance and intense emotional turmoil. While talking about the different ways in which artists produce creative works, he humbly says:\nWriters who are blessed with in-born talent can freely write novels no matter what they do, or don\u0026rsquo;t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up and with little or no effort, these writers can complete a work. Occasionally, you\u0026rsquo;ll find someone like that, but unfortunately that category wouldn\u0026rsquo;t include me. I haven\u0026rsquo;t spotted any springs nearby. I have to pound the rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of creativity. To write a novel, I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another new, deep hole.\nSeeing it through his eyes, it becomes clear that there are a lot of parallels between running long distances and sustaining a long writing career. He is also not shy about admitting that both of these processes involve sheer repetition of the same thing over and over again:\nI think certain types of processes don\u0026rsquo;t allow for any variation. If you have to be part of that process, all you can do is transform, or perhaps distort, yourself through that persistence repetition and make that process a part of your own personality.\nThis part-memoir, part-love-letter to running is filled with such simple yet important insights. Murakami has made a name for himself as one of the most original writers of the time and the humility with which he lays out himself in these pages is inspiring. In one of those beautiful passages, he talks about the turbulent times of adolescence and how we can cope up with the absurd reality of our imperfections:\nOnce when I was around sixteen and nobody else was home, I stripped naked, stood in front of a large mirror in our house, and checked out my body from top to bottom. As I did this, I made a mental list of all the deficiencies - or what, to me at least, appeared to be deficiencies. For instance (and these are just instances), my eyebrows were too thick, or my fingernails were shaped funny - that sort of thing. As I recall, when I got to twenty-seven items, I got sick of it and gave up. And this is what I thought: If there are this many visible parts of my body that are worse than normal people\u0026rsquo;s, then if I start considering other aspects - personality, brains, athleticism, things of this sort - the list will be endless.\nAs you get older though, through trial and error you learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded. And you start to recognize (or be resigned to the fact) that since your faults and deficiencies are well nigh infinite, you\u0026rsquo;d best figure out your good points and learn to get by with what you have.\nThis book has piqued my interest to give running a try and if I ever manage, in future, to enjoy running long distances, Murakami would certainly have a large role to play.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/running-murakami/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nPain is inevitable, suffering is optional.\nI have no affinity for running, even for short jogs, and much less for wanting to run long distances. Although this is not because I hate exercises - one of those rare things that I figured out early in life was my desire to remain healthy as long as possible and that of course means I need to keep myself fit - but probably my distaste for running stems from the monotonous nature of the activity.","title":"What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nI find India really fascinating sometimes, even though I\u0026rsquo;ve lived my whole life here. What the cultural multitudes and colorful festivals hide underneath is an ugly facade which threatens to break everything that has been built over the years. What I find most fascinating is how we\u0026rsquo;ve conditioned ourselves to ignore the blatant reality and move ahead with an oblivious calm, living in shit and aspiring for the gold.\nCaste and religion are two of the most contentious topics out there, so much ingrained in our day to day life that one cannot even comprehend that any alternatives exist. Ambedkar had tried to show an alternative way out, and it only speaks of the deep-rootedness of the system when all we remember Dr. Ambedkar for is writing the Constitution (albiet not a small feat by any stretch), while all his life he had worked to shake the society off from the chains of caste.\nThis annotated edition is the perfect way to educate oneself about the almost forgotten history of a radical man who dared to question the status quo and to demand justice, fighting not against a foreign invader but with his fellow countrymen, and who has been sidelined from every history book that is taught in the country.\nCaste is part and parcel of a Hindu life. I did not realize or experience this until I entered college. Although it remains rather concealed amongst students, it reared its ugly head whenever the matter of reservation (Affirmative action in west) was discussed. Arundhati Roy put this brilliantly in her forward:\n‘Merit’ is the weapon of choice for an Indian elite that has dominated a system by allegedly divine authorisation, and denied knowledge—of certain kinds—to the subordinated castes for thousands of years. Now that it is being challenged, there have been passionate privileged-caste protests against the policy of reservation in government jobs and student quotas in universities. The presumption is that ‘merit’ exists in an ahistorical social vacuum and that the advantages that come from privileged-caste social networking and the establishment’s entrenched hostility towards the subordinated castes are not factors that deserve consideration. In truth, ‘merit’ has become a euphemism for nepotism.\nEven now when I no longer believe in religion (Hinduism was never my religion, it was my parents\u0026rsquo; religion which I inherited, much like everyone else), I still get asked for my \u0026ldquo;last name\u0026rdquo; as a proxy for my caste. It is so seeped into our consciousness that we can\u0026rsquo;t help but feel a reverence whenever we come across someone from a \u0026ldquo;higher caste\u0026rdquo;, or to feel discomfort when we meet someone from a \u0026ldquo;lower caste\u0026rdquo;. This prejudice even trumps religious beliefs in India - even though their scriptures don\u0026rsquo;t sanction it, the elite Muslims, Sikhs and Christians all practice caste discrimination.\nThe arguments put forward by Ambedkar for breaking up the entire caste system is a brilliant demonstration of the crystal-clear thinking of a man who left such a huge legacy on the Indian subcontinent and made sure that the future of India is steered in the right direction. He is criticised for asking for a radical transformation of society when India needed to unite everyone to win its freedom. What these criticisms seem to miss is that every radical man/woman is considered radical precisely because i) they go against the cultural norms and ii) they question the deep-rooted prejudiced beliefs. There will never come an \u0026ldquo;appropriate\u0026rdquo; time for reforms, as is sadly evident with the still prevalent caste discrimination almost 90 years after Ambedkar decided to storm the gates.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a travesty that he still remains, for the large part, forgotten.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/annihilation-of-caste/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nI find India really fascinating sometimes, even though I\u0026rsquo;ve lived my whole life here. What the cultural multitudes and colorful festivals hide underneath is an ugly facade which threatens to break everything that has been built over the years. What I find most fascinating is how we\u0026rsquo;ve conditioned ourselves to ignore the blatant reality and move ahead with an oblivious calm, living in shit and aspiring for the gold.","title":"Annihilation of Caste(Annotated Edition) by Arundhati Roy"},{"content":"My fascination with the visual media brought me closer to seeing the world through a different lens. This is an ongoing effort to capture what I see and share it with the world.\nYou can browse the images below using left/right keys. All the images are hosted on flickr, I\u0026rsquo;d recommend navigating to my photostream if you want to see them in full size. 1\nYou might need to enable Javascript if you\u0026rsquo;re unable to see the images properly.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/photography/","summary":"My fascination with the visual media brought me closer to seeing the world through a different lens. This is an ongoing effort to capture what I see and share it with the world.\nYou can browse the images below using left/right keys. All the images are hosted on flickr, I\u0026rsquo;d recommend navigating to my photostream if you want to see them in full size. 1\nYou might need to enable Javascript if you\u0026rsquo;re unable to see the images properly.","title":"Photography"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nI have had a very curious relationship with religion, although now that I talk to others, it was a much more normal experience than what I led myself to believe. I followed the typical path of receiving a particular religion from my parents (born a \u0026ldquo;Hindu child\u0026rdquo;), which had a supporting role in my life up until my late-teenage/early-adolescent years.\nAs is the norm for every child brought up in religion, I used to consider myself special believing that I had a \u0026ldquo;personal relationship\u0026rdquo; with God. There are so many good things about religion, but this in particular I believe to be the best part - this soothing feeling that somebody is watching over you in times of distress. During my early college years when I lost my faith, I was most afraid of having lost this rescuer of last resort (I wrote a short poem on this which you can read here. During times of despair, I frequently wondered what would\u0026rsquo;ve happened had I not been brought up in a religious family.\nThis book combines two of the most morally contentious issues that have always puzzled me - Religion and having a child. While I don\u0026rsquo;t swing to the other extreme of subscribing to antinatalistic views, I do frequently wonder how it is that people don\u0026rsquo;t question the morality of bringing a sentient being into the world, whose life (to a major extent) will be affected by how they are brought up by their parents. Children are shaped by the identity of their parents during their formative years, and require a significant struggle during their adolescence to be able to make independent decisions of their own. This struggle is more pronounced in matters of faith - an overwhelming majority of children wind up believing in the same gods that their parents believe in.\nWhat can be done to lessen this automatic behavior so that children are more confident of picking their own battles and faith? This book presents insights from the people who tried to do exactly that.\nIt is a wonderful collection of essays from parents who are non-religious and want to bring up their child in an environment which enables them to question the authority and dogma. While just raising them secular doesn\u0026rsquo;t make them superior to everybody else - bigotry is never dependent on faith - it is the independent exploration that is crucial. The essays deal with nuances of raising children in secular homes, going pretty much against the society, and how to deal with disagreements. Unfortunately, there are few essays in the end which swings the pendulum to the other end, concerned with finding \u0026ldquo;Humanist\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Unitarian\u0026rdquo; communities which I found to be dull, however, the rest of the book remains a pleasant and insightful read.\nMy notebook is filled with highlights from the book, but there\u0026rsquo;s one paragraph in particular that I want to share, which nicely defines the central theme of these essays.\nOne thread runs throughout this book: Encourage a child to think well, then trust her to do so. Removing religion by no means guarantees kids will think independently and well. Consider religion itself: Kids growing up in a secular home are at the same risk of making uninformed decisions about religion as are those in deeply religious homes. In order to really think for themselves about religion, kids must learn as much as possible about religion as a human cultural expression while being kept free of the sickening idea that they will be rewarded in heaven or punished in hell based on what they decide—a bit of intellectual terrorism we should never inflict on our kids, nor on each other. They must also learn what has been said and thought in opposition to religious ideas. If my kids think independently and well, then end up coming to conclusions different from my own—well, I’d have to consider the possibility that I’ve gotten it all wrong, then. Either way, in order to own and be nourished by their convictions, kids must ultimately come to them independently. Part of our wonderfully complex job as parents is to facilitate that process without controlling it.\nI\u0026rsquo;d highly recommend this book to everyone.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/parenting/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nI have had a very curious relationship with religion, although now that I talk to others, it was a much more normal experience than what I led myself to believe. I followed the typical path of receiving a particular religion from my parents (born a \u0026ldquo;Hindu child\u0026rdquo;), which had a supporting role in my life up until my late-teenage/early-adolescent years.\nAs is the norm for every child brought up in religion, I used to consider myself special believing that I had a \u0026ldquo;personal relationship\u0026rdquo; with God.","title":"Parenting Beyond Belief by Dale McGowan"},{"content":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Check it out on Letterboxd\nOver the years, I have increasingly gravitated towards films where supposedly \u0026ldquo;nothing happens\u0026rdquo;. Characters talk, no attempt is made to instill a moral point into the minds of the audience, which is usually accompanied with long, patient shots of people existing in their environments. This was an excellent specimen of the same dish.\nI had watched Once Upon a Time in Anatolia from the same director previously and much like films by Wes Anderson, I could immediately tell this was Ceylan\u0026rsquo;s film right from the start, although these two directors could not be any more different. The way Ceylan deals with landscapes and how people co-exist with nature is simply breathtaking. Alas, I neither have the vocabulary nor the expertise to appreciate much less dissect a film like this, but let these screenings be my own private film school and I hope that at the end of this year (which I\u0026rsquo;ve dedicated to watching foreign language films only), I would at least be in a position where I can better appreciate these masters of their crafts.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema/winter-sleep/","summary":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Check it out on Letterboxd\nOver the years, I have increasingly gravitated towards films where supposedly \u0026ldquo;nothing happens\u0026rdquo;. Characters talk, no attempt is made to instill a moral point into the minds of the audience, which is usually accompanied with long, patient shots of people existing in their environments. This was an excellent specimen of the same dish.\nI had watched Once Upon a Time in Anatolia from the same director previously and much like films by Wes Anderson, I could immediately tell this was Ceylan\u0026rsquo;s film right from the start, although these two directors could not be any more different.","title":"Winter Sleep (2014) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan"},{"content":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Check it out on Letterboxd\nA slow, methodical display of patience and absurdity juxtaposed on the vast landscape, this film has something else going for it. When you read the synopsis or look at the posters, you expect a certain police procedural drama - the kind of which you\u0026rsquo;ve been accustomed to till date. What you get is a completely different take on the trope.\nThe cinematography seems out of this world, and the melancholic doctor only adds to the moodiness of the whole atmosphere. One little scene in the middle will remain in my heart for a long time.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema/anatolia/","summary":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Check it out on Letterboxd\nA slow, methodical display of patience and absurdity juxtaposed on the vast landscape, this film has something else going for it. When you read the synopsis or look at the posters, you expect a certain police procedural drama - the kind of which you\u0026rsquo;ve been accustomed to till date. What you get is a completely different take on the trope.","title":"Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan"},{"content":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Check it out on Letterboxd\nMotorcycling community is laden with fist-pumping-muscle-bulging-neckbeardy-speed-ninjas-Harley-fans, and it usually gets a bad rap all across the world. Gaurav Jani is none of these things. His passion and humility and curious nature reminded me why I loved biking in the first place. This is a must-watch for anyone fascinated with two wheels and the places they enable you to visit.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema/riding-solo/","summary":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Check it out on Letterboxd\nMotorcycling community is laden with fist-pumping-muscle-bulging-neckbeardy-speed-ninjas-Harley-fans, and it usually gets a bad rap all across the world. Gaurav Jani is none of these things. His passion and humility and curious nature reminded me why I loved biking in the first place. This is a must-watch for anyone fascinated with two wheels and the places they enable you to visit.","title":"Riding Solo to the Top of the World (2006) by Gaurav Jani"},{"content":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ Check it out on Letterboxd\nThere are films which you wish you had watched earlier in life, and there are others which don\u0026rsquo;t make sense until you have had your fair share of world experiences. Waking Life falls in the former category.\nThe college sophomore me would have been really excited about discussing vague notions of self and freedom and free will and morality and dreams - and don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, mid-twenties me is equally as excited about these things as my former self, if not more so - but the problem lies in the superficiality of it all. Now that I\u0026rsquo;ve had more nuanced discussions about these philosophical conundrums and have read a fair amount of academic literature, the surface level discussions here leave a lot to be desired.\nHaving said that, since I put Linklater on a pedestal, this by no means make it an average film. The visuals are cool, the animations are innovative and the ideas discussed, no matter how superficial, ultimately make you think and mull them over afterwards. That is more than what any filmmaker can aspire for and in the end, makes this a watch worthwhile for me.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema/waking-life/","summary":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ Check it out on Letterboxd\nThere are films which you wish you had watched earlier in life, and there are others which don\u0026rsquo;t make sense until you have had your fair share of world experiences. Waking Life falls in the former category.\nThe college sophomore me would have been really excited about discussing vague notions of self and freedom and free will and morality and dreams - and don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, mid-twenties me is equally as excited about these things as my former self, if not more so - but the problem lies in the superficiality of it all.","title":"Waking Life (2001) by Richard Linklater"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\n(For some reason, this review has resonated with a lot of people - it\u0026rsquo;s currently the top review for the book!)\nI don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of friends who are supporters of the ruling BJP (well at least the ones who have disclosed it publicly), and consequently whenever the conversation shifts towards the ongoings in India, more often than not, we find ourselves agreeing with each other. Although this is perfectly alright for me on most days, on few ocaasions, I find a shadow of a doubt slowly creeping up inside - what if I\u0026rsquo;m living inside a bubble, an echo-chamber where I only get exposed to the ideas which I already hold to be true, especially relevant now that everything in our lives are getting regulated by algorithms. Whenever this confirmation bias hits me, I long to read something contrarian, to engage with the other side and to try to put myself in their shoes.\nSo it was with a pleasant surprise that I found out one day, one of my friends \u0026ldquo;coming out of the closet\u0026rdquo; and to declare him(her)self to be a supporter of the ruling party. I grabbed the chance to finally be able to hear the arguments from the other side and so, I broke my cardinal rule of not engaging in political debates on social media and contacted him/her. The result was devastating. We passionately debated our views and had heated discussions throughout the day, in the end agreeing that maybe we shouldn\u0026rsquo;t have bothered to hit each other up after all. I was visibly distressed for a few days after this incident, as if a small flicker of hope had died in that encounter.\nIf two educated and privileged youths in their early twenties were unable to agree on something as basic as whether Muslims deserve to live in India, or whether India should really become a \u0026ldquo;Hindu Rashtra\u0026rdquo; or not, what hope could I have from the millions of others who didn\u0026rsquo;t have the same privileges as us?\nReading this book brought that hopelessness to the front once again. There are hard-hitting truths written here, things that we would sooner like to forget lest they cause us pain and make vivid the grim reality of our times. But like a festering wound which devours our body if unattended, ignorance is not bliss but a vicious disease which paralyzes us faster than we might think.\nMy appeal to whoever is reading this would be - reach out to others, engage in conversations, don\u0026rsquo;t dismiss the whole debate as \u0026ldquo;unnecessary politics\u0026rdquo; - your mere existence is political. Politics is not about discussing who should be the next PM, it\u0026rsquo;s about discussing ideas and how you view others who are different than yourself, to engage with empathy and to embrace the differences, and to speak out against wrongs.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll leave you with a powerful passage from the book itself, where Arundhati Roy laments about the role each of us plays in how the future shapes itself:\nAfter twenty years of writing fiction and nonfiction that tracks the rise of Hindu nationalism, after years of reading about the rise and fall of European fascism, I have begun to wonder why fascism—although it is by no means the same everywhere—is so recognizable across histories and cultures. It’s not just the fascists that are recognizable—the strong man, the ideological army, the squalid dreams of Aryan superiority, the dehumanization and ghettoization of the “internal enemy,” the massive and utterly ruthless propaganda machine, the false-flag attacks and assassinations, the fawning businessmen and film stars, the attacks on universities, the fear of intellectuals, the specter of detention camps, and the hate-fueled zombie population that chants the Eastern equivalent of “Heil! Heil! Heil!” It’s also the rest of us—the exhausted, quarreling opposition, the vain, nit-picking Left, the equivocating liberals who spent years building the road that has led to the situation we find ourselves in, and are now behaving like shocked, righteous rabbits who never imagined that rabbits were an important ingredient of the rabbit stew that was always on the menu. And, of course, the wolves who ignored the decent folks’ counsel of moderation and sloped off into the wilderness to howl unceasingly, futilely—and, if they were female, then “shrilly” and “hysterically”—at the terrifying, misshapen moon. All of us are recognizable.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/azadi/","summary":"A series of essays on the bleak reality in India. Highly recommended.","title":"Azadi by Arundhati Roy"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nReading fiction has always been a double-edged sword for me. Some of the most intimate moments I\u0026rsquo;ve spent alone is while reading fictional stories, while at the same time, feeling a pang of disappointment for myself because I wasn\u0026rsquo;t doing anything \u0026ldquo;productive.\u0026rdquo; Is this mere entertainment? Am I just escaping my real-life responsibilities and reading stories of make-believe? While I still haven\u0026rsquo;t found sincere answers to these questions, I\u0026rsquo;ve grown more confident of what I enjoy and what I don\u0026rsquo;t, which has consequently helped me find peace with this conflict. Over the years, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that reading good literature is therapeutic for me - not to be used as an afterthought but essential to keep me functional.\nStoner was another great session in my therapy.\nA story that on the surface feels depressing and sad, but curiously enough has immense hopeful undertones. This is the ordinary story of a man whose only goals in life are to attain two of the most notoriously difficult things known to mankind - knowledge, and love. He fails in both, but if you look underneath the surface, he succeeds in attaining both as well - just enough to make him feel satisfied but not enough to make the world think the same. The story is simple. A man hailing from rural American farmland attends university, falls in love with literature, and decides to dedicate himself to fulfill his passion. He starts teaching at the university, gets married by following his desire, but without falling in love, has a passionate love affair and, in the end, dies without having accomplished much.\nBut the way Mr. Williams writes this simple story is mesmerizing, to say the least. There\u0026rsquo;s an existential dread in all the interactions, always pulsing with energy, and the prose flows with a perfection, almost to a fault. When I looked back at the book having finished my 4-hour marathon run through it, I noticed that for the first 100 pages or so, the book had a lot of markings - sentences I had loved, descriptions I had enjoyed - however as it moved further, I got tired of doing so, simply because it only got better and better. If I had continued, the whole book would have been messed up by my pencil.\nThroughout the book, I could sense Camus\u0026rsquo;s influence on his writing; the existential dread always present. All the characters felt as if they could easily exist in my universe. The slow torment that the protagonist went through, at times, felt too personal, as if someone had mercilessly ripped out a few chapters from my life and laid it bare for the world to see. One of these moving passages is written at approximately two-third of the book, which I can\u0026rsquo;t help but quote below:\nIn his extreme youth, Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity, he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which he ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.\nTo illustrate an example of the existential feelings at play in the novel, here\u0026rsquo;s another passage where Stoner wonders about the futility of knowledge at a tumultuous point in his life:\nHe had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge; that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.\nI should stop lest I give myself a free rein and quote the entire book itself. And so I shall stop here. Pick this book up from dusty old shelves of second-hand bookshops and pass it onto others with a note saying, \u0026ldquo;Thank you for accepting this gift. Thank you for existing.\u0026rdquo; Maybe someday somewhere, this gift would end up saving someone.\nP.S: If one picture could summarise this whole book for me, it would be the famous oil painting by Edward Hopper, named Nighthawks.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/stoner/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nReading fiction has always been a double-edged sword for me. Some of the most intimate moments I\u0026rsquo;ve spent alone is while reading fictional stories, while at the same time, feeling a pang of disappointment for myself because I wasn\u0026rsquo;t doing anything \u0026ldquo;productive.\u0026rdquo; Is this mere entertainment? Am I just escaping my real-life responsibilities and reading stories of make-believe? While I still haven\u0026rsquo;t found sincere answers to these questions, I\u0026rsquo;ve grown more confident of what I enjoy and what I don\u0026rsquo;t, which has consequently helped me find peace with this conflict.","title":"Stoner by John Williams"},{"content":" I don\u0026rsquo;t know why, but I liked the eyes-only version more. Linked below is the work-in-progress sketch:\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/drawings/a-beautiful-woman/","summary":"I don\u0026rsquo;t know why, but I liked the eyes-only version more. Linked below is the work-in-progress sketch:","title":"A Beautiful Woman"},{"content":" I used to be obsessed with Sherlock (the HBO show) during the time it aired, and part of my fascination was with Martin Freeman here, who so brilliantly played the role of Watson.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/drawings/martin-freeman/","summary":"I used to be obsessed with Sherlock (the HBO show) during the time it aired, and part of my fascination was with Martin Freeman here, who so brilliantly played the role of Watson.","title":"Martin Freeman"},{"content":" I have a particular affinity towards this sketch as I was very apprehensive about attempting Einstein, his face had much more complexity than what I usually dealt with, but it turned out good enough in the end.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/drawings/einstein/","summary":"I have a particular affinity towards this sketch as I was very apprehensive about attempting Einstein, his face had much more complexity than what I usually dealt with, but it turned out good enough in the end.","title":"Einstein"},{"content":" Completely botched this drawing, but it reminds me of the drawing streak I used to have back when I was in my hometown during college vacations.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/drawings/teresa/","summary":"Completely botched this drawing, but it reminds me of the drawing streak I used to have back when I was in my hometown during college vacations.","title":"Mother Teresa"},{"content":" I was either on acid or I had watched a sad movie before attempting this piece. A strange juxtaposition of Chaplin and Hitler.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/drawings/chaplin/","summary":"I was either on acid or I had watched a sad movie before attempting this piece. A strange juxtaposition of Chaplin and Hitler.","title":"Charlie Chaplin (um... not quite)"},{"content":" My first attempt at drawing after dabbling in caricature pieces in my childhood :)\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/drawings/gandhi/","summary":"My first attempt at drawing after dabbling in caricature pieces in my childhood :)","title":"Gandhi"},{"content":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Check out this review on Letterboxd\nAnhedonia. The Wikipedia entry for this word says:\na diverse array of deficits in hedonic function, including reduced motivation or ability to experience pleasure.\nAt one point or another, we have all experienced some version of this phenomenon - may be characterized by an oversaturation of love, or caused by a prolonged mediocrity in life, or as in the case of our protagonist here, the complete loss of will and motivation to feel anything.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s something intriguing about the slice-of-life cinematic style - it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a dramatic plot, no pulsating action or suspenseful storyline to keep us on the edge of our seats - and yet, I can\u0026rsquo;t seem to be able to leave the film to grab even a glass of water. Linklater is one of the masters of this style, keeping the viewers engaged via dialogues. Here, Joachim Trier opts for a more subtle approach of filmmaking, making us observe things rather than spoon-feeding us via expository dialogues. There are some powerful scenes scattered throughout the film. With the opening montage, we are absorbed into the old and beautiful city of Oslo, making us nostalgic about a place we\u0026rsquo;ve never been to. And then comes a powerful scene - we see the protagonist going for a walk into the forest, a shaky camera holding the inscrutable face of Anders in the frame. Once he reaches the lake, he fills up his jacket pockets with rocks and attempts to drown himself in the lake. The camera stays steady over the surface of the lake, instead of following him underwater, we shift in our seats - uncomfortable with anticipation. The tension resolves as we see Anders gasp out of the water and go back dejectedly towards his home. We learn that he\u0026rsquo;s a recovering addict, currently in an institution, and has suicidal tendencies.\nAll of this is shown without any soundtrack or dialogues.\nAnother scene that I found particularly powerful was the café scene. The way Anders selectively chooses to listen to particular conversations, especially a girl reciting her list of things she\u0026rsquo;d want to do over the course of her life, there\u0026rsquo;s a strong contrast between the girl\u0026rsquo;s (perhaps naive) optimism and Anders\u0026rsquo; pessimism for life. Anders has lost his ability to feel motivation or pleasure as he desperately looks for some way to remedy this. Anders\u0026rsquo; best friend quotes Proust during one of their discussions:\nTrying to understand desire by watching a nude woman is like a child taking apart a clock to understand time.\nAnders is trying to do exactly that, looking for some way to connect with the outside world without losing himself. There\u0026rsquo;s not a single pivotal moment in the film where one can say that this is where he stops trying, instead we see him increasingly spiraling out of the natural order and getting distant from the illusory ideal he was hoping for in the first half of the film. He hesitantly goes to a friend\u0026rsquo;s party, trying to achieve some normalcy in his otherwise fucked up life, but there he is reminded of the same old crowd of people who are miserable and unhappy with their lives and are trying to drown their sorrows with alcohol - and this reminder is too much for Anders. He begins to feel convinced that there\u0026rsquo;s no way for him to get out of this death spiral and begins to let go. There\u0026rsquo;s no hope left for him. During one of the last scenes, he goes to his ancestral home where he finds a house full of reminders of his happy past, tries for the last time to feel some emotion by playing the old piano but halts abruptly as it\u0026rsquo;s evident he has lost his emotional connection with this once-beloved playing like everything else. The last sigh we hear from him is the only way he knows of feeling something - drugs, as he lets go for the last time.\nThe depression of a lone man struggling with mental health issues is shown beautifully here, even though the conclusions are tragic. Lately, I\u0026rsquo;ve been getting a lot of recommendations to watch Scandinavian movies and I\u0026rsquo;ve been loving them! This film will go down as yet another one of the great, grounded movies about depression, addiction, and city life in my diary.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema/oslo-august/","summary":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Check out this review on Letterboxd\nAnhedonia. The Wikipedia entry for this word says:\na diverse array of deficits in hedonic function, including reduced motivation or ability to experience pleasure.\nAt one point or another, we have all experienced some version of this phenomenon - may be characterized by an oversaturation of love, or caused by a prolonged mediocrity in life, or as in the case of our protagonist here, the complete loss of will and motivation to feel anything.","title":"Oslo, August 31st (2011) by Joachim Trier"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nHow to fool the world and become a Billionaire I remember hearing about Elizabeth Holmes when I was in my late teens, at that impressionable age when you get hyper-inspired by reading about icons that are going to change the world. There was a profile of her in Wired, with an eye-catching image of her wearing a turtleneck black sweater holding what looked like a test-tube with a tiny amount of blood with a science-y background. I remember it had made quite a distinct impression on my mind, no doubt helped by the fact that the profile had described her as \u0026ldquo;this Stanford dropout 20-something who was hailed as being a younger version of Einstein, was going to change the world\u0026rdquo;.\nUndoubtedly, as so often happens, I forgot about people who were gonna change the world as I grew up. Then I heard about this book last year, which was getting enormously praised for its exposé of a Silicon Valley firm and was really surprised to find out that the company at the center of the storm was Theranos, the brainchild of Elizabeth Holmes. This book reads like a detective novel, meticulously giving the clues and binding the threads of the deception that Holmes had so carefully and brilliantly constructed and managed to fool the entire world.\nRead this one if you want to get a lesson in how not to emulate a leader.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/bad-blood/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nHow to fool the world and become a Billionaire I remember hearing about Elizabeth Holmes when I was in my late teens, at that impressionable age when you get hyper-inspired by reading about icons that are going to change the world. There was a profile of her in Wired, with an eye-catching image of her wearing a turtleneck black sweater holding what looked like a test-tube with a tiny amount of blood with a science-y background.","title":"Bad Blood by John Carreyrou"},{"content":"Check it out on Instagram\nI\u0026rsquo;m scared.\nNo, not because there\u0026rsquo;s a pandemic going on,\neven though that itself is enough\nto make one lose their mind.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s another deadly virus crawling\nits way into my whole being.\nSlowly eating away at my sanity,\nfeasting on my thoughts,\nmutating inside my head as if a colony of ants was given\nan open invitation to a room full of sugary syrup.\nI\u0026rsquo;m disintegrating.\nFunny how the same thoughts,\nwho once used to tell me there\u0026rsquo;s an ocean of possibilities out there;\nare slowly drowning me into the same pool,\nreplacing me, devouring me\nbit-by-bit\nas if my feet are tied with stones of expectations\nand I keep swimming to the bottom, mistaking it for the shore.\nSplash. Splash. Splash.\nI see people making art, saving lives, reading books, writing novels,\ncooking food, running home marathons -\nresolving to turn this gloom into resilient happiness.\nAnd I can\u0026rsquo;t help but feel disgusted\nat my curled up crying self in the bedroom corner,\nstruggling to tell apart midnight from noon.\nWhen I go to the kitchen to make my first\n(and only) meal of the day,\nthe knife shivers, even though my hands are steady\nit fears for the fingers that are too close to the blunt edge,\nfearing that as the layers of onions come apart, the body holding the knife\nwill shed its pretentious layers as well,\nbaring naked the vast void in the center.\nHow many layers will I have to cut\nbefore I find myself again?\nI\u0026rsquo;m scared to find out.\nBut there\u0026rsquo;s hope.\nA distant glimmer at the horizon, but it\u0026rsquo;s there.\nCounting my breath, one step at a time,\ndragging myself through the dark tunnel,\nfollowing the whisper that says\nit gets better.\nit always does.\nit has to.\nA poem penned down during the Coronavirus pandemic. I see people who are struggling with mental health issues which, I can only imagine, would have exacerbated during these times. Take care of yourself, folks. Don\u0026rsquo;t forget that you matter. A lot.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/scared-in-lockdown/","summary":"Check it out on Instagram\nI\u0026rsquo;m scared.\nNo, not because there\u0026rsquo;s a pandemic going on,\neven though that itself is enough\nto make one lose their mind.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s another deadly virus crawling\nits way into my whole being.\nSlowly eating away at my sanity,\nfeasting on my thoughts,\nmutating inside my head as if a colony of ants was given\nan open invitation to a room full of sugary syrup.","title":"Fear"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nA disappointing jumble of thoughts Disappointed.\nI am an atheist interested in the power of mindfulness and the whole world of so-called spirituality, so naturally, I am the ideal audience that Sam Harris is looking for. But it disappointed in almost every domain that I had expectations in. Using deep-sounding difficult words and wrapping them in an almost mythical aura of \u0026ldquo;Consciousness\u0026rdquo;, this one was a huge letdown. The irony is that I\u0026rsquo;ve been following his mindfulness meditation course and it\u0026rsquo;s been the opposite experience there - in fact, his meditation course itself was what motivated me to pick up this book.\nSave yourself the trouble of reading on why to meditate and instead dive into doing the practice itself and judge for yourself.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/waking-up/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nA disappointing jumble of thoughts Disappointed.\nI am an atheist interested in the power of mindfulness and the whole world of so-called spirituality, so naturally, I am the ideal audience that Sam Harris is looking for. But it disappointed in almost every domain that I had expectations in. Using deep-sounding difficult words and wrapping them in an almost mythical aura of \u0026ldquo;Consciousness\u0026rdquo;, this one was a huge letdown.","title":"Waking Up by Sam Harris"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nWorld history in a nutshell More than 1100 pages, this behemoth of a book still fails to capture the whole essence of world history - and rightly so. How can you combine over 2000 years of human history and still do justice to every element? But the unique manner in which this book - or more appropriately, collection of letters - has been written, it shines brightly amongst the plethora of history books you can find on this vast subject of world history.\nLately and unfortunately, people in my country have been going down a dangerous political hole and it is almost becoming a fashion statement now to indulge in tales of \u0026ldquo;revisionist history\u0026rdquo;, especially when it\u0026rsquo;s related to foundations of India and the exact roles played by political parties of the time. It\u0026rsquo;s shameful to hear people bashing Nehru for whatever \u0026ldquo;wrongs\u0026rdquo; he committed, while at the same time, being ignorant about his accomplishments and the monumentally difficult task he faced of leading and building India during its first few years of Independence.\nThe personal nature of the letters and the choice of the subject notwithstanding - or more accurately, I should say because of these characteristics - this book is also a revealing window to the character and intelligence of our first Prime Minister.\nThis one would surely go onto my favorites\u0026rsquo; stand :)\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/glimpses-of-world-history/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nWorld history in a nutshell More than 1100 pages, this behemoth of a book still fails to capture the whole essence of world history - and rightly so. How can you combine over 2000 years of human history and still do justice to every element? But the unique manner in which this book - or more appropriately, collection of letters - has been written, it shines brightly amongst the plethora of history books you can find on this vast subject of world history.","title":"Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru"},{"content":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ Check out this review on Letterboxd\nYou can spot Wes Anderson trademark from a mile ago, although this is the only movie by him which left me dissatisfied. The unique and swift camera movements are still there, the colors still pop out like from another universe, the absurd comic timings still bring a smile to your face - but you won\u0026rsquo;t feel the kind of personal emotional investment into the characters like you would in the rest of his filmography. Still, for a Wes Anderson fan, this would be a nice enough movie.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema/darjeeling/","summary":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ Check out this review on Letterboxd\nYou can spot Wes Anderson trademark from a mile ago, although this is the only movie by him which left me dissatisfied. The unique and swift camera movements are still there, the colors still pop out like from another universe, the absurd comic timings still bring a smile to your face - but you won\u0026rsquo;t feel the kind of personal emotional investment into the characters like you would in the rest of his filmography.","title":"The Darjeeling Limited (2007) by Wes Anderson"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nReasons you should read this book:\nIf you\u0026rsquo;ve ever had a panic attack. If you\u0026rsquo;ve ever counted the number of times the ceiling fan rotates, just so you could avoid dealing with the endless voices in your head. If you\u0026rsquo;ve ever felt ashamed to admit that you might be suffering from the D-word. If reading about personal stories of how people overcame their mental illnesses soothes you. Because why not. A lucid, non-linear and a sort of haphazard look at the most personal struggle anyone can go through, give this one a read if you want to know what it feels like to have depression.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/reasons-to-stay-alive/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nReasons you should read this book:\nIf you\u0026rsquo;ve ever had a panic attack. If you\u0026rsquo;ve ever counted the number of times the ceiling fan rotates, just so you could avoid dealing with the endless voices in your head. If you\u0026rsquo;ve ever felt ashamed to admit that you might be suffering from the D-word. If reading about personal stories of how people overcame their mental illnesses soothes you.","title":"Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nI have been a lover of music since my early childhood - runs in the family - and have imitated and performed songs (mostly inside my own head) on numerous occasions. Despite this lifelong love affair with music of all kinds, there was one particular genre of music that always baffled me. Mostly because of my own ignorance, but partially also because nobody else was talking about it. Nobody else in my own vicinity that is. It didn\u0026rsquo;t play on the radio, you won\u0026rsquo;t hear it playing on any of the countless music channels and certainly, nobody was going on tours giving live performances.\nThis was the wonderful genre of concert music.\nWe have all probably heard the following names: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky. But, and this is especially true in India, very few listeners would be able to identify a piece of concert music by its composer, the way they would a Linkin Park song for example. Now I realize the comparison is a bit unfair, and I\u0026rsquo;m not trying to pit one musician against another - it\u0026rsquo;s just to illustrate a point - the point being that we are grossly unfamiliar with these great composers apart from reading a passage about them in history books about what geniuses they were.\nThis series of lectures is dedicated towards amending this misstep. Narrated by the ever passionate and wonderful Dr. Robert Greenberg, this is a collection of 48 lectures of 45 minutes each (36 hours in total), which takes you on a musical journey starting from the ancient Greek music up until the first half of the twentieth century. For the lack of a better word, these lectures are absolutely amazing - especially because of the narrator. His enthusiasm is simply so infectious!\nDo give this one a listen. I promise it\u0026rsquo;ll be worth it.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/great-music/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nI have been a lover of music since my early childhood - runs in the family - and have imitated and performed songs (mostly inside my own head) on numerous occasions. Despite this lifelong love affair with music of all kinds, there was one particular genre of music that always baffled me. Mostly because of my own ignorance, but partially also because nobody else was talking about it.","title":"How to Listen to and Understand Great Music by Robert Greenberg"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nThere are few books which leave you in a mesmerizing state after having read them. You ponder about it for days to come, want to scream your head off about it to anyone who\u0026rsquo;d listen, and then dwell in this fear of picking up another book because how can something else ever come close to being this perfect! I have felt this way before - first when I\u0026rsquo;d finished The Complete Sherlock Holmes, later when I was left in a daze for multiple days after finishing the notorious and brilliant House of Leaves, and much more recently when I was unable to sleep after reading Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.\nBehave is one of those few books.\nI first heard about Dr. Sapolsky when my girlfriend recommended me one of his lectures on Depression from his popular lecture series titled \u0026ldquo;Human Behavioral Biology\u0026rdquo; (Playlist available on Youtube). I was immediately taken in. He reminded me of those hilariously brilliant and yet humble grand-dads with whom you can be best friends with (of course, only seen in the movies) - and I picked up this book the very next day.\nDr. Sapolsky is a neuroendocrinologist by profession and currently a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford. To save you the pain of having to look up neuroendocrinologist - it\u0026rsquo;s the branch of biology which studies how the brain regulates the hormonal activity in the body. From the late 70s to early 90s, he spent a vast majority of his time studying the social behaviors of baboons in the wild - something that features prominently in this book where he discusses different social behaviors of humans and how they relate to our biology. He writes early on in the book -\nSome of the time, we are indeed just like any other animal. When we’re scared, we secrete the same hormone as would some subordinate fish getting hassled by a bully. The biology of pleasure involves the same brain chemicals in us as in a capybara. Neurons from humans and brine shrimp work the same way. House two female rats together, and over the course of weeks, they will synchronize their reproductive cycles so that they wind up ovulating within a few hours of each other. Try the same with two human females (as reported in some but not all studies), and something similar occurs. It’s called the Wellesley effect, first shown with roommates at all-women’s Wellesley College. And when it comes to violence, we can be just like some other apes—we pummel, we cudgel, we throw rocks, we kill with our bare hands. So some of the time an intellectual challenge is to assimilate how similar we can be to other species. In other cases, the challenge is to appreciate how, though human physiology resembles that of other species, we use the physiology in novel ways. We activate the classical physiology of vigilance while watching a scary movie. We activate a stress response when thinking about mortality. We secrete hormones related to nurturing and social bonding but in response to an adorable baby panda. And this certainly applies to aggression—we use the same muscles as does a male chimp attacking a sexual competitor, but we use them to harm someone because of their ideology.\nThe book is dissected neatly into chapters where he takes up a behavior and tries to explain which factors might have influenced that behavior - ranging from seconds to minutes to days to months to years to millennia before. The latter half of the book delves more into sociology - how our behaviors get influenced by our environments and cultures and how much of a role biology plays in that. Dr. Sapolsky is a master of wit and humor while also hitting the nail on its head with preciseness. He discusses the \u0026ldquo;popular\u0026rdquo; hormones and their typical roles in human behavior as portrayed by media - like Testesterones make you aggressive, to \u0026ldquo;love\u0026rdquo; hormone to mirror neurons to our love for dopamine hits - and argues that the reality is much more nuanced than what is portrayed. In a characteristic Sapolsky way, he talks about this in one of the passages -\nVarious muscles have moved, and a behavior has happened. Perhaps it is a good act: you’ve empathically touched the arm of a suffering person. Perhaps it is a foul act: you’ve pulled a trigger, targeting an innocent person. Perhaps it is a good act: you’ve pulled a trigger, drawing fire to save others. Perhaps it is a foul act: you’ve touched the arm of someone, starting a chain of libidinal events that betray a loved one. Acts that, as emphasized, are definable only by context.\nContext, context, context. Everything is dependant on the context. The book touches on and discusses a wide variety of problems and their causes - something which is easily conveyed to me by a large number of underlined notes present in my Kindle. In bringing together two of the most complicated fields that exist - human behavior and the functions of the brain - Dr. Sapolsky has taken a hard challenge, something which he acknowledges in one of the closing passages:\nIf you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It’s complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead, everything just modulates something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but now we realize that . . .” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue, it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite. And so on. Eventually, it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try.\nIn the end, I\u0026rsquo;d say it\u0026rsquo;s one of the best books to come out in recent years and although you might (as I did) get intimidated by the technicalities of biology and the sheer length of the book - Dr. Sapolsky is such an entertaining and humble writer that you\u0026rsquo;ll hardly feel the complications yourself and will end up profoundly enjoying the ride.\nNow, it\u0026rsquo;s time to say goodbye to the civilized world while I go on a Youtube binge-watch - something about which I would\u0026rsquo;ve scolded myself before had the pursuit not been of watching this man deliver hours of lectures on Human behavioral biology. Au revoir!\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/behave-review/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nThere are few books which leave you in a mesmerizing state after having read them. You ponder about it for days to come, want to scream your head off about it to anyone who\u0026rsquo;d listen, and then dwell in this fear of picking up another book because how can something else ever come close to being this perfect! I have felt this way before - first when I\u0026rsquo;d finished The Complete Sherlock Holmes, later when I was left in a daze for multiple days after finishing the notorious and brilliant House of Leaves, and much more recently when I was unable to sleep after reading Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.","title":"Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nStarted with a tightly-knit structure, but faltered at the end. The last few chapters were a slog to get through - mostly because of numerous \u0026ldquo;business-class\u0026rdquo; style case studies.\nMain takeaway? Other than the central idea around which the book revolves (and succinctly mentioned as the book subtitle too), the idea of interleaving is what struck me the most. I had already read about this particular method in Michael Nielsen\u0026rsquo;s brilliant post on Anki (\u0026ldquo;Augmenting Long-term Memory\u0026rdquo;) and it was interesting to read about it formally in the book. Interleaving is the technique of mixing up your learning in varied environments so that it makes some unusual connections that you\u0026rsquo;d normally won\u0026rsquo;t think about - and might come in handy when you are faced with a problem in a new environment you haven\u0026rsquo;t previously encountered.\nIn the end, \u0026ldquo;Range\u0026rdquo; suffers from the same deficiencies that a lot of other pop-psychology/self-management books suffer from - too many anecdotal evidence and case studies. A reviewer here on Goodreads summed it the best:\nFinally, Range is designed to appeal to people who are already skeptical of specialization/ enthusiastic about generalized skillsets. I worry that some of the appreciation of this book is just a soothing exercise in confirmation bias for generalists.\nStill, I\u0026rsquo;d recommend it to people who (like me) are skeptical about their tendency to dabble in too many disparate fields at the same time - this might be the soothing pill that you were looking for.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/range-a-review/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nStarted with a tightly-knit structure, but faltered at the end. The last few chapters were a slog to get through - mostly because of numerous \u0026ldquo;business-class\u0026rdquo; style case studies.\nMain takeaway? Other than the central idea around which the book revolves (and succinctly mentioned as the book subtitle too), the idea of interleaving is what struck me the most. I had already read about this particular method in Michael Nielsen\u0026rsquo;s brilliant post on Anki (\u0026ldquo;Augmenting Long-term Memory\u0026rdquo;) and it was interesting to read about it formally in the book.","title":"Range by David Epstein"},{"content":"(See this picture on Flickr)\nDeference vs. Indifference There used to be a time\nwhen things used to be simple.\nI\u0026rsquo;d wake up, rub my eyes, sit up straight, close my eyes,\nAnd pray that He will continue to guide me\nas He had done the previous day.\nThere used to be a time\nwhen I used to love the aroma\nof the stick when it burned,\nlighting up my day with the secret enchantments,\nas if the secrecy itself was the source of my happiness.\nThere used to be a time\nwhen coming home after a bad day,\nI\u0026rsquo;d sit on my bed and join my hands and close my eyes\nand quietly shed a tear.\nThe statues didn\u0026rsquo;t move or speak or whisper,\nbut I felt assured that somehow those little stones\nwere the only ones who listened to me\nand answered back.\nBut now,\nI wake up and lie on my bed for hours,\nwatching the fan complete circles after circles after circles,\nas if I was stuck in the middle while everyone else around me\nkept going through life as if it was such an easy task.\nBut now,\nThe smell of the burning stick nauseates my senses,\nthe secret spells make me mad,\nthe constant enchantings feel as if someone lit a person on fire\nwhile they were sleeping.\nBut now,\nwhen I come back home after a bad day,\nto the empty apartment echoing with silence so loud\nI worry my neighbors will start complaining -\nEven crying for hours doesn\u0026rsquo;t help.\nSometimes I think,\nwhat use is consciousness\nif it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make you happy but slowly takes away\nwhatever little sanity you had left\nsecond by second.\nSometimes I worry,\nDid I make a mistake in choosing not to follow blindly?\nDoes asking questions that nobody has answers to\nmakes me more alive\nor merely leaves me more broken and naive and stupid?\nIs ignorance really bliss?\nI still go to churches and mosques and temples,\nthe difference being it was deference before,\nand now it\u0026rsquo;s curiosity about the people who go there\nand indifference to the thing they pray to.\nSometimes I wonder,\nThere really is no answer, is there?\nA poem I wrote when I had troubles accepting myself. Still do, to be honest.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/deference-vs-indifference/","summary":"(See this picture on Flickr)\nDeference vs. Indifference There used to be a time\nwhen things used to be simple.\nI\u0026rsquo;d wake up, rub my eyes, sit up straight, close my eyes,\nAnd pray that He will continue to guide me\nas He had done the previous day.\nThere used to be a time\nwhen I used to love the aroma\nof the stick when it burned,\nlighting up my day with the secret enchantments,","title":"Deference vs. Indifference"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nThe School of Life - a massively popular YouTube channel - used to be this source of solace in some turbulent times of my college life. It is not something that you\u0026rsquo;d think would be cheerful and uplifting - a quick glance at some of the most popular videos of the channel would include titles such as \u0026ldquo;Why we go cold on our partners\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;Why you will marry the wrong person\u0026rdquo; etc. The honest yet straightforward mannger in which the narrator calmly tells us that even though it might feel like this is the worst possible time of your life, it is not usually so - it was a comforting thought - to feel and accept that things are fucked up and move on with quiet resignation.\nAlain De Botton is the founder of the said channel as well as the author of this book.\nThe Course of Love is Alain\u0026rsquo;s critique of what\u0026rsquo;s wrong with the society\u0026rsquo;s current perspective of love and marriages. Romanticism - the idea that the briefest of glances of some stranger is the formulation of a satisfying relationship, the idea of soul-mates and the happily ever after - is one of the most mistakenly understood facets of life.\nThe story revolves around two fictional characters who meet each other at work, fall in love, get married, have children and go through the whole process of frustrations and resignations and disappointments that constitutes a married life. Through this fictional story, Alain gives us some of the most profound insights into how love and relationships work in real life - quite unlike how they happen in stories. He writes in one of the passages -\nOur understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving elements. We have allowed our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.\nIt has its shortcomings though - sometimes Alain insights might appear to be delusional and bordering on self-righteousness, especially when he is commenting on one of the most controversial aspects of marriage - Adultery.\nHowever, if you keep in mind that all these insights are a one man\u0026rsquo;s opinion and that you don\u0026rsquo;t have to take everything at face value, you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to take away many good things from this book. Give this one a read when you\u0026rsquo;re falling in love, revisit it when you\u0026rsquo;re getting married and visit again when you\u0026rsquo;re trapped in those inevitable frustrations of married life. I know I certainly will.\nI will leave you with one of my favorite passages from the book -\nAt the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one. We should add: it is a privilege to be the recepient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/the-course-of-love/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nThe School of Life - a massively popular YouTube channel - used to be this source of solace in some turbulent times of my college life. It is not something that you\u0026rsquo;d think would be cheerful and uplifting - a quick glance at some of the most popular videos of the channel would include titles such as \u0026ldquo;Why we go cold on our partners\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;Why you will marry the wrong person\u0026rdquo; etc.","title":"The Course of Love by Alain de Botton"},{"content":"Preamble Philosophy has always been one of those baffling things that entice you at first by its simplicity, but as you get sucked into it more and more, you find yourself searching for the end of this labyrinthine landscape. I had my first exposure to anything related to philosophy in my second year of college when I stumbled upon The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. At the time, it was one of the fascinating books I had ever read. I distinctly remember sitting down with the book at 9 PM having had my dinner, and as the custom goes, was looking forward to reading anything that could distract me from the mountain load of coursework that I had to finish for the upcoming semester exams. I became so engrossed in the story that when I finished the book and went outside to take in a fresh breath of air - I was startled to discover that the sunlight was already shining throughout the corridor - it was 7 o\u0026rsquo;clock in the morning!\nHowever, aside from a couple of books here and there, I was pretty ignorant about the whole field of philosophy . It was not until my last year of college when my then-girlfriend introduced me to different sub-fields of philosophy, and consequently, the names like Albert Camus, Bertrand Russell, and Friedrich Nietzsche and their ideas started sounding familiar. From all the ideas out there, Existentialism was something that drew me in the most.\nBy no means, I\u0026rsquo;m an expert in any of these matters, and neither do I have any authority to comment on them. This is just an excited rant of a newbie fanboy who just discovered his favorite toy. So please, Reader Discretion is Advised!\nWhat does it actually mean? Existentialism as a field traced back its existence to hundreds of years ago but was popularized mainly by Jean-Paul Sartre in mid-1900s. To simplify a field like this would be a disservice to the great philosophers who spent their whole lives trying to understand and popularize it; however, I will try to put into words whatever I\u0026rsquo;ve understood till now. The central theme of Existentialism revolves around the Individual. It brings the responsibility back to the central point of origin - to the individual. We, every one of us as an individual, are responsible - for how we live, for how we deal with the world, and essentially responsible for the way the world is right now. It also brings in this radical idea that if you try to look for a grand meaning of things in this universe, it would be a fruitless task. The universe is meaningless. There is no grand plan. So ultimately what matters is how you define the meaning of life.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a line from one of my favorite shows Rick and Morty, where a character just finds out that she was conceived as a mistake by their parents. She is deeply saddened and angry and wants to run away. Her little brother then comes to her and says something that has remained with me ever since: (Watch the full scene here).\n\u0026ldquo;Nobody exists on purpose, Nobody belongs anywhere, Everybody\u0026rsquo;s going to die - Come watch TV?\u0026rdquo;\nOur life is purposeless. We are mere mortals who will die in a few years, and nobody will remember us. Equipped with this feeling of utter hopelessness, and only then, we can start to carve out our own meaning of existence, our own hopes for the world. It is amongst one of those beautiful contradictions that the world has to offer.\nA meeting with The Stranger Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can\u0026rsquo;t be sure.\nThe Stranger introduces its eponymous character with this rather unusual sentence. In fact, the entire first half of the book is filled with such \u0026lsquo;absurd\u0026rsquo; statements. What\u0026rsquo;s strange about this character is that he doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to feel anything. He goes through life living it from one moment to the next without reflecting on his actions. The reader is confronted with the peak of this peculiarity when Mersault commits a murder but rather than feeling remorse for this deplorable act, he feels, well, nothing. It\u0026rsquo;s only when in the second act, he is forced to reflect on his actions because there\u0026rsquo;s nothing else to do in prison, that he begins to feel the situation that he has gotten himself into truly. But even then, the only true emotion that he shows is when the prison Chaplain asks him about the afterlife, and he flows into a rage saying \u0026ldquo;This life is the only one that means anything!\u0026rdquo;\nWith this book, Camus brought the idea of living an \u0026lsquo;absurd\u0026rsquo; life to the surface, which he goes on to hammer in fully in the successor \u0026lsquo;The Myth of Sisyphus\u0026rsquo;.\nAn Encounter with The Plague Imagine your utopian world where you don\u0026rsquo;t have to work for eight hours a day, live in a lakeside cottage, read books whole day and generally are quite content with the way of life - and slowly a kind of mysterious wave goes through the whole town and sweeps in all your happiness and leaves you dead inside.\nThis is what happens in The Plague. Well, sorta.\nCamus explores the idea of experiencing the present moment as it is, without any future ambitions obfuscating our judgment, and yet having the deepest desire to experience just for once what was considered as routine few days ago. Early in the story when the town finds itself woven in the murderous embrace of the plague, Camus writes about the plight of those who were separated from their loved ones:\nMothers and children, lovers, husbands and wives, who had a few days previously taken it for granted that their parting would be a short one, who had kissed one another goodbye on the platform and exchanged a few trivial remarks, sure as they were of seeing one another again after a few days or, at most, a few weeks, duped by our blind human faith in the near future and little if at all diverted from their normal interests by this leave-taking—all these people found themselves, without the least warning, hopelessly cut off, prevented from seeing one another again, or even communicating with one another.\nThe feeling of exile was all that the town residents were capable of experiencing. Slowly the separation started to take into possession the hearts and minds of everyone, so much as that people started to live their life through the lived experience of the past and started dreading the imagination of a rosy future. At one point, Camus writes:\nWe realized that the separation was destined to continue, we had no choice but to come to terms with the days ahead. In short, we returned to our prison-house, we had nothing left us but the past, and even if some were tempted to live in the future, they had speedily to abandon the idea - anyhow, as soon as could be - once they felt the wounds that the imagination inflicts on those who yield themselves to it.\nHowever, this tough ordeal also had a silver lining. When people were forced to contemplate, despite all the hate and resentments, they always came back to thinking about their loved ones and aching to embrace them just once more. This drives home the point that a lot of other thinkers have said - love is the greatest victory, whether it be peace, war or death.\nNevertheless - and this point is the most important - however bitter their distress and however heavy their hearts, for all their emptiness, it can be truly said of these exiles that in the early period of the plague, they could account themselves privileged. For at the precise moment when the residents of the town began to panic, their thoughts were wholly fixed on the person whom they longed to meet again. The egoism of love made them immune to the general distress and, if they thought of the plague, it was only in so far as it might threaten to make their separation eternal. Thus in the very heart of the epidemic, they maintained a saving indifference, which one was tempted to take for composure. Their despair saved them from panic, thus their misfortune had a good side.\nThe Conclusion and the path ahead Both of these books are considered as one of the best works of Albert Camus, and for good reason. The fluidity in the prose and the thought-provoking ideas in the content make for an exciting read. I\u0026rsquo;ll surely be delving into the rest of the works of Camus, as well as exploring other philosophy writers like Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Although time is the enemy here, let\u0026rsquo;s hope that I keep myself motivated enough to finish all these books.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll keep you guys posted in the meantime :)\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/the-stranger-and-the-plague-a-review/","summary":"Preamble Philosophy has always been one of those baffling things that entice you at first by its simplicity, but as you get sucked into it more and more, you find yourself searching for the end of this labyrinthine landscape. I had my first exposure to anything related to philosophy in my second year of college when I stumbled upon The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. At the time, it was one of the fascinating books I had ever read.","title":"The Stranger and The Plague by Albert Camus"},{"content":"(See this picture on flickr)\n\u0026ldquo;Tell me about yourself.\u0026rdquo;\nI have always dreaded this question. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter which setting I\u0026rsquo;m in - a social gathering, an interview, or while traveling - I invariably become visibly flabbergasted when people introduce themselves to me which is followed by the silent expectation that I\u0026rsquo;d return the favor and say something about myself.\nSo to solve this little problem of mine, I came up with this unoriginal idea. Maybe I should make a website and put everything that goes on in my little mind out there so that whenever someone asks me to perform this horrendous task of saying something about myself, I\u0026rsquo;ll simply point them towards \u0026ldquo;The Lazy Oxymoron\u0026rdquo; and say - that\u0026rsquo;s me.\nI know, how genius of me!\nNow, if you have managed to read this far without rolling your eyes too much, I\u0026rsquo;ll tell you something about myself.\nI am Siddhartha. Although most of my friends know me by my nickname \u0026lsquo;Golu\u0026rsquo; - which is also part of my full name btw - but that\u0026rsquo;s a story for some other time. I am currently engaged in building One800 which is going to consume a lot of my personal and professional time for the forseeable future, so do excuse any delay in responses.\nI am passionate about a lot of things, which by its nature, leads me to become anxious a lot because I can\u0026rsquo;t fulfill them all. I love reading books (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, comics, magazines - pretty much anything) and have a tiny but increasing library at home. Music, drawing, and photography are some of the things that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of talent for, nevertheless, I find them to be great creative stimulants, and so I dabble here and there with my amateur hands. Whenever I find the time - or rather I absolutely make the time to do this - I travel. You\u0026rsquo;ll often hear people say this, so much that it might\u0026rsquo;ve started sounding like bullshit, but it\u0026rsquo;s true - traveling changes you. I can get carried away with this, so let\u0026rsquo;s keep this for a future post.\nIf you want to get in touch with me, the easiest way would be to go the old fashioned way - drop me an email at sid@siddharthagolu.com. I reply to every email I get (which is once in a blue moon).\nOr if you prefer, you can also connect with me on the following social media sites:\nGoodreads Instagram Flickr LinkedIn Git Letterboxd If you connect with my thoughts here, please do reach out to me via your preferred medium. After all, we all live for the human connections we make.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/about/","summary":"(See this picture on flickr)\n\u0026ldquo;Tell me about yourself.\u0026rdquo;\nI have always dreaded this question. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter which setting I\u0026rsquo;m in - a social gathering, an interview, or while traveling - I invariably become visibly flabbergasted when people introduce themselves to me which is followed by the silent expectation that I\u0026rsquo;d return the favor and say something about myself.\nSo to solve this little problem of mine, I came up with this unoriginal idea.","title":"About Me"}] \ No newline at end of file +[{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nI remember first knowing about the Sackler family when Jon Oliver did a segment on them, and I remember feeling infuriated. Little did I know about the empire that they had created, riding on the wave of people\u0026rsquo;s addictions, creating and fueling the opioid crisis and absolving themselves of all the blame while at the same time, putting up their names on all the Ivy league buildings.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s sickening to learn how the rich always get a preferential treatment by law and society.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/empire-of-pain/","summary":"If you want to understand how the opioid crisis began, read this. Recommended.","title":"Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nThis book falls into the category of books that I like to call \u0026ldquo;Fast-food books\u0026rdquo;. They won\u0026rsquo;t necessarily make you healthier or your mind sounder, but it\u0026rsquo;ll feel really good while you\u0026rsquo;re eating them. There\u0026rsquo;s only so many anecdotes you can digest. The most common criticism that people have with these kind of books are that they could\u0026rsquo;ve been summarized in a much shorter format - probably a blog post or two. The same applies here - only the irony is that it is BECAUSE of those blog posts and the reaction it generated that prompted the author to write a whole book about it.\nProbably should have let the blogs say it all.\nWell, now that my rant is over, I\u0026rsquo;d like to list some of the positive things that I got out of this book. While tiring at times, reading through the different stories and the paths ordinary people take to become successful made me appreciate the importance of THINKING about your career. For people in my field (software developers), it can be a daunting task to get ourselves out of the autopilot and start questioning things - which includes the choices that we\u0026rsquo;ve made for our own careers. But doing exactly that is an important and necessary step towards achieving a fulfilling career.\nGive this one a read if you haven\u0026rsquo;t obsessively read all those countless Quora and Medium posts. Otherwise, skip it.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/so-good-newport/","summary":"A series of blog posts that unfortunately became a book. Not recommended.","title":"So Good They Can't Ignore You - Cal Newport"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nNothing extra-ordinary in terms of content, but special when you think of the book as a compilation of useful frameworks to think about time.\nAlas, I stumbled upon Four Thousand Weeks at such a point in my life where I\u0026rsquo;ve already been a productivity addict for so long that it\u0026rsquo;s impossible for me to make a fresh start. The central theme of the book - that you won\u0026rsquo;t ever get to do all the things you\u0026rsquo;ve set out to do so you should consciously choose and be happy about your choice - is such an aphoristic statement that no matter how you spin it, it always feels bland.\nHaving said that, the self-help ocean that this book is a part of, is filled with heaps of garbage books, so stumbling upon this one is like finding a needle in a haystack. Few ways of thinking about time and choices that I found interesting:\nDon\u0026rsquo;t think of these things as life hacks - don\u0026rsquo;t treat life as a faulty contraption in need of modification.\nA spin on FOMO (Fear of Missing Out): missing out is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place, every decision to use a portion of a time on anything represents saying no to every other thing that you could\u0026rsquo;ve done but you didn\u0026rsquo;t.\nThe anti-skill of staying with the anxiety of never having time to do everything.\nPicking one item from the menu represents an affirmation rather than a defeat. The fact that you could\u0026rsquo;ve chosen a different and perhaps equally valuable way to spend this afternoon bestows meaning on the choice you did make.\nA hobbyist is a subversive: they insist that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/four-thousand-weeks/","summary":"A book about time and our relationship with it. Recommended.","title":"Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman"},{"content":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Check it out on Letterboxd\nCan there be a more difficult task than being asked to select a single memory from your life that you want to carry forever? As humans, we contain multitudes and we want to resist any attempt to put us into a box. But what happens if you\u0026rsquo;re asked to choose something which you\u0026rsquo;ll cherish for the rest of your life - would you let go of all the times when you were sad, angry, bitter, hypocrite and a bad human being? Would you like to remember your life as having lived a happy memory or would rather prefer a kaleidoscope?\nThere are no right answers to these questions.\nAs I read somewhere few hours ago:\n\u0026ldquo;Film editing performs on the material of a film, the operation that death performs on life - that is, giving a sequence of uncertain and unstable events a coherent form and meaning\u0026rdquo;.\nWatching the film unfold was like leafing through the pages of my own life. In fact, I think the characters are universal - everyone can find at least one person (or their memory) here that they\u0026rsquo;ll relate to. The most intriguing case being a young man who has left the world before his cynicism could turn into quiet acceptance. After refusing to select one memory from his past, he says in one of the conversations:\n\u0026hellip; But those are just memories. And ultimately, we end up turning memories into our own images. Of course, it really happened so it feels very real, but, Say I construct the future, as though I\u0026rsquo;m making a film about it. As I imagine all kinds of situations, I think what I create, would feel a lot more real than some memory. That\u0026rsquo;s a lot more meaningful than looking back at the past\u0026quot;.\nRather than giving you answers, Kore-eda takes you on a journey of discovery with questions. After all, how often do you think about death, memory, legacy and afterlife?\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema/after-life/","summary":"An interesting take on life, seen through the lens of afterlife. Highly recommended!","title":"After Life (1998) by Hirokazu Kore-eda"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nOne of the principal joys of reading is to discover the magic hidden in the seemingly banal things in life. I would\u0026rsquo;ve never cared to think twice about the intricacies of designing buildings and urban spaces, had it not been for this book. This serves as a gentle introduction to the fascinating study of how subtle differences in design of public spaces affect interactions on a much more broader scale.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/life-between-buildings/","summary":"A gentle introduction to the study of buildings and the way they enable societal interactions.","title":"Life Between Buildings by Jan Gehl"},{"content":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Check it out on Letterboxd\nWe are all empty houses, waiting for someone to open the lock and set us free.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s something romantic about living on extremes. This applies as much to my film taste as it does to my day-to-day life. Nowhere is this more evident than in a crucial element of cinema - dialogues. On the one hand, you have Celine and Jesse showing us the entire world through their words, while on the other you have Sun and Tae doing the same thing without speaking a word. Both are equally satisfying for the soul.\nA lovely introduction to the cinema of Kim Ki-Duk.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema/3-iron/","summary":"A film where everything is conveyed through glances.","title":"3 Iron (2004) by Kim Ki-duk"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nEthics is hard.\nIf I\u0026rsquo;ve learnt something all these years, it is this universal maxim. Everybody wishes they\u0026rsquo;d make ethically sound choices in their lives, but more often than not, ethical choices are in contrast with cost and convenience. Nowhere is this more apparent than the way we consume food.\nThere are a lot of similarities between food and religion. Both are deeply personal choices which are erroneously thought of as having a clear, set winning answer. Both divide people into disjoint sets where they vehemently try to outdo one another in following \u0026ldquo;The Right Way\u0026rdquo;. And of course, both are deeply political.\nMy personal journey in food, as in religion, has been quite tumultuous. Coming from a vegetarian family, I used to feel discomfort in sitting at the same table where somebody was eating meat, used to scoff at the smell of eggs and couldn\u0026rsquo;t go near anything related to fish (this is still the case). Then somewhere along the way, I decided that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a right to reject things which I haven\u0026rsquo;t experienced myself and started indulging in this forbidden fruit. I tried everything I could get my hands on, but never reached that stage where I could appreciate the hype. Having gotten a taste of the other side, I made the decision to quit everything and slowly move back to being a vegetarian/vegan.\nThis was the point where I started to seek out reasons to convince me of my choice, and came across this book.\nI wouldn\u0026rsquo;t call this a balanced book in the sense that the authors\u0026rsquo; convictions are clear from the start, however where this shines is the way they use evidence to reach their conclusions rather than playing on guilt and shame. The basic fact remains, and this I have confirmed with many of my non-vegetarian friends as well, that we know too little about where our food comes from and our choices would be different if we were armed with this knowledge. The authors visit few American families and observe their eating habits, and then take us through some factory farms where the brutalities are quite graphic and sometimes hard to read and difficult to digest.\nHowever, one qualm that I had while reading through these chapters, was the over-importance of ethics in our everyday choices. Not everyone wants to live a Kantian life full of moments filled with questioning their every choice. Life is hard to live anyway. I was delighted though to find a section dealing with this exhaustion:\nSometimes the very success of the ethical consumer movement and the proliferation of consumer concerns it has spawned seems to threaten the entire ethical consumption project. When one ethical concern is heaped upon another and we struggle to be sure that our purchases do not contribute to slave labor, animal exploitation, land degradation, wetland pollution, rural depopulation, unfair trade practices, global warming, and the destruction of rain-forests, it may all seem so complicated that we could be tempted to forget about everything except eating what we like and can afford.\nI\u0026rsquo;m facing this situation myself when I eat eggs and drink milk in the morning - if every time I consume an animal product, I have to think about where this is coming from and whether I\u0026rsquo;ve unintentionally hurt an animal - to say that my day-to-day life would be unpleasant would be an understatement. However, we should be cautious of throwing the baby out with bathwater - the choice doesn\u0026rsquo;t have to be between over-indulgence and starvation; we just need to be a bit more conscious of what we consume. To borrow an economist\u0026rsquo;s favorite phrase: there\u0026rsquo;s always a trade-off. We just need to be aware of the ones we are making.\nAll in all, I found this to be quite an informative read, albeit a bit dry in places, but would definitely recommend.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/the-way-we-eat/","summary":"The ethical dilemma of eating. Highly recommended!","title":"The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nNow that I\u0026rsquo;ve moved away from reading fiction, I find that I face a lot of inertia to pick up something purely for pleasure. Maybe this is a nasty by-product of wanting to be as \u0026ldquo;productive\u0026rdquo; as possible. But the more I have drifted away from reading for pleasure, more mechanical the whole process has become for me. Partly to avoid this feeling, and partly because of my shame at seeing my bookshelf filled with dusty unread books, I picked up this one to assuage my feelings of guilt.\nI had not expected the journey to be this beautiful!\nSalman Rushdie doesn\u0026rsquo;t need an introduction. He has been routinely hailed amongst one of the best contemporary writers of our time. It only speaks of my ignorance that I had only heard about him because of his controversies - outcry for Satanic Verses, fatwa issued against him - and only knew that one of his novels, Midnight\u0026rsquo;s Children, had won a Booker Prize. I don\u0026rsquo;t have a fond memory of reading Booker Prize winning books, bitter from the day I read The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. But as I got sucked into the universe created by Rushdie, my initial skepticism gave way to awe and admiration.\nRushdie has a peculiar way with words, an authoritative stance where the sentences bend over backwards to dance to the master\u0026rsquo;s tunes. He weaves them in and out and creates intricate relationships between the story, storyteller and reader. You need to be acquainted with the history of India and Pakistan, or at least be familiar with the events surrounding the partition, in order to grasp fully what he has set out here to do. The book is filled with brilliant uses of metaphors and similes, creating a parallel universe of Pakistan during the tumultuous years after partition. The sentences are measured and precise, neatly packed with an intricate plot and the social commentary (with a tinge of satire) leading you towards the destination.\nIf it\u0026rsquo;s not yet clear, I unashamedly loved every part of Shame and I\u0026rsquo;m excited to dig more into Rushdie\u0026rsquo;s works!\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/shame-rushdie/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nNow that I\u0026rsquo;ve moved away from reading fiction, I find that I face a lot of inertia to pick up something purely for pleasure. Maybe this is a nasty by-product of wanting to be as \u0026ldquo;productive\u0026rdquo; as possible. But the more I have drifted away from reading for pleasure, more mechanical the whole process has become for me. Partly to avoid this feeling, and partly because of my shame at seeing my bookshelf filled with dusty unread books, I picked up this one to assuage my feelings of guilt.","title":"Shame by Salman Rushdie"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nPain is inevitable, suffering is optional.\nI have no affinity for running, even for short jogs, and much less for wanting to run long distances. Although this is not because I hate exercises - one of those rare things that I figured out early in life was my desire to remain healthy as long as possible and that of course means I need to keep myself fit - but probably my distaste for running stems from the monotonous nature of the activity. You keep pounding your legs with a short breath and no rest in sight, what is there to enjoy and look forward to?\nMy girlfriend on the other hand, loves running.\nIntrigued by her passion, I began to take a more compassionate look on the whole idea of running, shunning my former dismissive attitude. What is it that motivates people to run marathons, putting their body through excruciating pain for an uncertain reward? It cannot be as simple as just the competitive spirit. In fact, running is exactly opposite of a team sport, it\u0026rsquo;s as solitary an activity as thinking and dreaming. Can it be that the monotonicity itself is part of the charm?\nIn this book, Murakami tries to give an answer to this. Or more accurately, he dissects his own emotions and gives insights on how (long distance) running has been crucial to his writing. Both involve perseverance and intense emotional turmoil. While talking about the different ways in which artists produce creative works, he humbly says:\nWriters who are blessed with in-born talent can freely write novels no matter what they do, or don\u0026rsquo;t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up and with little or no effort, these writers can complete a work. Occasionally, you\u0026rsquo;ll find someone like that, but unfortunately that category wouldn\u0026rsquo;t include me. I haven\u0026rsquo;t spotted any springs nearby. I have to pound the rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of creativity. To write a novel, I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another new, deep hole.\nSeeing it through his eyes, it becomes clear that there are a lot of parallels between running long distances and sustaining a long writing career. He is also not shy about admitting that both of these processes involve sheer repetition of the same thing over and over again:\nI think certain types of processes don\u0026rsquo;t allow for any variation. If you have to be part of that process, all you can do is transform, or perhaps distort, yourself through that persistence repetition and make that process a part of your own personality.\nThis part-memoir, part-love-letter to running is filled with such simple yet important insights. Murakami has made a name for himself as one of the most original writers of the time and the humility with which he lays out himself in these pages is inspiring. In one of those beautiful passages, he talks about the turbulent times of adolescence and how we can cope up with the absurd reality of our imperfections:\nOnce when I was around sixteen and nobody else was home, I stripped naked, stood in front of a large mirror in our house, and checked out my body from top to bottom. As I did this, I made a mental list of all the deficiencies - or what, to me at least, appeared to be deficiencies. For instance (and these are just instances), my eyebrows were too thick, or my fingernails were shaped funny - that sort of thing. As I recall, when I got to twenty-seven items, I got sick of it and gave up. And this is what I thought: If there are this many visible parts of my body that are worse than normal people\u0026rsquo;s, then if I start considering other aspects - personality, brains, athleticism, things of this sort - the list will be endless.\nAs you get older though, through trial and error you learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded. And you start to recognize (or be resigned to the fact) that since your faults and deficiencies are well nigh infinite, you\u0026rsquo;d best figure out your good points and learn to get by with what you have.\nThis book has piqued my interest to give running a try and if I ever manage, in future, to enjoy running long distances, Murakami would certainly have a large role to play.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/running-murakami/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nPain is inevitable, suffering is optional.\nI have no affinity for running, even for short jogs, and much less for wanting to run long distances. Although this is not because I hate exercises - one of those rare things that I figured out early in life was my desire to remain healthy as long as possible and that of course means I need to keep myself fit - but probably my distaste for running stems from the monotonous nature of the activity.","title":"What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nI find India really fascinating sometimes, even though I\u0026rsquo;ve lived my whole life here. What the cultural multitudes and colorful festivals hide underneath is an ugly facade which threatens to break everything that has been built over the years. What I find most fascinating is how we\u0026rsquo;ve conditioned ourselves to ignore the blatant reality and move ahead with an oblivious calm, living in shit and aspiring for the gold.\nCaste and religion are two of the most contentious topics out there, so much ingrained in our day to day life that one cannot even comprehend that any alternatives exist. Ambedkar had tried to show an alternative way out, and it only speaks of the deep-rootedness of the system when all we remember Dr. Ambedkar for is writing the Constitution (albiet not a small feat by any stretch), while all his life he had worked to shake the society off from the chains of caste.\nThis annotated edition is the perfect way to educate oneself about the almost forgotten history of a radical man who dared to question the status quo and to demand justice, fighting not against a foreign invader but with his fellow countrymen, and who has been sidelined from every history book that is taught in the country.\nCaste is part and parcel of a Hindu life. I did not realize or experience this until I entered college. Although it remains rather concealed amongst students, it reared its ugly head whenever the matter of reservation (Affirmative action in west) was discussed. Arundhati Roy put this brilliantly in her forward:\n‘Merit’ is the weapon of choice for an Indian elite that has dominated a system by allegedly divine authorisation, and denied knowledge—of certain kinds—to the subordinated castes for thousands of years. Now that it is being challenged, there have been passionate privileged-caste protests against the policy of reservation in government jobs and student quotas in universities. The presumption is that ‘merit’ exists in an ahistorical social vacuum and that the advantages that come from privileged-caste social networking and the establishment’s entrenched hostility towards the subordinated castes are not factors that deserve consideration. In truth, ‘merit’ has become a euphemism for nepotism.\nEven now when I no longer believe in religion (Hinduism was never my religion, it was my parents\u0026rsquo; religion which I inherited, much like everyone else), I still get asked for my \u0026ldquo;last name\u0026rdquo; as a proxy for my caste. It is so seeped into our consciousness that we can\u0026rsquo;t help but feel a reverence whenever we come across someone from a \u0026ldquo;higher caste\u0026rdquo;, or to feel discomfort when we meet someone from a \u0026ldquo;lower caste\u0026rdquo;. This prejudice even trumps religious beliefs in India - even though their scriptures don\u0026rsquo;t sanction it, the elite Muslims, Sikhs and Christians all practice caste discrimination.\nThe arguments put forward by Ambedkar for breaking up the entire caste system is a brilliant demonstration of the crystal-clear thinking of a man who left such a huge legacy on the Indian subcontinent and made sure that the future of India is steered in the right direction. He is criticised for asking for a radical transformation of society when India needed to unite everyone to win its freedom. What these criticisms seem to miss is that every radical man/woman is considered radical precisely because i) they go against the cultural norms and ii) they question the deep-rooted prejudiced beliefs. There will never come an \u0026ldquo;appropriate\u0026rdquo; time for reforms, as is sadly evident with the still prevalent caste discrimination almost 90 years after Ambedkar decided to storm the gates.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a travesty that he still remains, for the large part, forgotten.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/annihilation-of-caste/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nI find India really fascinating sometimes, even though I\u0026rsquo;ve lived my whole life here. What the cultural multitudes and colorful festivals hide underneath is an ugly facade which threatens to break everything that has been built over the years. What I find most fascinating is how we\u0026rsquo;ve conditioned ourselves to ignore the blatant reality and move ahead with an oblivious calm, living in shit and aspiring for the gold.","title":"Annihilation of Caste(Annotated Edition) by Arundhati Roy"},{"content":"My fascination with the visual media brought me closer to seeing the world through a different lens. This is an ongoing effort to capture what I see and share it with the world.\nYou can browse the images below using left/right keys. All the images are hosted on flickr, I\u0026rsquo;d recommend navigating to my photostream if you want to see them in full size. 1\nYou might need to enable Javascript if you\u0026rsquo;re unable to see the images properly.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/photography/","summary":"My fascination with the visual media brought me closer to seeing the world through a different lens. This is an ongoing effort to capture what I see and share it with the world.\nYou can browse the images below using left/right keys. All the images are hosted on flickr, I\u0026rsquo;d recommend navigating to my photostream if you want to see them in full size. 1\nYou might need to enable Javascript if you\u0026rsquo;re unable to see the images properly.","title":"Photography"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nI have had a very curious relationship with religion, although now that I talk to others, it was a much more normal experience than what I led myself to believe. I followed the typical path of receiving a particular religion from my parents (born a \u0026ldquo;Hindu child\u0026rdquo;), which had a supporting role in my life up until my late-teenage/early-adolescent years.\nAs is the norm for every child brought up in religion, I used to consider myself special believing that I had a \u0026ldquo;personal relationship\u0026rdquo; with God. There are so many good things about religion, but this in particular I believe to be the best part - this soothing feeling that somebody is watching over you in times of distress. During my early college years when I lost my faith, I was most afraid of having lost this rescuer of last resort (I wrote a short poem on this which you can read here. During times of despair, I frequently wondered what would\u0026rsquo;ve happened had I not been brought up in a religious family.\nThis book combines two of the most morally contentious issues that have always puzzled me - Religion and having a child. While I don\u0026rsquo;t swing to the other extreme of subscribing to antinatalistic views, I do frequently wonder how it is that people don\u0026rsquo;t question the morality of bringing a sentient being into the world, whose life (to a major extent) will be affected by how they are brought up by their parents. Children are shaped by the identity of their parents during their formative years, and require a significant struggle during their adolescence to be able to make independent decisions of their own. This struggle is more pronounced in matters of faith - an overwhelming majority of children wind up believing in the same gods that their parents believe in.\nWhat can be done to lessen this automatic behavior so that children are more confident of picking their own battles and faith? This book presents insights from the people who tried to do exactly that.\nIt is a wonderful collection of essays from parents who are non-religious and want to bring up their child in an environment which enables them to question the authority and dogma. While just raising them secular doesn\u0026rsquo;t make them superior to everybody else - bigotry is never dependent on faith - it is the independent exploration that is crucial. The essays deal with nuances of raising children in secular homes, going pretty much against the society, and how to deal with disagreements. Unfortunately, there are few essays in the end which swings the pendulum to the other end, concerned with finding \u0026ldquo;Humanist\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Unitarian\u0026rdquo; communities which I found to be dull, however, the rest of the book remains a pleasant and insightful read.\nMy notebook is filled with highlights from the book, but there\u0026rsquo;s one paragraph in particular that I want to share, which nicely defines the central theme of these essays.\nOne thread runs throughout this book: Encourage a child to think well, then trust her to do so. Removing religion by no means guarantees kids will think independently and well. Consider religion itself: Kids growing up in a secular home are at the same risk of making uninformed decisions about religion as are those in deeply religious homes. In order to really think for themselves about religion, kids must learn as much as possible about religion as a human cultural expression while being kept free of the sickening idea that they will be rewarded in heaven or punished in hell based on what they decide—a bit of intellectual terrorism we should never inflict on our kids, nor on each other. They must also learn what has been said and thought in opposition to religious ideas. If my kids think independently and well, then end up coming to conclusions different from my own—well, I’d have to consider the possibility that I’ve gotten it all wrong, then. Either way, in order to own and be nourished by their convictions, kids must ultimately come to them independently. Part of our wonderfully complex job as parents is to facilitate that process without controlling it.\nI\u0026rsquo;d highly recommend this book to everyone.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/parenting/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nI have had a very curious relationship with religion, although now that I talk to others, it was a much more normal experience than what I led myself to believe. I followed the typical path of receiving a particular religion from my parents (born a \u0026ldquo;Hindu child\u0026rdquo;), which had a supporting role in my life up until my late-teenage/early-adolescent years.\nAs is the norm for every child brought up in religion, I used to consider myself special believing that I had a \u0026ldquo;personal relationship\u0026rdquo; with God.","title":"Parenting Beyond Belief by Dale McGowan"},{"content":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Check it out on Letterboxd\nOver the years, I have increasingly gravitated towards films where supposedly \u0026ldquo;nothing happens\u0026rdquo;. Characters talk, no attempt is made to instill a moral point into the minds of the audience, which is usually accompanied with long, patient shots of people existing in their environments. This was an excellent specimen of the same dish.\nI had watched Once Upon a Time in Anatolia from the same director previously and much like films by Wes Anderson, I could immediately tell this was Ceylan\u0026rsquo;s film right from the start, although these two directors could not be any more different. The way Ceylan deals with landscapes and how people co-exist with nature is simply breathtaking. Alas, I neither have the vocabulary nor the expertise to appreciate much less dissect a film like this, but let these screenings be my own private film school and I hope that at the end of this year (which I\u0026rsquo;ve dedicated to watching foreign language films only), I would at least be in a position where I can better appreciate these masters of their crafts.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema/winter-sleep/","summary":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Check it out on Letterboxd\nOver the years, I have increasingly gravitated towards films where supposedly \u0026ldquo;nothing happens\u0026rdquo;. Characters talk, no attempt is made to instill a moral point into the minds of the audience, which is usually accompanied with long, patient shots of people existing in their environments. This was an excellent specimen of the same dish.\nI had watched Once Upon a Time in Anatolia from the same director previously and much like films by Wes Anderson, I could immediately tell this was Ceylan\u0026rsquo;s film right from the start, although these two directors could not be any more different.","title":"Winter Sleep (2014) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan"},{"content":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Check it out on Letterboxd\nA slow, methodical display of patience and absurdity juxtaposed on the vast landscape, this film has something else going for it. When you read the synopsis or look at the posters, you expect a certain police procedural drama - the kind of which you\u0026rsquo;ve been accustomed to till date. What you get is a completely different take on the trope.\nThe cinematography seems out of this world, and the melancholic doctor only adds to the moodiness of the whole atmosphere. One little scene in the middle will remain in my heart for a long time.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema/anatolia/","summary":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Check it out on Letterboxd\nA slow, methodical display of patience and absurdity juxtaposed on the vast landscape, this film has something else going for it. When you read the synopsis or look at the posters, you expect a certain police procedural drama - the kind of which you\u0026rsquo;ve been accustomed to till date. What you get is a completely different take on the trope.","title":"Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan"},{"content":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Check it out on Letterboxd\nMotorcycling community is laden with fist-pumping-muscle-bulging-neckbeardy-speed-ninjas-Harley-fans, and it usually gets a bad rap all across the world. Gaurav Jani is none of these things. His passion and humility and curious nature reminded me why I loved biking in the first place. This is a must-watch for anyone fascinated with two wheels and the places they enable you to visit.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema/riding-solo/","summary":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Check it out on Letterboxd\nMotorcycling community is laden with fist-pumping-muscle-bulging-neckbeardy-speed-ninjas-Harley-fans, and it usually gets a bad rap all across the world. Gaurav Jani is none of these things. His passion and humility and curious nature reminded me why I loved biking in the first place. This is a must-watch for anyone fascinated with two wheels and the places they enable you to visit.","title":"Riding Solo to the Top of the World (2006) by Gaurav Jani"},{"content":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ Check it out on Letterboxd\nThere are films which you wish you had watched earlier in life, and there are others which don\u0026rsquo;t make sense until you have had your fair share of world experiences. Waking Life falls in the former category.\nThe college sophomore me would have been really excited about discussing vague notions of self and freedom and free will and morality and dreams - and don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, mid-twenties me is equally as excited about these things as my former self, if not more so - but the problem lies in the superficiality of it all. Now that I\u0026rsquo;ve had more nuanced discussions about these philosophical conundrums and have read a fair amount of academic literature, the surface level discussions here leave a lot to be desired.\nHaving said that, since I put Linklater on a pedestal, this by no means make it an average film. The visuals are cool, the animations are innovative and the ideas discussed, no matter how superficial, ultimately make you think and mull them over afterwards. That is more than what any filmmaker can aspire for and in the end, makes this a watch worthwhile for me.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema/waking-life/","summary":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ Check it out on Letterboxd\nThere are films which you wish you had watched earlier in life, and there are others which don\u0026rsquo;t make sense until you have had your fair share of world experiences. Waking Life falls in the former category.\nThe college sophomore me would have been really excited about discussing vague notions of self and freedom and free will and morality and dreams - and don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, mid-twenties me is equally as excited about these things as my former self, if not more so - but the problem lies in the superficiality of it all.","title":"Waking Life (2001) by Richard Linklater"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\n(For some reason, this review has resonated with a lot of people - it\u0026rsquo;s currently the top review for the book!)\nI don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of friends who are supporters of the ruling BJP (well at least the ones who have disclosed it publicly), and consequently whenever the conversation shifts towards the ongoings in India, more often than not, we find ourselves agreeing with each other. Although this is perfectly alright for me on most days, on few ocaasions, I find a shadow of a doubt slowly creeping up inside - what if I\u0026rsquo;m living inside a bubble, an echo-chamber where I only get exposed to the ideas which I already hold to be true, especially relevant now that everything in our lives are getting regulated by algorithms. Whenever this confirmation bias hits me, I long to read something contrarian, to engage with the other side and to try to put myself in their shoes.\nSo it was with a pleasant surprise that I found out one day, one of my friends \u0026ldquo;coming out of the closet\u0026rdquo; and to declare him(her)self to be a supporter of the ruling party. I grabbed the chance to finally be able to hear the arguments from the other side and so, I broke my cardinal rule of not engaging in political debates on social media and contacted him/her. The result was devastating. We passionately debated our views and had heated discussions throughout the day, in the end agreeing that maybe we shouldn\u0026rsquo;t have bothered to hit each other up after all. I was visibly distressed for a few days after this incident, as if a small flicker of hope had died in that encounter.\nIf two educated and privileged youths in their early twenties were unable to agree on something as basic as whether Muslims deserve to live in India, or whether India should really become a \u0026ldquo;Hindu Rashtra\u0026rdquo; or not, what hope could I have from the millions of others who didn\u0026rsquo;t have the same privileges as us?\nReading this book brought that hopelessness to the front once again. There are hard-hitting truths written here, things that we would sooner like to forget lest they cause us pain and make vivid the grim reality of our times. But like a festering wound which devours our body if unattended, ignorance is not bliss but a vicious disease which paralyzes us faster than we might think.\nMy appeal to whoever is reading this would be - reach out to others, engage in conversations, don\u0026rsquo;t dismiss the whole debate as \u0026ldquo;unnecessary politics\u0026rdquo; - your mere existence is political. Politics is not about discussing who should be the next PM, it\u0026rsquo;s about discussing ideas and how you view others who are different than yourself, to engage with empathy and to embrace the differences, and to speak out against wrongs.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll leave you with a powerful passage from the book itself, where Arundhati Roy laments about the role each of us plays in how the future shapes itself:\nAfter twenty years of writing fiction and nonfiction that tracks the rise of Hindu nationalism, after years of reading about the rise and fall of European fascism, I have begun to wonder why fascism—although it is by no means the same everywhere—is so recognizable across histories and cultures. It’s not just the fascists that are recognizable—the strong man, the ideological army, the squalid dreams of Aryan superiority, the dehumanization and ghettoization of the “internal enemy,” the massive and utterly ruthless propaganda machine, the false-flag attacks and assassinations, the fawning businessmen and film stars, the attacks on universities, the fear of intellectuals, the specter of detention camps, and the hate-fueled zombie population that chants the Eastern equivalent of “Heil! Heil! Heil!” It’s also the rest of us—the exhausted, quarreling opposition, the vain, nit-picking Left, the equivocating liberals who spent years building the road that has led to the situation we find ourselves in, and are now behaving like shocked, righteous rabbits who never imagined that rabbits were an important ingredient of the rabbit stew that was always on the menu. And, of course, the wolves who ignored the decent folks’ counsel of moderation and sloped off into the wilderness to howl unceasingly, futilely—and, if they were female, then “shrilly” and “hysterically”—at the terrifying, misshapen moon. All of us are recognizable.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/azadi/","summary":"A series of essays on the bleak reality in India. Highly recommended.","title":"Azadi by Arundhati Roy"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nReading fiction has always been a double-edged sword for me. Some of the most intimate moments I\u0026rsquo;ve spent alone is while reading fictional stories, while at the same time, feeling a pang of disappointment for myself because I wasn\u0026rsquo;t doing anything \u0026ldquo;productive.\u0026rdquo; Is this mere entertainment? Am I just escaping my real-life responsibilities and reading stories of make-believe? While I still haven\u0026rsquo;t found sincere answers to these questions, I\u0026rsquo;ve grown more confident of what I enjoy and what I don\u0026rsquo;t, which has consequently helped me find peace with this conflict. Over the years, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that reading good literature is therapeutic for me - not to be used as an afterthought but essential to keep me functional.\nStoner was another great session in my therapy.\nA story that on the surface feels depressing and sad, but curiously enough has immense hopeful undertones. This is the ordinary story of a man whose only goals in life are to attain two of the most notoriously difficult things known to mankind - knowledge, and love. He fails in both, but if you look underneath the surface, he succeeds in attaining both as well - just enough to make him feel satisfied but not enough to make the world think the same. The story is simple. A man hailing from rural American farmland attends university, falls in love with literature, and decides to dedicate himself to fulfill his passion. He starts teaching at the university, gets married by following his desire, but without falling in love, has a passionate love affair and, in the end, dies without having accomplished much.\nBut the way Mr. Williams writes this simple story is mesmerizing, to say the least. There\u0026rsquo;s an existential dread in all the interactions, always pulsing with energy, and the prose flows with a perfection, almost to a fault. When I looked back at the book having finished my 4-hour marathon run through it, I noticed that for the first 100 pages or so, the book had a lot of markings - sentences I had loved, descriptions I had enjoyed - however as it moved further, I got tired of doing so, simply because it only got better and better. If I had continued, the whole book would have been messed up by my pencil.\nThroughout the book, I could sense Camus\u0026rsquo;s influence on his writing; the existential dread always present. All the characters felt as if they could easily exist in my universe. The slow torment that the protagonist went through, at times, felt too personal, as if someone had mercilessly ripped out a few chapters from my life and laid it bare for the world to see. One of these moving passages is written at approximately two-third of the book, which I can\u0026rsquo;t help but quote below:\nIn his extreme youth, Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity, he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which he ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.\nTo illustrate an example of the existential feelings at play in the novel, here\u0026rsquo;s another passage where Stoner wonders about the futility of knowledge at a tumultuous point in his life:\nHe had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge; that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.\nI should stop lest I give myself a free rein and quote the entire book itself. And so I shall stop here. Pick this book up from dusty old shelves of second-hand bookshops and pass it onto others with a note saying, \u0026ldquo;Thank you for accepting this gift. Thank you for existing.\u0026rdquo; Maybe someday somewhere, this gift would end up saving someone.\nP.S: If one picture could summarise this whole book for me, it would be the famous oil painting by Edward Hopper, named Nighthawks.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/stoner/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nReading fiction has always been a double-edged sword for me. Some of the most intimate moments I\u0026rsquo;ve spent alone is while reading fictional stories, while at the same time, feeling a pang of disappointment for myself because I wasn\u0026rsquo;t doing anything \u0026ldquo;productive.\u0026rdquo; Is this mere entertainment? Am I just escaping my real-life responsibilities and reading stories of make-believe? While I still haven\u0026rsquo;t found sincere answers to these questions, I\u0026rsquo;ve grown more confident of what I enjoy and what I don\u0026rsquo;t, which has consequently helped me find peace with this conflict.","title":"Stoner by John Williams"},{"content":" I don\u0026rsquo;t know why, but I liked the eyes-only version more. Linked below is the work-in-progress sketch:\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/drawings/a-beautiful-woman/","summary":"I don\u0026rsquo;t know why, but I liked the eyes-only version more. Linked below is the work-in-progress sketch:","title":"A Beautiful Woman"},{"content":" I used to be obsessed with Sherlock (the HBO show) during the time it aired, and part of my fascination was with Martin Freeman here, who so brilliantly played the role of Watson.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/drawings/martin-freeman/","summary":"I used to be obsessed with Sherlock (the HBO show) during the time it aired, and part of my fascination was with Martin Freeman here, who so brilliantly played the role of Watson.","title":"Martin Freeman"},{"content":" I have a particular affinity towards this sketch as I was very apprehensive about attempting Einstein, his face had much more complexity than what I usually dealt with, but it turned out good enough in the end.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/drawings/einstein/","summary":"I have a particular affinity towards this sketch as I was very apprehensive about attempting Einstein, his face had much more complexity than what I usually dealt with, but it turned out good enough in the end.","title":"Einstein"},{"content":" Completely botched this drawing, but it reminds me of the drawing streak I used to have back when I was in my hometown during college vacations.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/drawings/teresa/","summary":"Completely botched this drawing, but it reminds me of the drawing streak I used to have back when I was in my hometown during college vacations.","title":"Mother Teresa"},{"content":" I was either on acid or I had watched a sad movie before attempting this piece. A strange juxtaposition of Chaplin and Hitler.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/drawings/chaplin/","summary":"I was either on acid or I had watched a sad movie before attempting this piece. A strange juxtaposition of Chaplin and Hitler.","title":"Charlie Chaplin (um... not quite)"},{"content":" My first attempt at drawing after dabbling in caricature pieces in my childhood :)\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/drawings/gandhi/","summary":"My first attempt at drawing after dabbling in caricature pieces in my childhood :)","title":"Gandhi"},{"content":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Check out this review on Letterboxd\nAnhedonia. The Wikipedia entry for this word says:\na diverse array of deficits in hedonic function, including reduced motivation or ability to experience pleasure.\nAt one point or another, we have all experienced some version of this phenomenon - may be characterized by an oversaturation of love, or caused by a prolonged mediocrity in life, or as in the case of our protagonist here, the complete loss of will and motivation to feel anything.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s something intriguing about the slice-of-life cinematic style - it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a dramatic plot, no pulsating action or suspenseful storyline to keep us on the edge of our seats - and yet, I can\u0026rsquo;t seem to be able to leave the film to grab even a glass of water. Linklater is one of the masters of this style, keeping the viewers engaged via dialogues. Here, Joachim Trier opts for a more subtle approach of filmmaking, making us observe things rather than spoon-feeding us via expository dialogues. There are some powerful scenes scattered throughout the film. With the opening montage, we are absorbed into the old and beautiful city of Oslo, making us nostalgic about a place we\u0026rsquo;ve never been to. And then comes a powerful scene - we see the protagonist going for a walk into the forest, a shaky camera holding the inscrutable face of Anders in the frame. Once he reaches the lake, he fills up his jacket pockets with rocks and attempts to drown himself in the lake. The camera stays steady over the surface of the lake, instead of following him underwater, we shift in our seats - uncomfortable with anticipation. The tension resolves as we see Anders gasp out of the water and go back dejectedly towards his home. We learn that he\u0026rsquo;s a recovering addict, currently in an institution, and has suicidal tendencies.\nAll of this is shown without any soundtrack or dialogues.\nAnother scene that I found particularly powerful was the café scene. The way Anders selectively chooses to listen to particular conversations, especially a girl reciting her list of things she\u0026rsquo;d want to do over the course of her life, there\u0026rsquo;s a strong contrast between the girl\u0026rsquo;s (perhaps naive) optimism and Anders\u0026rsquo; pessimism for life. Anders has lost his ability to feel motivation or pleasure as he desperately looks for some way to remedy this. Anders\u0026rsquo; best friend quotes Proust during one of their discussions:\nTrying to understand desire by watching a nude woman is like a child taking apart a clock to understand time.\nAnders is trying to do exactly that, looking for some way to connect with the outside world without losing himself. There\u0026rsquo;s not a single pivotal moment in the film where one can say that this is where he stops trying, instead we see him increasingly spiraling out of the natural order and getting distant from the illusory ideal he was hoping for in the first half of the film. He hesitantly goes to a friend\u0026rsquo;s party, trying to achieve some normalcy in his otherwise fucked up life, but there he is reminded of the same old crowd of people who are miserable and unhappy with their lives and are trying to drown their sorrows with alcohol - and this reminder is too much for Anders. He begins to feel convinced that there\u0026rsquo;s no way for him to get out of this death spiral and begins to let go. There\u0026rsquo;s no hope left for him. During one of the last scenes, he goes to his ancestral home where he finds a house full of reminders of his happy past, tries for the last time to feel some emotion by playing the old piano but halts abruptly as it\u0026rsquo;s evident he has lost his emotional connection with this once-beloved playing like everything else. The last sigh we hear from him is the only way he knows of feeling something - drugs, as he lets go for the last time.\nThe depression of a lone man struggling with mental health issues is shown beautifully here, even though the conclusions are tragic. Lately, I\u0026rsquo;ve been getting a lot of recommendations to watch Scandinavian movies and I\u0026rsquo;ve been loving them! This film will go down as yet another one of the great, grounded movies about depression, addiction, and city life in my diary.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema/oslo-august/","summary":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Check out this review on Letterboxd\nAnhedonia. The Wikipedia entry for this word says:\na diverse array of deficits in hedonic function, including reduced motivation or ability to experience pleasure.\nAt one point or another, we have all experienced some version of this phenomenon - may be characterized by an oversaturation of love, or caused by a prolonged mediocrity in life, or as in the case of our protagonist here, the complete loss of will and motivation to feel anything.","title":"Oslo, August 31st (2011) by Joachim Trier"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nHow to fool the world and become a Billionaire I remember hearing about Elizabeth Holmes when I was in my late teens, at that impressionable age when you get hyper-inspired by reading about icons that are going to change the world. There was a profile of her in Wired, with an eye-catching image of her wearing a turtleneck black sweater holding what looked like a test-tube with a tiny amount of blood with a science-y background. I remember it had made quite a distinct impression on my mind, no doubt helped by the fact that the profile had described her as \u0026ldquo;this Stanford dropout 20-something who was hailed as being a younger version of Einstein, was going to change the world\u0026rdquo;.\nUndoubtedly, as so often happens, I forgot about people who were gonna change the world as I grew up. Then I heard about this book last year, which was getting enormously praised for its exposé of a Silicon Valley firm and was really surprised to find out that the company at the center of the storm was Theranos, the brainchild of Elizabeth Holmes. This book reads like a detective novel, meticulously giving the clues and binding the threads of the deception that Holmes had so carefully and brilliantly constructed and managed to fool the entire world.\nRead this one if you want to get a lesson in how not to emulate a leader.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/bad-blood/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nHow to fool the world and become a Billionaire I remember hearing about Elizabeth Holmes when I was in my late teens, at that impressionable age when you get hyper-inspired by reading about icons that are going to change the world. There was a profile of her in Wired, with an eye-catching image of her wearing a turtleneck black sweater holding what looked like a test-tube with a tiny amount of blood with a science-y background.","title":"Bad Blood by John Carreyrou"},{"content":"Check it out on Instagram\nI\u0026rsquo;m scared.\nNo, not because there\u0026rsquo;s a pandemic going on,\neven though that itself is enough\nto make one lose their mind.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s another deadly virus crawling\nits way into my whole being.\nSlowly eating away at my sanity,\nfeasting on my thoughts,\nmutating inside my head as if a colony of ants was given\nan open invitation to a room full of sugary syrup.\nI\u0026rsquo;m disintegrating.\nFunny how the same thoughts,\nwho once used to tell me there\u0026rsquo;s an ocean of possibilities out there;\nare slowly drowning me into the same pool,\nreplacing me, devouring me\nbit-by-bit\nas if my feet are tied with stones of expectations\nand I keep swimming to the bottom, mistaking it for the shore.\nSplash. Splash. Splash.\nI see people making art, saving lives, reading books, writing novels,\ncooking food, running home marathons -\nresolving to turn this gloom into resilient happiness.\nAnd I can\u0026rsquo;t help but feel disgusted\nat my curled up crying self in the bedroom corner,\nstruggling to tell apart midnight from noon.\nWhen I go to the kitchen to make my first\n(and only) meal of the day,\nthe knife shivers, even though my hands are steady\nit fears for the fingers that are too close to the blunt edge,\nfearing that as the layers of onions come apart, the body holding the knife\nwill shed its pretentious layers as well,\nbaring naked the vast void in the center.\nHow many layers will I have to cut\nbefore I find myself again?\nI\u0026rsquo;m scared to find out.\nBut there\u0026rsquo;s hope.\nA distant glimmer at the horizon, but it\u0026rsquo;s there.\nCounting my breath, one step at a time,\ndragging myself through the dark tunnel,\nfollowing the whisper that says\nit gets better.\nit always does.\nit has to.\nA poem penned down during the Coronavirus pandemic. I see people who are struggling with mental health issues which, I can only imagine, would have exacerbated during these times. Take care of yourself, folks. Don\u0026rsquo;t forget that you matter. A lot.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/scared-in-lockdown/","summary":"Check it out on Instagram\nI\u0026rsquo;m scared.\nNo, not because there\u0026rsquo;s a pandemic going on,\neven though that itself is enough\nto make one lose their mind.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s another deadly virus crawling\nits way into my whole being.\nSlowly eating away at my sanity,\nfeasting on my thoughts,\nmutating inside my head as if a colony of ants was given\nan open invitation to a room full of sugary syrup.","title":"Fear"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nA disappointing jumble of thoughts Disappointed.\nI am an atheist interested in the power of mindfulness and the whole world of so-called spirituality, so naturally, I am the ideal audience that Sam Harris is looking for. But it disappointed in almost every domain that I had expectations in. Using deep-sounding difficult words and wrapping them in an almost mythical aura of \u0026ldquo;Consciousness\u0026rdquo;, this one was a huge letdown. The irony is that I\u0026rsquo;ve been following his mindfulness meditation course and it\u0026rsquo;s been the opposite experience there - in fact, his meditation course itself was what motivated me to pick up this book.\nSave yourself the trouble of reading on why to meditate and instead dive into doing the practice itself and judge for yourself.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/waking-up/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nA disappointing jumble of thoughts Disappointed.\nI am an atheist interested in the power of mindfulness and the whole world of so-called spirituality, so naturally, I am the ideal audience that Sam Harris is looking for. But it disappointed in almost every domain that I had expectations in. Using deep-sounding difficult words and wrapping them in an almost mythical aura of \u0026ldquo;Consciousness\u0026rdquo;, this one was a huge letdown.","title":"Waking Up by Sam Harris"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nWorld history in a nutshell More than 1100 pages, this behemoth of a book still fails to capture the whole essence of world history - and rightly so. How can you combine over 2000 years of human history and still do justice to every element? But the unique manner in which this book - or more appropriately, collection of letters - has been written, it shines brightly amongst the plethora of history books you can find on this vast subject of world history.\nLately and unfortunately, people in my country have been going down a dangerous political hole and it is almost becoming a fashion statement now to indulge in tales of \u0026ldquo;revisionist history\u0026rdquo;, especially when it\u0026rsquo;s related to foundations of India and the exact roles played by political parties of the time. It\u0026rsquo;s shameful to hear people bashing Nehru for whatever \u0026ldquo;wrongs\u0026rdquo; he committed, while at the same time, being ignorant about his accomplishments and the monumentally difficult task he faced of leading and building India during its first few years of Independence.\nThe personal nature of the letters and the choice of the subject notwithstanding - or more accurately, I should say because of these characteristics - this book is also a revealing window to the character and intelligence of our first Prime Minister.\nThis one would surely go onto my favorites\u0026rsquo; stand :)\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/glimpses-of-world-history/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nWorld history in a nutshell More than 1100 pages, this behemoth of a book still fails to capture the whole essence of world history - and rightly so. How can you combine over 2000 years of human history and still do justice to every element? But the unique manner in which this book - or more appropriately, collection of letters - has been written, it shines brightly amongst the plethora of history books you can find on this vast subject of world history.","title":"Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru"},{"content":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ Check out this review on Letterboxd\nYou can spot Wes Anderson trademark from a mile ago, although this is the only movie by him which left me dissatisfied. The unique and swift camera movements are still there, the colors still pop out like from another universe, the absurd comic timings still bring a smile to your face - but you won\u0026rsquo;t feel the kind of personal emotional investment into the characters like you would in the rest of his filmography. Still, for a Wes Anderson fan, this would be a nice enough movie.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema/darjeeling/","summary":"Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ Check out this review on Letterboxd\nYou can spot Wes Anderson trademark from a mile ago, although this is the only movie by him which left me dissatisfied. The unique and swift camera movements are still there, the colors still pop out like from another universe, the absurd comic timings still bring a smile to your face - but you won\u0026rsquo;t feel the kind of personal emotional investment into the characters like you would in the rest of his filmography.","title":"The Darjeeling Limited (2007) by Wes Anderson"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nReasons you should read this book:\nIf you\u0026rsquo;ve ever had a panic attack. If you\u0026rsquo;ve ever counted the number of times the ceiling fan rotates, just so you could avoid dealing with the endless voices in your head. If you\u0026rsquo;ve ever felt ashamed to admit that you might be suffering from the D-word. If reading about personal stories of how people overcame their mental illnesses soothes you. Because why not. A lucid, non-linear and a sort of haphazard look at the most personal struggle anyone can go through, give this one a read if you want to know what it feels like to have depression.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/reasons-to-stay-alive/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nReasons you should read this book:\nIf you\u0026rsquo;ve ever had a panic attack. If you\u0026rsquo;ve ever counted the number of times the ceiling fan rotates, just so you could avoid dealing with the endless voices in your head. If you\u0026rsquo;ve ever felt ashamed to admit that you might be suffering from the D-word. If reading about personal stories of how people overcame their mental illnesses soothes you.","title":"Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nI have been a lover of music since my early childhood - runs in the family - and have imitated and performed songs (mostly inside my own head) on numerous occasions. Despite this lifelong love affair with music of all kinds, there was one particular genre of music that always baffled me. Mostly because of my own ignorance, but partially also because nobody else was talking about it. Nobody else in my own vicinity that is. It didn\u0026rsquo;t play on the radio, you won\u0026rsquo;t hear it playing on any of the countless music channels and certainly, nobody was going on tours giving live performances.\nThis was the wonderful genre of concert music.\nWe have all probably heard the following names: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky. But, and this is especially true in India, very few listeners would be able to identify a piece of concert music by its composer, the way they would a Linkin Park song for example. Now I realize the comparison is a bit unfair, and I\u0026rsquo;m not trying to pit one musician against another - it\u0026rsquo;s just to illustrate a point - the point being that we are grossly unfamiliar with these great composers apart from reading a passage about them in history books about what geniuses they were.\nThis series of lectures is dedicated towards amending this misstep. Narrated by the ever passionate and wonderful Dr. Robert Greenberg, this is a collection of 48 lectures of 45 minutes each (36 hours in total), which takes you on a musical journey starting from the ancient Greek music up until the first half of the twentieth century. For the lack of a better word, these lectures are absolutely amazing - especially because of the narrator. His enthusiasm is simply so infectious!\nDo give this one a listen. I promise it\u0026rsquo;ll be worth it.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/great-music/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nI have been a lover of music since my early childhood - runs in the family - and have imitated and performed songs (mostly inside my own head) on numerous occasions. Despite this lifelong love affair with music of all kinds, there was one particular genre of music that always baffled me. Mostly because of my own ignorance, but partially also because nobody else was talking about it.","title":"How to Listen to and Understand Great Music by Robert Greenberg"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nThere are few books which leave you in a mesmerizing state after having read them. You ponder about it for days to come, want to scream your head off about it to anyone who\u0026rsquo;d listen, and then dwell in this fear of picking up another book because how can something else ever come close to being this perfect! I have felt this way before - first when I\u0026rsquo;d finished The Complete Sherlock Holmes, later when I was left in a daze for multiple days after finishing the notorious and brilliant House of Leaves, and much more recently when I was unable to sleep after reading Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.\nBehave is one of those few books.\nI first heard about Dr. Sapolsky when my girlfriend recommended me one of his lectures on Depression from his popular lecture series titled \u0026ldquo;Human Behavioral Biology\u0026rdquo; (Playlist available on Youtube). I was immediately taken in. He reminded me of those hilariously brilliant and yet humble grand-dads with whom you can be best friends with (of course, only seen in the movies) - and I picked up this book the very next day.\nDr. Sapolsky is a neuroendocrinologist by profession and currently a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford. To save you the pain of having to look up neuroendocrinologist - it\u0026rsquo;s the branch of biology which studies how the brain regulates the hormonal activity in the body. From the late 70s to early 90s, he spent a vast majority of his time studying the social behaviors of baboons in the wild - something that features prominently in this book where he discusses different social behaviors of humans and how they relate to our biology. He writes early on in the book -\nSome of the time, we are indeed just like any other animal. When we’re scared, we secrete the same hormone as would some subordinate fish getting hassled by a bully. The biology of pleasure involves the same brain chemicals in us as in a capybara. Neurons from humans and brine shrimp work the same way. House two female rats together, and over the course of weeks, they will synchronize their reproductive cycles so that they wind up ovulating within a few hours of each other. Try the same with two human females (as reported in some but not all studies), and something similar occurs. It’s called the Wellesley effect, first shown with roommates at all-women’s Wellesley College. And when it comes to violence, we can be just like some other apes—we pummel, we cudgel, we throw rocks, we kill with our bare hands. So some of the time an intellectual challenge is to assimilate how similar we can be to other species. In other cases, the challenge is to appreciate how, though human physiology resembles that of other species, we use the physiology in novel ways. We activate the classical physiology of vigilance while watching a scary movie. We activate a stress response when thinking about mortality. We secrete hormones related to nurturing and social bonding but in response to an adorable baby panda. And this certainly applies to aggression—we use the same muscles as does a male chimp attacking a sexual competitor, but we use them to harm someone because of their ideology.\nThe book is dissected neatly into chapters where he takes up a behavior and tries to explain which factors might have influenced that behavior - ranging from seconds to minutes to days to months to years to millennia before. The latter half of the book delves more into sociology - how our behaviors get influenced by our environments and cultures and how much of a role biology plays in that. Dr. Sapolsky is a master of wit and humor while also hitting the nail on its head with preciseness. He discusses the \u0026ldquo;popular\u0026rdquo; hormones and their typical roles in human behavior as portrayed by media - like Testesterones make you aggressive, to \u0026ldquo;love\u0026rdquo; hormone to mirror neurons to our love for dopamine hits - and argues that the reality is much more nuanced than what is portrayed. In a characteristic Sapolsky way, he talks about this in one of the passages -\nVarious muscles have moved, and a behavior has happened. Perhaps it is a good act: you’ve empathically touched the arm of a suffering person. Perhaps it is a foul act: you’ve pulled a trigger, targeting an innocent person. Perhaps it is a good act: you’ve pulled a trigger, drawing fire to save others. Perhaps it is a foul act: you’ve touched the arm of someone, starting a chain of libidinal events that betray a loved one. Acts that, as emphasized, are definable only by context.\nContext, context, context. Everything is dependant on the context. The book touches on and discusses a wide variety of problems and their causes - something which is easily conveyed to me by a large number of underlined notes present in my Kindle. In bringing together two of the most complicated fields that exist - human behavior and the functions of the brain - Dr. Sapolsky has taken a hard challenge, something which he acknowledges in one of the closing passages:\nIf you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It’s complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead, everything just modulates something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but now we realize that . . .” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue, it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite. And so on. Eventually, it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try.\nIn the end, I\u0026rsquo;d say it\u0026rsquo;s one of the best books to come out in recent years and although you might (as I did) get intimidated by the technicalities of biology and the sheer length of the book - Dr. Sapolsky is such an entertaining and humble writer that you\u0026rsquo;ll hardly feel the complications yourself and will end up profoundly enjoying the ride.\nNow, it\u0026rsquo;s time to say goodbye to the civilized world while I go on a Youtube binge-watch - something about which I would\u0026rsquo;ve scolded myself before had the pursuit not been of watching this man deliver hours of lectures on Human behavioral biology. Au revoir!\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/behave-review/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nThere are few books which leave you in a mesmerizing state after having read them. You ponder about it for days to come, want to scream your head off about it to anyone who\u0026rsquo;d listen, and then dwell in this fear of picking up another book because how can something else ever come close to being this perfect! I have felt this way before - first when I\u0026rsquo;d finished The Complete Sherlock Holmes, later when I was left in a daze for multiple days after finishing the notorious and brilliant House of Leaves, and much more recently when I was unable to sleep after reading Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.","title":"Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nStarted with a tightly-knit structure, but faltered at the end. The last few chapters were a slog to get through - mostly because of numerous \u0026ldquo;business-class\u0026rdquo; style case studies.\nMain takeaway? Other than the central idea around which the book revolves (and succinctly mentioned as the book subtitle too), the idea of interleaving is what struck me the most. I had already read about this particular method in Michael Nielsen\u0026rsquo;s brilliant post on Anki (\u0026ldquo;Augmenting Long-term Memory\u0026rdquo;) and it was interesting to read about it formally in the book. Interleaving is the technique of mixing up your learning in varied environments so that it makes some unusual connections that you\u0026rsquo;d normally won\u0026rsquo;t think about - and might come in handy when you are faced with a problem in a new environment you haven\u0026rsquo;t previously encountered.\nIn the end, \u0026ldquo;Range\u0026rdquo; suffers from the same deficiencies that a lot of other pop-psychology/self-management books suffer from - too many anecdotal evidence and case studies. A reviewer here on Goodreads summed it the best:\nFinally, Range is designed to appeal to people who are already skeptical of specialization/ enthusiastic about generalized skillsets. I worry that some of the appreciation of this book is just a soothing exercise in confirmation bias for generalists.\nStill, I\u0026rsquo;d recommend it to people who (like me) are skeptical about their tendency to dabble in too many disparate fields at the same time - this might be the soothing pill that you were looking for.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/range-a-review/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nStarted with a tightly-knit structure, but faltered at the end. The last few chapters were a slog to get through - mostly because of numerous \u0026ldquo;business-class\u0026rdquo; style case studies.\nMain takeaway? Other than the central idea around which the book revolves (and succinctly mentioned as the book subtitle too), the idea of interleaving is what struck me the most. I had already read about this particular method in Michael Nielsen\u0026rsquo;s brilliant post on Anki (\u0026ldquo;Augmenting Long-term Memory\u0026rdquo;) and it was interesting to read about it formally in the book.","title":"Range by David Epstein"},{"content":"(See this picture on Flickr)\nDeference vs. Indifference There used to be a time\nwhen things used to be simple.\nI\u0026rsquo;d wake up, rub my eyes, sit up straight, close my eyes,\nAnd pray that He will continue to guide me\nas He had done the previous day.\nThere used to be a time\nwhen I used to love the aroma\nof the stick when it burned,\nlighting up my day with the secret enchantments,\nas if the secrecy itself was the source of my happiness.\nThere used to be a time\nwhen coming home after a bad day,\nI\u0026rsquo;d sit on my bed and join my hands and close my eyes\nand quietly shed a tear.\nThe statues didn\u0026rsquo;t move or speak or whisper,\nbut I felt assured that somehow those little stones\nwere the only ones who listened to me\nand answered back.\nBut now,\nI wake up and lie on my bed for hours,\nwatching the fan complete circles after circles after circles,\nas if I was stuck in the middle while everyone else around me\nkept going through life as if it was such an easy task.\nBut now,\nThe smell of the burning stick nauseates my senses,\nthe secret spells make me mad,\nthe constant enchantings feel as if someone lit a person on fire\nwhile they were sleeping.\nBut now,\nwhen I come back home after a bad day,\nto the empty apartment echoing with silence so loud\nI worry my neighbors will start complaining -\nEven crying for hours doesn\u0026rsquo;t help.\nSometimes I think,\nwhat use is consciousness\nif it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make you happy but slowly takes away\nwhatever little sanity you had left\nsecond by second.\nSometimes I worry,\nDid I make a mistake in choosing not to follow blindly?\nDoes asking questions that nobody has answers to\nmakes me more alive\nor merely leaves me more broken and naive and stupid?\nIs ignorance really bliss?\nI still go to churches and mosques and temples,\nthe difference being it was deference before,\nand now it\u0026rsquo;s curiosity about the people who go there\nand indifference to the thing they pray to.\nSometimes I wonder,\nThere really is no answer, is there?\nA poem I wrote when I had troubles accepting myself. Still do, to be honest.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/deference-vs-indifference/","summary":"(See this picture on Flickr)\nDeference vs. Indifference There used to be a time\nwhen things used to be simple.\nI\u0026rsquo;d wake up, rub my eyes, sit up straight, close my eyes,\nAnd pray that He will continue to guide me\nas He had done the previous day.\nThere used to be a time\nwhen I used to love the aroma\nof the stick when it burned,\nlighting up my day with the secret enchantments,","title":"Deference vs. Indifference"},{"content":"Check it out on Goodreads\nThe School of Life - a massively popular YouTube channel - used to be this source of solace in some turbulent times of my college life. It is not something that you\u0026rsquo;d think would be cheerful and uplifting - a quick glance at some of the most popular videos of the channel would include titles such as \u0026ldquo;Why we go cold on our partners\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;Why you will marry the wrong person\u0026rdquo; etc. The honest yet straightforward mannger in which the narrator calmly tells us that even though it might feel like this is the worst possible time of your life, it is not usually so - it was a comforting thought - to feel and accept that things are fucked up and move on with quiet resignation.\nAlain De Botton is the founder of the said channel as well as the author of this book.\nThe Course of Love is Alain\u0026rsquo;s critique of what\u0026rsquo;s wrong with the society\u0026rsquo;s current perspective of love and marriages. Romanticism - the idea that the briefest of glances of some stranger is the formulation of a satisfying relationship, the idea of soul-mates and the happily ever after - is one of the most mistakenly understood facets of life.\nThe story revolves around two fictional characters who meet each other at work, fall in love, get married, have children and go through the whole process of frustrations and resignations and disappointments that constitutes a married life. Through this fictional story, Alain gives us some of the most profound insights into how love and relationships work in real life - quite unlike how they happen in stories. He writes in one of the passages -\nOur understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving elements. We have allowed our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.\nIt has its shortcomings though - sometimes Alain insights might appear to be delusional and bordering on self-righteousness, especially when he is commenting on one of the most controversial aspects of marriage - Adultery.\nHowever, if you keep in mind that all these insights are a one man\u0026rsquo;s opinion and that you don\u0026rsquo;t have to take everything at face value, you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to take away many good things from this book. Give this one a read when you\u0026rsquo;re falling in love, revisit it when you\u0026rsquo;re getting married and visit again when you\u0026rsquo;re trapped in those inevitable frustrations of married life. I know I certainly will.\nI will leave you with one of my favorite passages from the book -\nAt the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one. We should add: it is a privilege to be the recepient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/the-course-of-love/","summary":"Check it out on Goodreads\nThe School of Life - a massively popular YouTube channel - used to be this source of solace in some turbulent times of my college life. It is not something that you\u0026rsquo;d think would be cheerful and uplifting - a quick glance at some of the most popular videos of the channel would include titles such as \u0026ldquo;Why we go cold on our partners\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;Why you will marry the wrong person\u0026rdquo; etc.","title":"The Course of Love by Alain de Botton"},{"content":"Preamble Philosophy has always been one of those baffling things that entice you at first by its simplicity, but as you get sucked into it more and more, you find yourself searching for the end of this labyrinthine landscape. I had my first exposure to anything related to philosophy in my second year of college when I stumbled upon The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. At the time, it was one of the fascinating books I had ever read. I distinctly remember sitting down with the book at 9 PM having had my dinner, and as the custom goes, was looking forward to reading anything that could distract me from the mountain load of coursework that I had to finish for the upcoming semester exams. I became so engrossed in the story that when I finished the book and went outside to take in a fresh breath of air - I was startled to discover that the sunlight was already shining throughout the corridor - it was 7 o\u0026rsquo;clock in the morning!\nHowever, aside from a couple of books here and there, I was pretty ignorant about the whole field of philosophy . It was not until my last year of college when my then-girlfriend introduced me to different sub-fields of philosophy, and consequently, the names like Albert Camus, Bertrand Russell, and Friedrich Nietzsche and their ideas started sounding familiar. From all the ideas out there, Existentialism was something that drew me in the most.\nBy no means, I\u0026rsquo;m an expert in any of these matters, and neither do I have any authority to comment on them. This is just an excited rant of a newbie fanboy who just discovered his favorite toy. So please, Reader Discretion is Advised!\nWhat does it actually mean? Existentialism as a field traced back its existence to hundreds of years ago but was popularized mainly by Jean-Paul Sartre in mid-1900s. To simplify a field like this would be a disservice to the great philosophers who spent their whole lives trying to understand and popularize it; however, I will try to put into words whatever I\u0026rsquo;ve understood till now. The central theme of Existentialism revolves around the Individual. It brings the responsibility back to the central point of origin - to the individual. We, every one of us as an individual, are responsible - for how we live, for how we deal with the world, and essentially responsible for the way the world is right now. It also brings in this radical idea that if you try to look for a grand meaning of things in this universe, it would be a fruitless task. The universe is meaningless. There is no grand plan. So ultimately what matters is how you define the meaning of life.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a line from one of my favorite shows Rick and Morty, where a character just finds out that she was conceived as a mistake by their parents. She is deeply saddened and angry and wants to run away. Her little brother then comes to her and says something that has remained with me ever since: (Watch the full scene here).\n\u0026ldquo;Nobody exists on purpose, Nobody belongs anywhere, Everybody\u0026rsquo;s going to die - Come watch TV?\u0026rdquo;\nOur life is purposeless. We are mere mortals who will die in a few years, and nobody will remember us. Equipped with this feeling of utter hopelessness, and only then, we can start to carve out our own meaning of existence, our own hopes for the world. It is amongst one of those beautiful contradictions that the world has to offer.\nA meeting with The Stranger Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can\u0026rsquo;t be sure.\nThe Stranger introduces its eponymous character with this rather unusual sentence. In fact, the entire first half of the book is filled with such \u0026lsquo;absurd\u0026rsquo; statements. What\u0026rsquo;s strange about this character is that he doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to feel anything. He goes through life living it from one moment to the next without reflecting on his actions. The reader is confronted with the peak of this peculiarity when Mersault commits a murder but rather than feeling remorse for this deplorable act, he feels, well, nothing. It\u0026rsquo;s only when in the second act, he is forced to reflect on his actions because there\u0026rsquo;s nothing else to do in prison, that he begins to feel the situation that he has gotten himself into truly. But even then, the only true emotion that he shows is when the prison Chaplain asks him about the afterlife, and he flows into a rage saying \u0026ldquo;This life is the only one that means anything!\u0026rdquo;\nWith this book, Camus brought the idea of living an \u0026lsquo;absurd\u0026rsquo; life to the surface, which he goes on to hammer in fully in the successor \u0026lsquo;The Myth of Sisyphus\u0026rsquo;.\nAn Encounter with The Plague Imagine your utopian world where you don\u0026rsquo;t have to work for eight hours a day, live in a lakeside cottage, read books whole day and generally are quite content with the way of life - and slowly a kind of mysterious wave goes through the whole town and sweeps in all your happiness and leaves you dead inside.\nThis is what happens in The Plague. Well, sorta.\nCamus explores the idea of experiencing the present moment as it is, without any future ambitions obfuscating our judgment, and yet having the deepest desire to experience just for once what was considered as routine few days ago. Early in the story when the town finds itself woven in the murderous embrace of the plague, Camus writes about the plight of those who were separated from their loved ones:\nMothers and children, lovers, husbands and wives, who had a few days previously taken it for granted that their parting would be a short one, who had kissed one another goodbye on the platform and exchanged a few trivial remarks, sure as they were of seeing one another again after a few days or, at most, a few weeks, duped by our blind human faith in the near future and little if at all diverted from their normal interests by this leave-taking—all these people found themselves, without the least warning, hopelessly cut off, prevented from seeing one another again, or even communicating with one another.\nThe feeling of exile was all that the town residents were capable of experiencing. Slowly the separation started to take into possession the hearts and minds of everyone, so much as that people started to live their life through the lived experience of the past and started dreading the imagination of a rosy future. At one point, Camus writes:\nWe realized that the separation was destined to continue, we had no choice but to come to terms with the days ahead. In short, we returned to our prison-house, we had nothing left us but the past, and even if some were tempted to live in the future, they had speedily to abandon the idea - anyhow, as soon as could be - once they felt the wounds that the imagination inflicts on those who yield themselves to it.\nHowever, this tough ordeal also had a silver lining. When people were forced to contemplate, despite all the hate and resentments, they always came back to thinking about their loved ones and aching to embrace them just once more. This drives home the point that a lot of other thinkers have said - love is the greatest victory, whether it be peace, war or death.\nNevertheless - and this point is the most important - however bitter their distress and however heavy their hearts, for all their emptiness, it can be truly said of these exiles that in the early period of the plague, they could account themselves privileged. For at the precise moment when the residents of the town began to panic, their thoughts were wholly fixed on the person whom they longed to meet again. The egoism of love made them immune to the general distress and, if they thought of the plague, it was only in so far as it might threaten to make their separation eternal. Thus in the very heart of the epidemic, they maintained a saving indifference, which one was tempted to take for composure. Their despair saved them from panic, thus their misfortune had a good side.\nThe Conclusion and the path ahead Both of these books are considered as one of the best works of Albert Camus, and for good reason. The fluidity in the prose and the thought-provoking ideas in the content make for an exciting read. I\u0026rsquo;ll surely be delving into the rest of the works of Camus, as well as exploring other philosophy writers like Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Although time is the enemy here, let\u0026rsquo;s hope that I keep myself motivated enough to finish all these books.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll keep you guys posted in the meantime :)\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/the-stranger-and-the-plague-a-review/","summary":"Preamble Philosophy has always been one of those baffling things that entice you at first by its simplicity, but as you get sucked into it more and more, you find yourself searching for the end of this labyrinthine landscape. I had my first exposure to anything related to philosophy in my second year of college when I stumbled upon The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. At the time, it was one of the fascinating books I had ever read.","title":"The Stranger and The Plague by Albert Camus"},{"content":"(See this picture on flickr)\n\u0026ldquo;Tell me about yourself.\u0026rdquo;\nI have always dreaded this question. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter which setting I\u0026rsquo;m in - a social gathering, an interview, or while traveling - I invariably become visibly flabbergasted when people introduce themselves to me which is followed by the silent expectation that I\u0026rsquo;d return the favor and say something about myself.\nSo to solve this little problem of mine, I came up with this unoriginal idea. Maybe I should make a website and put everything that goes on in my little mind out there so that whenever someone asks me to perform this horrendous task of saying something about myself, I\u0026rsquo;ll simply point them towards \u0026ldquo;The Lazy Oxymoron\u0026rdquo; and say - that\u0026rsquo;s me.\nI know, how genius of me!\nNow, if you have managed to read this far without rolling your eyes too much, I\u0026rsquo;ll tell you something about myself.\nI am Siddhartha. Although most of my friends know me by my nickname \u0026lsquo;Golu\u0026rsquo; - which is also part of my full name btw - but that\u0026rsquo;s a story for some other time. I am currently engaged in building One800 which is going to consume a lot of my personal and professional time for the forseeable future, so do excuse any delay in responses.\nI am passionate about a lot of things, which by its nature, leads me to become anxious a lot because I can\u0026rsquo;t fulfill them all. I love reading books (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, comics, magazines - pretty much anything) and have a tiny but increasing library at home. Music, drawing, and photography are some of the things that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of talent for, nevertheless, I find them to be great creative stimulants, and so I dabble here and there with my amateur hands. Whenever I find the time - or rather I absolutely make the time to do this - I travel. You\u0026rsquo;ll often hear people say this, so much that it might\u0026rsquo;ve started sounding like bullshit, but it\u0026rsquo;s true - traveling changes you. I can get carried away with this, so let\u0026rsquo;s keep this for a future post.\nIf you want to get in touch with me, the easiest way would be to go the old fashioned way - drop me an email at sid@siddharthagolu.com. I reply to every email I get (which is once in a blue moon).\nOr if you prefer, you can also connect with me on the following social media sites:\nGoodreads Instagram Flickr LinkedIn Git Letterboxd If you connect with my thoughts here, please do reach out to me via your preferred medium. After all, we all live for the human connections we make.\n","permalink":"https://www.siddharthagolu.com/about/","summary":"(See this picture on flickr)\n\u0026ldquo;Tell me about yourself.\u0026rdquo;\nI have always dreaded this question. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter which setting I\u0026rsquo;m in - a social gathering, an interview, or while traveling - I invariably become visibly flabbergasted when people introduce themselves to me which is followed by the silent expectation that I\u0026rsquo;d return the favor and say something about myself.\nSo to solve this little problem of mine, I came up with this unoriginal idea.","title":"About Me"}] \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/public/index.xml b/public/index.xml index 973aa8e..58bdfb4 100644 --- a/public/index.xml +++ b/public/index.xml @@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ en-us Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:49:32 +0530 - Empire of Pain + Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/empire-of-pain/ Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:49:32 +0530 diff --git a/public/posts/index.html b/public/posts/index.html index 4d27509..491cfa2 100644 --- a/public/posts/index.html +++ b/public/posts/index.html @@ -166,14 +166,14 @@
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Empire of Pain +

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

If you want to understand how the opioid crisis began, read this. Recommended.

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diff --git a/public/posts/index.xml b/public/posts/index.xml index fd24ad4..2193c82 100644 --- a/public/posts/index.xml +++ b/public/posts/index.xml @@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ en-us Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:49:32 +0530 - Empire of Pain + Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/empire-of-pain/ Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:49:32 +0530 diff --git a/public/posts/reading/empire-of-pain/index.html b/public/posts/reading/empire-of-pain/index.html index 902dd2f..6ac4fab 100644 --- a/public/posts/reading/empire-of-pain/index.html +++ b/public/posts/reading/empire-of-pain/index.html @@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ -Empire of Pain | Siddhartha Golu +Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty | Siddhartha Golu @@ -57,7 +57,7 @@ } - + @@ -67,7 +67,7 @@ - + @@ -85,7 +85,7 @@ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2 , - "name": "Empire of Pain", + "name": "Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty", "item": "https://www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/reading/empire-of-pain/" } ] @@ -95,8 +95,8 @@ { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "BlogPosting", - "headline": "Empire of Pain", - "name": "Empire of Pain", + "headline": "Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty", + "name": "Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty", "description": "If you want to understand how the opioid crisis began, read this. Recommended.", "keywords": [ "non-fiction", "audiobook", "public-health" @@ -197,7 +197,7 @@
Home » Posts

- Empire of Pain + Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

🗓 June 21, 2023     1 min     🔖  non-fiction ·  audiobook ·  public-health @@ -229,43 +229,43 @@