Being bad..

I have reached the point in life where people calling me bad seems better than having to explain each one the big question of why.. You see being good is kind of overrated in my current opinion. You keep your values right, act as per morals and don’t go against your good conscience. You do a lot of hard work both mental and physical to satisfy your own judgement that you are indeed good. A tiny speck of dirt on an otherwise clean sheet of Karma worries you. To be good it is a lot of work. After all of this, it isn’t appreciated as much as it should be. No one cares..

To top it off you have to explain to everyone as to why you did something, which is in their judgement a bad deed from an otherwise good guy. Satisfying everyone is not possible so you invariably end up doing stuff which is good to some and bad to someone at the same time. Still try to reconcile with everyone regarding your actions and the logic behind. The people to whom you explain your perspective, act as if they deserved the explanation yet aren’t satisfied. the cycle repeats on and on.. Sometimes some of your actions becomes an ego battle between some third persons, who then go all sentimental asking if their point of view matters at all to you. They don’t get that you explaining to them each and every action of yours, is them mattering to you in whatever way it be.

What is the point of it all? My mother always says be good so that everyone remembers you as a good example after you leave earth. My point is WhyTF I would care about a time when I as a living being would not exist?! Why is it so important to be the so called good to everyone around you? Life or Luck whatever it is, doesn’t spare you because you are good to others. Rather it becomes your unbecoming under pressure and soft point for others to punch. “Natural selection” the very real phenomenon that we know has been active since life came on earth, didn’t favor any species because it was good to others. Only the baddest badass species survived and thrived, not at all because they were good.

Being good is a luxury, not a necessity. In the end you end up being bad..

Do whatever the hell you want and if anyone ever asks why, just answer. “Because I am bad” and move on..

I’m gonna write for myself..

When I started blogging, I had this idea of doing something huge just like I thought I would with my programming. But over the years I have been on and off with the blogging. I don’t write stuff that might reach other people or so they would wanna read. Yes I wanted to be that but today, right at this moment it seems not gonna happen. Let me just be content with stuff I am writing for myself.

Why can’t I write for myself? Why not write to myself? Maybe I am going the opposite way. Earlier days people used to write personal diary for themselves, they moved to public diaries with time. I seem to be moving from the online to offline diary with this post. Let it be so. Let stuff be here for anyone who stumbles upon these black pebbles in the forest of internet. Otherwise, let it be there for me. I know, after some years I will again want to revisit myself and search for me through the pages of past. Let these pages be there for me when I come back.

I don’t know if this is creativity in any form, but this writing bug seems alive the most when I am sort of depressed or bored. This reminds me of an incident n my childhood. I was standing at the end of our street of our old home. I was looking at some vultures nesting at the top of a tall palm tree. To my english teacher who happened to be there out of pure coincidence, this seemed like I had the makings of a writer. Like I told earlier I had this idea that I will be a big writer some day, so I let her know that. She had told me “Son, don’t be. Don’t go down that path. Most of the masterpiece writers are depressed in their lives and so on..”. She was right. I am no writer but I do have peaks of these spurious writing sessions when I am depressed. This is my vent for pent up feelings. Cry for help? Not so much.. This isn’t a cry for help. The writing itself is the medicine or cure if you will. Once I start, I am not feeling that bad anymore.

After writing these three paragraphs at a stretch, I take a look at the paras. It seems I am not looking for validation from people anymore. This used to be a huge part of me earlier but today, right at this instant it seems I don’t care any more. When did this happen? Gradually over time it seems. Just like evolution. It seems I have evolved to a large extent.

I know this post is absolute nonsense. Doesn’t matter, coz no one reads my stuff 😀

Why I never became the programmer people expected?

Since childhood I have been fascinated by programming. Starting with LOGO and BASIC in school, I took to programming like fish to water. Ever since I have been dabbling in code whenever I get the chance. While doing so I had built this idea in my mind of being an actual professional coder, that I was gonna become some day. Sad to say, it hasn’t happened. So far I have been able to materialize only a small percentage of that dream. I am a employed as a COBOL developer and I work on mainframes. But this is far from the image I had in mind. There are a few reasons why. Here I explore them with you if you care enough to read:

1. To excel in something a good amount of concentration is needed. I don’t have much of that. Usually my mind wanders off soon and I have lost focus before I know it. Still programming is able to hold my interest to some extent as it shows up outputs as per my written logic instantly. I like putting stuff together to solve problems or build solutions.
2. Usually people assume that being good at programming means you are good at Mathematics. I am a stark exception to that rule. I can’t calculate sum of two double digit numbers in my mind without error. As a result I have an innate fear of math ever since I can remember. But surprisingly I like watching math explanation videos of Mathologer, 3Blue1Brown, Numberphile etc. Seeing them makes me feel like I wanna get a degree in Maths! Anyone feeling the same please comment and let me know I am not alone.
3. When I came in touch with coding, I knew only about Logo and Basic. In primary school itself, I learnt Office, Foxpro, SQL but I never got the independence to explore programming on my own then. In college I came across coding in C s a part of our course curriculum. I learnt data structure and OOPS to some extent. I got myself enrolled into JAVA classes. Lapped it up like it was Biriyani! By now I had my laptop, so could do some stuff by myself. I took up android app building too thinking that learning Android App building was supposed to be my gate-pass to the elite world of highly paid developers. Like I said I thought so, it wasn’t so in reality. Stepping into the app development universe reality hit me. I was just a tiny space debris in this whole galaxy of coding and development. There is unlimited supply of languages, syntax, keywords, environments,frameworks, use cases etc along with assortment of jargon! This coding universe is expanding like ours each second. I have no idea where to start and which way to go.
   Example: Just learning JavaScript wont help, because you have a plethora of frameworks which are basically programming languages by themselves. Each one has its own syntax, keywords and way of functioning all of which you have to learn to be of any use. After spending an infinite amount of time learning it all, you find that the people making actual impact with their coding are far ahead of you on the learning curve. This feels like a mathematical fractal where you never know if you are at the start of the curve or at the end. All of this frustrates me.
4. We are always too fixated on the output image of a huge success. Almost everyone has this motto of “Go BIG or go home”. No one cares about the mountain of effort or maybe smidgen of luck that leads to it. So most of the people like me, the worst and mediocre ones who fall off on the way to the top aren’t recognized as worth anything. We are just another face in this sea of humanity. I too was a believer of this big motto once upon a time. But as I grew up I slowly began to realize no matter how much motivation or efforts are there, some attributes you need to be topper in any field. I had none of those. No matter what I tried I could not even cross the middle line of my class. So was I worthless? In eyes of society, I still am. In mine, I did what I could so I am good. I am interested in programming and I always will be. Just not a wealthy app/game/whatever developer like my family, friends and society expects me to be. I have found my peace in it. Ommmm!

Let me know if you have any advice for me 🙂