This is a curation of my notes from the last 28 days of Sanskrit learning, put together for ease of reference. I used AI tools to help pull the notes together into this essay. If you find any issues or fixes, please comment below to help my learning journey. I am forever looking to improve in this language.

Day 1

Thinking of posting one simple sentence in Sanskrit daily as I continue my grammar classes over the next few weeks.

Learning in public may finally break my fear of using the language daily.

And I hope this lands on a Sanskrit scholar’s feed, so they can correct me and I can start following them.

Dear Substack, do your magic! ✨

I think, therefore I am.

अहं चिन्तयामि, तस्मात् अहम् अस्मि।

Day 2

A birthday wish: I wanted to say, “happy birthday,” but also try a classical-style blessing like “may abundance live in you”, the kind of abundance is up to the person 😊

May your birthday be auspicious. May prosperity always dwell in you.

जन्मदिनस्य शुभं भवतु। समृद्धिः त्वयि सदा वसतु ।

Day 3

I am going to temple.

अहं मन्दिरं गच्छामि ।

Day 4

Now this is a question I often get asked, especially when I’ve promised ghee roast or poori masala for breakfast 😁

Is the food ready? Yes, the food is ready.

भोजनं सिद्धं वा? आम्, भोजनं सिद्धम् अस्ति।

Day 5

When we make doodles of people thinking, we draw a tiny cloud above the head, but if you ask me, i don’t feel like my thoughts arise from my head. I feel like they arise from my gut.

Where do my thoughts come from?

मम विचाराः कुतः जायन्ते?

Day 6

I keep noticing this rush in me and in most people at tech these days to grab the next shiny tool and start running.

But why are we not pausing to ask for better engineering, better tools? It was a long day, and I wondered how to say:

I am tired from work

कार्यात् श्रान्तास्मि। (f) कार्यात् श्रान्तोऽस्मि। (m)

Day 7

Inspired by @Swati Thakur’s note today, I wanted to use शनैः शनैः - Gradually 😊

This is hypothetical for today, since desire isn’t going anywhere for me anytime soon. But the desire for a lot of things that never brought me meaning has quietly died out over time.

So, I’m writing this down as a small step towards eventually getting there, manifesting a version of me (in this life or the next) where desires have settled!

Desires gradually subside.

शनैः शनैः इच्छाः शाम्यन्ति।

Day 8

This sentence feels right today.

I bow to thee, Mother!

Vande is an ātmanepada verb, this means the fruit of the action is understood to return to the doer himself, not just extend outward to another.

The charm of Sanskrit ❤️

It reminds me of us, blessed to be born in Bharat. Like Sanskrit, we look simple, live simple, but we are layered in someways.

वन्दे मातरम्।

Day 9

As winter ends and the weather starts warming up here in Australia, this is something I expect to be saying often.

I also wanted to use the word kiñcit, it’s the cutest word ever ❤️

Please drink some water!

किञ्चित् जलं पिबतु।

Day 10

This week is crazy at work. If I wanted to put a status on my Teams with DnD, it would be this.

Lots of work this week.

But is there a better way to form this?

अस्मिन् सप्ताहे बहु कार्यम् अस्ति।

Day 11

I had a teacher who spoke to the class in Sanskrit. Honestly, it was very hard to follow but equally exciting 😁. He used this word a lot 👇🏾

हत्युक्त्वा (having said)

I stumbled upon this word today while reading so thought about him and decided to use it.

Having said “I am going” he left the house.

I was tempted to do sandhi but I am going to go slow for my own sake.

“अहं गच्छामि” इत्युक्त्वा सः गृहात् निरागच्छत्।

Day 12

I don’t particularly entertain crazy work timings, but a global team demands a few sacrifices. The exhaustion is not just physical but mental. The next day, I usually go easy.

Now, rest alone is the best medicine.

अधुना, विश्रामः एव श्रेष्ठम् औषधम् अस्ति।

Day 13

Separation is painful yet it is the most reliable fuel for many writers.

I think of you always. 🪷

अहं त्वां सततं स्मरामि।

Day 14

This life is full of surprises. Some good, most bad, the only way forward is through faith 🪷🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽

Therefore, I take refuge in devotion alone.

तस्मात्, भक्तिम् एव आश्रये।

Day 15

Our Onam celebration is often shifted to the nearest weekend so there’s time to cook, enjoy, and gather with the people we love 🌺

We celebrate Onam tomorrow.

I did not choose future tense to keep my focus on present tense for now.

वयं श्वः ओणम् उत्सवम् आचरामः।

Day 16

Today we made ഓണപൂക്കളം (flower carpet) with flowers from my friend’s garden as well as mine. It is a simple activity but makes one feel grounded immediately. And flowers, they always make me happy 🌼🌺🪷.

Seeing these flowers, I am happy.

एतानि पुष्पाणि दृष्ट्वा अहं प्रसन्ना अस्मि।

Day 17

Every afternoon he arrives, a beautiful Willie Wagtail, steps into the water bowl I have kept for my guests in the yard, bathes, and rests on the cloth line.

Today a new guest came to the bowl. He chased him off and quietly slipped back into the bowl again rinsing away the mischief he just made 😁 So here is a little reminder to my jealous patron.

O friend! You share the water bowl.

हे मित्र! त्वं जलपात्रं संविभज।

Day 18

Separation fascinates me. Someone appears in your life each day, then suddenly they are gone, and a strange unease takes over. It absorbs you quietly; even in the middle of other tasks, the absence keeps touching you. I often think of the gopis in that brief moment when Krishna vanished, how even their sorrow must have carried a beautifully aching stillness.

O Madhava, this separation is beautiful 🪷

हे माधव, अयं वियोगः सुन्दरः अस्ति।

Day 19

I did not form this sentence; I borrowed a part of BG 5.8. A reminder that I am not the doer 🪷

I carry this verse within me, not as a thought but as posture. It settles the noise inside and loosens the ego’s grip on my spine 🙏🏽

I do not do anything at all.

नैव किञ्चित् करोमि।

Day 20

Who am I?

I’ve used Ramana’s (my mānasa‑guru) affirmation for many years.

देहं नाहम्। कोऽहम्? सोऽहम्।

Yet I still cannot comprehend the last part, and my answer remains the same.

I do not know myself!

अहं स्वं न जानामि।

Day 21

Most days I have to search for something to reflect on to form my sentences. Today was easy with Raksha Bandhan wishes everywhere. When life slips into the same patterns, these festivals nudge the soul awake, asking us to feel life a little differently, even if only for a day.

A quick shout‑out to my grammar teacher for helping me with this sentence 🥳

Heartfelt Raksha Bandhan wishes to all!

सर्वेभ्यः रक्षाबन्धनदिनस्य हार्दाः शुभाशयाः।

Day 22

I don’t need to reflect more on this. I always like to choose simple ❤️✨

Simplicity alone is the beauty of life.

सरलता एव जीवनस्य सौन्दर्यम्।

Day 23

The Australian sky feels closer than the one I grew up under in India. Bhooma and I used to spend our Mondays out in the backyard. Open sky, distant trees, and birds he loved to chase, while I scolded him for being mean to them. And today I felt like just being outdoors like before.

By the wind, the clouds move fast and my flowers dance.

वातेन मेघाः शीघ्रं प्लवन्ते मम कुसुमानि च नृत्यन्ति।

Day 24

Today I wrote an article about a rainbow 🌈 and naturally I wanted to write something about it.

This one was especially challenging as someone who skipped through most of the vibhakti tables in her diploma 😁 so if you have suggestions, you are more than welcome to correct me 🙏🏽

Rainbows are magical circles drawn by God.

इन्द्रधनूंषि ईश्वरेण आलिखितानि मायिकानि वृत्तानि सन्ति।

Day 25

Some days gratitude feels effortless. Even when life pulls your mind elsewhere, there are moments when the sense of having enough returns on its own. Today is one of those days ✨

Today I am grateful

अहम् अद्य कृतज्ञा अस्मि।

Day 26

When a drama unfolds in front of you, excluding you or your people, you naturally become a mere witness. That’s what the word उपद्रष्टा means, the one who sees from close range, fully present, observing but not directly participating.

I wanted to use this word today after reading it in the scriptures. A reminder that we often live inside the misery we create ourselves; the Lord who is the supreme witness has also given each of us the ability to have this clarity.

I am the witness of everything.

अहं सर्वस्य उपद्रष्ट्री अस्मि। (f) / अहं सर्वस्य उपद्रष्टा अस्मि। (m)

Day 27

Today was another left-brained day. During my breaks, I kept glancing at the water bowl, wondering when the little bird will come for its bath. I didn’t see him today. I just hope he returns tomorrow 🐥

i wish for your return.

अहं तव पुनरागमनम् इच्छामि।

Day 28

Day 28: Today I am breaking the pattern a little for a special poem I wish to share as an offering 🪷. Posting this is an act of bravery as a Sanskrit student 😊

I wrote this poem earlier this year, but I had to go back and correct it many times. It’s still not perfect, but today I felt like releasing it. I will keep on trying, to get better at this 🤜🏽🤛🏽

हरिभक्तिः

केवलं भक्तिम् इच्छामि हरिभक्तिं दिनं प्रति । एतां भक्तिम् एव आश्रये हरिभक्तिं पुनः पुनः ॥

लक्ष्मी धनं दत्त्वैव स्वयं भक्तिं बिभर्ति ताम् । रुद्रोऽपि मे हितं कुर्यात् मा हर हरिभक्तिं मम ॥

मोक्षात् श्रेष्ठतरम् एव मम हरिभक्तिः सदा । तस्मात् भक्तिम् एव आश्रये हरिभक्तिं पुनः पुनः ॥

P.S I tried to write in Anushtubh meter.

Watch this space for more in this series.

Then one morning it did. The dictionary wasn’t wrong. I just had to experience the word.

A slightly cold March morning in Brisbane. I took Bhuma out for our 5 o’clock walk, yes, the small ritual-torture I inflict on my body for my fur-boy’s sake. Never regretted it once. We once trekked through a reserve for almost 3 hours because I got lost and he found the way out before I did. Australia makes this easy. Bushland spills into reserve, reserve opens into park, and every suburb has a bike path running straight through the middle of things. Neat and tidy but still wild. You may see a python on a tree or kangaroos staring at you from a bush, yet you will never feel threatened.

That morning was nothing special, Bhuma did what Bhuma does. Nose down, reading and replying to his pee-mails. By 5:30 we were at the top of the oval, a raised patch of lawn for sports, maintained by the council. Grass still wet. Air sitting in that narrow gap between cold and warm. And then the sun broke through the mist, and there was a rainbow in front of me. Not a faint one. A full arc, and just above it, softer but definitely there, a second. A double rainbow. My luck!

I stood there for a full minute with my mouth actually open.

Bhuma stood there, staring at my face, visibly anxious about why the playtime was interrupted (classic Border Collie). Somewhere in that moment I took a photo, and it caught none of it. Not the size of the thing. Not what it was doing to my chest.

Because something was happening to my chest. Wonder? Fear? Though there was nothing to be afraid of. Or disbelief? But about what? Then, with no warning, a huge burst of happiness led to a stream of tears running down my face. There was nothing to be sad or happy about, but there was this feeling of having stepped into something larger without meaning to.

This is the point where my thoughts shifted to Arjuna on the battlefield when he saw Lord Krishna in His cosmic form. A point where vastness stops being a concept and becomes a sight. Arjuna, the brave warrior shaking, unable to hold it together asking the Lord to return to the human, gentler form again. The real scale of things as seen by Arjuna, isn’t something a human can hold for long.

I am not going to put “a rainbow over a suburban oval on a Tuesday” in the same sentence as the scene from the Gita. But to be honest, for one minute my mind did what Arjuna’s did, at a much smaller scale. I saw something too large to comfortably contain. And I was no warrior but a regular woman, just 5 foot tall.

So that’s the closest I have come to what that word means to me, an expanse, where the known and the unknown stand together and a moment when I couldn’t have told you where I ended and the sky began.

Bhuma completely missed the rainbow; he was only looking at me, waiting to hear the words he’d been wanting all along -” Let’s play!” That struck something in me. Maybe that rainbow in that sky existed only for me. To teach me about a word. Not because I was special but because I was for a moment aligned in an unrepeatable way in that exact moment to receive something.

Ākāśa opens up to anyone as long as you’re willing to stand still enough not to notice you’re standing in it.

“Why learn Sanskrit now?”

I have been asked many versions of this question, often enough to know the concern is not really about me learning the language, but about what I will do with it. It is a question that wants a price on my pursuits. So here is the invoice 😃.

I have been reading books on Indian philosophy and the Puranas in translation for some time now. Sanskrit is what showed me how much of them I had never actually read.

You don’t miss what you never knew was there.

Where I got stuck

My interest in Vedanta started as plain curiosity. I love analysing myself, my changing identities, the people around me, and so on. And I found this concept of a “single source of truth”, unlike my own personality, quite fascinating.

I read some books; I joined an online class for Vedanta; and then I ran into the problem. When I was in the class (for four weeks), I was as bright as the Sun. I understood concepts naturally, until I was left alone to contemplate these texts. I could read Devanagari, so I read shlokas, but the translations, helpful as they were, were just giving me readymade conclusions on a platter.

I come from a Christian family, so I don’t have the necessary tools, teachers, context etc., to help me get started, or any guidance on how to approach a text from the Hindu philosophy called Advaita Vedanta. What I didn’t know at that time was that the absence of the Guru was itself a lesson about the tradition I was trying to grasp. Those texts were never meant to be a PDF in my OneDrive. They were part of a whole, the other part being a teacher, a Guru.

I still pushed through the recorded lectures, the group classes and the books. Most of the time I understood enough to keep going. But every now and then I could feel gaps in my understanding widening. Like something important sliding past me.

The problem

One example of that confusion started from the opening prayer itself in the group class.

oṃ pūrṇamadaḥ pūrṇamidaṃ pūrṇāt…1

Translated as: Om. Wholeness is That, Wholeness is This. From the Whole, the Whole comes forth. Removing the Whole from the Whole, the Whole remains. Om, peace, peace, peace.

At first that’s exactly how I internalised it. Two similar statements placed side by side for emphasis. But a question kept coming back to me. Why does “that” come before “this”? If everything is full, why spell out things, this or that? I nearly let it go. I told myself maybe this was beyond me. I needed a way to meet these shlokas closer to their own terms.

I eventually understood what I needed when I started learning pronouns in Sanskrit class. In Sanskrit, idam and adaḥ are not just “this” or “that” as in English. There is a whole set of “this”es and “that”s (demonstrative pronouns):

idam — this, what is here, present, near enough to point at.

etad — this, what is just in front of you.

tad — that, what has already been spoken of, or what isn’t present.

adaḥ — that, what is far off, distant, beyond immediate reach.

The mantra is using these pronouns on purpose. It begins from what cannot be pointed to, and only then arrives at what can. Adaḥ, then Idam.

The next clause - "From the Whole, the Whole comes forth”, is ablative, so I read it as Source producing Product, using my demonstrative pronouns and their order. Fine that works. Then I was destroyed in the very next line: “Removing the Whole from the Whole, the Whole remains."

My misunderstanding of source and product (from the order Adaḥ, then Idam) is now taken apart with this line. Nothing is diminished, “the Whole remains”.

This internal dialog was completely missing earlier with this or that plainly, although the gist was there in English too. Sankrit grammar made me commit to it. This entire process of applying grammar transformed the mantra from a statement to a movement in my head, an abhyasa.

Order, Creation, Subtraction, Realisation.

This is one such example.

Translation chooses for the reader

I want to be grateful to the translations, don’t get me wrong here. It is essential. Without it most of us would never even encounter such texts. What it misses is giving the reader a choice. It is usually translated for “all”. When a Guru teaches a student, he understands from the face of the student whether a door has opened for her or not, which is one thing the translator is unaware of.

When I read a Malayalam story, my eyes smile a little wider than when I read it translated because I go into a part of my mind with mallu context and experiences. You know that feeling someone calls you yaar, and it feels warmer than “hey, friend”? That was what I was looking for. The closeness to the words, so they can argue with me in my head.

I don’t have a Guru, maybe I have not earned one in this life, but Sanskrit gives me the next best thing. A push back from the text itself.

So why Sanskrit?

Because I simply don’t want to let another profound revelation slide past me without me noticing that it even existed.

I have never had this. And it’s not for lack of trying, or lack of announcing my love for birds, trees and animals, still, nothing. Bread for the noisy miners, bread for the crows, who show up like they’ve got daily stand ups, while the one bird I actually want to meet, acts like my offering is beneath its notice.

Very rarely though they’d turn up at the pool for a bath, but I can’t tell if they are the same ones. And every time, I’d get so genuinely thrilled watching it happen, so unable to play it cool, that they’d take one look at me hovering near the deck and just go. Poooof... Gone. Because who wants to bathe in peace with a psycho woman staring at you like you’re the last miracle on earth.

But one day I was woken up from my nap by a strange frantic splashing noise in the pool and something in me just clicked. I can sense things before they happen, apparently; my husband calls me “Iyer the Great” for a reason, and if you know the movie, you know exactly what kind of unearned confidence that implies.

As I ran to the pool, I saw something thrashing, fighting the water, fighting for its life, which, I realised as I got closer was a kookaburra! My heart left my body. And the worst part is that I’m a shallow-water swimmer (I just came up with this phrase because I was too ashamed to admit I can’t swim). I could not do what they do in the movies, dive in, scoop the poor thing up, hero BGM playing. That option simply wasn’t available to me.

So, I went looking for the pool net instead. The one my husband uses most Saturday mornings to pretend he needs quiet time away from me, standing at the pool’s edge looking deeply, creatively occupied, scooping dried leaves like it’s a lost art.

I scooped the poor bird in, slowly, bravely, and set him down on the deck. He was shivering, and clearly still scared of the net and of me. I couldn’t calm myself down, honestly. I wanted so badly to help but had no idea what “helping” even looked like.

I got some towels and gently tried to lift him out of the net into my palms. He fought it, of course, no surprise there. The psycho woman and a human hand. Who can be trusted, really? But I prayed, asked the Gods to tell him he was safe. I talked to him in baby voice just so that I’m less threatening. He protested a bit more, with his beak, but his shivering won in the end, and he let himself come into my hands.

That moment of trust undid me a little. I felt the guilt of it as a human, the collective failure, all the ways we fail these little lives without even noticing. But I didn’t let the thought stay long. I pushed it gently aside and chose, instead, to just feel grateful. Grateful to be trusted. Grateful to be, for one small hour, someone a little vulnerable bird could trust.

When his shivering eased, I placed him somewhere with a lot of sunlight in my backyard and left him to it. I called a friend, then the wild life rescue folks, and both said the same thing that he’d be fine once his wings dried out.

Later, I noticed he’d moved himself into the shade. I went to check, he looked calmer, steadier like he knew I’m harmless and that we were in this together. An hour after that, he was up on the fence, a little plumper, a little more himself. An hour after that, he flew away.

Next day, I waited and he came around mid-day. I’d like to think it’s him.

He didn’t give me the cackling laugh he’s famous for, the dramatic entrance I’d hoped for, thanks to my mom’s theatric genes. Instead, he simply sat near the pool, quiet, calm like he’d learned something. Or may be like he’d made a friend.

He didn’t come daily after that. He never became one of those birds, the backyard regulars’ kind. But some days, I see one, and I imagine it’s him. I’ll never really know. And each time, I think of that one strange day we shared, and I smile a little, hoping that somewhere in the bird world, word has gotten around. That I’m to be trusted. That somewhere, a kookaburra has gathered with my bread eating crows and miners, to tell the magpies to go easy on me during swooping season.

This isn’t a straightforward “Set up your Mac” guide, and it isn’t a philosophical dissection of anything either. It sits somewhere in between, just like me. I love tech, and I love to observe, to be slow with things in this fast-moving world. I am trying to find joy in the most boring things life can present me.

So here we are with a boring task, trying to have fun with it.

Before anything is installed, the screen is just the usual mac “Tahoe day” wallpaper. No files, no history, no cookies, no cache, no version of me I left lying around in folders I named “misc” or “untitled.” No sign of the 1001 different project ideas I have been procrastinating on.

It’s tempting to fill that space as fast as possible, the way we do with iPhones: sign in, sync everything from the cloud, get back to your old self in a few minutes.

I decided to resist that, just this once.

A tool shapes the hands that use it. You already know this about a kitchen, or a garden. Somehow, we forget it about the machine we spend more waking hours inside than almost anywhere else. So, this isn’t really a setup guide. It’s an invitation to set up slowly enough to notice what you’re choosing, and why.

The ground

I signed in but skipped the sync and started this one empty. Then, since I prefer dark mode, I went to System Settings → Appearance → Dark Mode (Auto). Comfort first.

I installed Microsoft Edge, my favourite browser believe it or not 😁.

Then I needed the infrastructure to install everything else and for me, that’s Homebrew. I opened the terminal and installed it first:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

The terminal is where I live as a developer for my job, and I wanted it to be more than just what my machine gives me by default. I installed iTerm2, a font, and a few tools so the space I live in feels cozy:

brew install --cask iterm2
brew install --cask font-jetbrains-mono-nerd-font
brew install zsh starship eza bat fzf zoxide fd ripgrep git gh git-delta 

Then I created my ~/.zshrc file inside my Home folder and opened it.

touch ~/.zshrc
open -e ~/.zshrc

Added these lines (tab-completion setup first, then prompt/tool init) and saved:

# Tab completion
autoload -Uz compinit
compinit
zstyle ':completion:*' matcher-list 'm:{a-zA-Z}={A-Za-z}'   # case-insensitive matching
zstyle ':completion:*' menu select                            # arrow-key navigation through matches
zstyle ':completion:*' list-colors "${(s.:.)LS_COLORS}"       # colored completion menu

# Prompt + tools
eval "$(starship init zsh)"
eval "$(zoxide init zsh)"
alias ls="eza --icons"
alias cat="bat"

Then, in iTerm2’s settings: Profiles → Colors → Solarized under Color Presets, and Appearance → Minimal theme.

Final look of my terminal 👩🏽‍💻:

The workspace

Next, I needed to set up a few things for my work that involves Node but many versions of it. So I installed it through through nvm (node version manager).

brew install nvm
mkdir ~/.nvm

Added below to .zshrc file:

export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
[ -s "/opt/homebrew/opt/nvm/nvm.sh" ] && \. "/opt/homebrew/opt/nvm/nvm.sh"
[ -s "/opt/homebrew/opt/nvm/etc/bash_completion.d/nvm" ] && \. "/opt/homebrew/opt/nvm/etc/bash_completion.d/nvm"

Then reloaded the termnial and installed latest Node:

source ~/.zshrc
nvm install node      # installs latest
nvm alias default node
node -v

Next, I installed Python, for MkDocs / GitHub Pages workflow: for my work related to courses creation, my tech blogs etc.

brew install python@3.12 pyenv uv

Then I carefully installed my editor of choice for code, good old VS Code

brew install --cask visual-studio-code

To set it up, I chose Solarized theme, the Material Icon set, the same Nerd Font from your terminal, to be consistent with my terminal (Edit the settings.json)

{
    "workbench.colorTheme": "Solarized Dark",
    "workbench.iconTheme": "material-icon-theme",
    "git.autofetch": true,
    "editor.fontLigatures": false,
    "editor.fontFamily": "JetBrainsMono Nerd Font",
}

Final look of my editor 📝:

The shelf

Somewhere for the thinking, like new blog ideas, articles for Substack, side projects, and everything in between, I chose to install Obsidian. The Minimal theme, and a folder structure with room to grow rather than one I’ll outgrow by September:

brew install --cask obsidian

My initial set up of folders looks like this, I hope it stays clean for sometime.

And by that, I came to the end of my minimal setup and I felt happy, genuinely happy, with it. It turned out exactly as I wanted it to.

I won't remember most of what I did to set this up by next week, which is why I documented it. But I know I'll feel it, every time I open the lid to work on something.

karmaṇyevādhikāraste mā phaleṣu kadācana
mā karmaphalaheturbhūrmā te saṅgo'stvakarmaṇi 
The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 47. 

Thy right is to work only, but never to its fruits; let not the fruit-of-action be thy motive, nor let thy attachment be to inaction. 

Lord Krishna said this to Arjuna, a warrior, frozen on a battlefield, paralysed by calculation on what he would lose or gain if he picks up the bow to fight his teachers, relatives and friends standing on the other side, as the enemy. Sound familiar?

This is us right now. The battlefield is a Teams or Slack channel, and nobody's frozen. Everyone’s moving very fast. Just not towards anything they actually care about.

The Start

It starts with a single message from a team-mate. A prototype, a strategy document, an analysis which took days or weeks, produced in an afternoon using AI. The thread goes silent, not in admiration, but into a silence of recalibration. The recalibration of survival.

The New Scoreboard

Everyone knows the new rules.

Whose project made the rest of the team look slow and lazy?

Who got the most visible AI centric initiative?

It’s like people are buying domain names for words that don’t exist yet. Everyone’s busy racing to own territory before anyone else names it. And the tragedy is that the people doing it were once known for their ethics, credibility, and craft. Now they live by a single measure - pace.

And pace is a brutal thing to measure a human being against.

A river moving fast in every direction is a flood.

The Work Became a Move on a Board

Every idea feels like a chess move now. Everything is a strategy to get noticed. Every thought gets filtered through questions, "How does this make me look to the leaders?" , “Do I still matter here?”

This is what happens when people optimise for the scoreboard instead of the work itself. It’s the same mechanism as a writer who chases trending topics instead of the story they actually want to tell.

The Burnout Nobody Has a Name For

Usually, you burnout from too much work or empty work calls. But the new burnout is different. It comes from competition.

Healthy competition is good, don’t get me wrong, but this one, it comes from the particular loneliness of competing with people you once genuinely enjoyed thinking and working alongside.

Fear, when it has nowhere honest to go, becomes competition.

Nobody Here Is the Villain. Not Even the AI.

Nobody sat down one morning and decided to hollow out their team culture. They all just responded to instinct.

The problem is that the definition of team hasn’t been updated. Leadership is still measuring individuals the way it did before AI arrived, which means individuals are optimising on their own at the expense of the whole.

This is how aggression enters a team without anyone intending it. It may look like conflict but it’s actually a withdrawal. Someone going quiet in a meeting, an idea kept close and not shared, a collaboration that quietly stops feeling natural etc.

Do the Work. Drop the Fruit. ✅

The best work almost never comes from the person running fastest. It comes from the person who forgets to check the scoreboard because they are too absorbed in the work itself. This is what we call - flow.

There’s a reason for that. In Vedantic thought, which is my favourite direction to think, the ego, the I-ness, is also the part that gets in the way.

You cannot reach the flow state, which is the whole you, while monitoring how you are performing. When you’re doing something for the numbers, you’re always slightly outside the work, calculating the return, watching yourself, watching your back. But when you’re doing it because it genuinely pulls you, because the creative juice is real, you merge into it and you disappear.

That disappearance is where the best outcomes live.

Things somehow always work out for people who are genuinely absorbed in what they do, who keep showing up, keep noticing, keep being in the right room.

Arjuna’s problem on that battlefield wasn’t cowardice. It was that he had made the outcome the whole point. Krishna’s answer wasn’t to care less either, it was to return his attention to the only thing actually in his hands, the quality of the work itself.

Do the work because it’s the right work. Let the fruits follow.

We are Arjuna right now. Frozen yet frantic, in front of a battlefield we’re calculating rather than engaging. The flow will find us the moment we stop performing for the scoreboard and start focusing on the task at hand.

karmaṇyevādhikāraste mā phaleṣu kadācana
mā karmaphalaheturbhūrmā te saṅgo’stvakarmaṇi

Your right is to the work. The scoreboard will catch up 🪷.

Bhagavad Gita 2.47. Verse and translation sourced from shlokam.org

Yet it is only irony that the same species which uncovered this truth, carried it through every era, and handed it faithfully to the next generation has never truly internalised it. And when grief arrives, most of us simply and massively fail.

Anticipatory grief..

Grief, I have learned, does not always wait for loss. And to grieve before the real loss is suffering in its most merciless form.

I grieved my fur best friend across seven months of chemotherapy, holding hope and sorrow in the same hands, watching him fall in and out of life of quality, while I stood by, helpless until one day he left.

Somewhere along three years of layoffs in tech industry, I find myself grieving in meetings and inboxes for a job not yet lost.

I now grieve the way my loved one with terminal illness calls my name, because I already know the shape of their absence. I am grieving someone who is still alive and that, I have learned, is its own kind of death

… And what I learned from it

Every setback has been, in its own reluctant way, a teacher.

The suffering from watching my dog through seven months of treatment carved patience into me, a patience I did not know I was capable of. It taught me selflessness, servitude, and how to recognise love in forms I was not aware of before.

The fear of layoff did something unexpected too, it loosened the grasp of my job and its hold on me. I still give my work the best I have, but I realised I am more than my job title. A Sanskrit diploma, Advaita Vedanta, this writing, they all came from the part of me that needed to remember who I was beyond my job.

But it is the grief I am living now that has changed me most profoundly. Every moment with the one I am losing feels weighted with meaning. I am more present, more deliberate, more willing to diminish my ego. To love without condition, to give without reserve. I see in them a calm that humbles me. I see an acceptance of fate that has quietly become gratitude for the life they were given. And in their smile, in the way they meet each moment without resistance and with beauty, I am learning to let go. To surrender.

Grief is real and I do not deny it but I am determined to observe it, to let it burn through what is unnecessary in me and leave something stronger behind.

An AI model works by predicting the statistically next best word to write and respond to you. When it lacks grounding information, that prediction can drift away from the truth (grounding information). This is hallucination in a nutshell.

Hallucination has become a common term in the world of AI, but the concept has always existed in human behaviour too.

Think of the time you only half-knew something but were asked about it anyway. You fumbled, then filled the gaps with invented details to complete the half-remembered story. That was your ego working hard to hold on to the “expert-on-this-topic badge.” This is the human version of hallucination.

You panicked at the follow-up question, edited the answer five times after hitting send, and lost sleep over having to justify yourself if your answer turned out to be factually incorrect. You knew perfectly well that your hallucination won’t be forgiven as easily as an AI model’s.

This is your opportunity to switch from reactive mode to responsive mode.

In such situations, you have two good options - respond later, after verifying the facts, or, if the question needs urgent acknowledgement, simply say: "Thank you for your patience while I gather the information needed to give you a complete answer." Honestly, the clarity and peace of mind this approach brought me is worth far more than any “expert badge”.

We all have enough burdens on our shoulders. Let's try not to add any more. After all, truth is the lightest thing to carry! It took watching an AI struggle with honesty to remind me of that.

If this helped, you know where to find me @ iknowthisfeeling.com . This world doesn't get easier - but we get wiser. Until next time. ☺️

When I first moved into the home near this tree, there were a few things that instantly made me fall in love, one of them was this tall gum tree that stood proudly just across the road from my house. Its shiny grey bark and its divine presence, patiently giving up its branches to the noisy Australian birds, all made me fall in love with it. We formed an unspoken bond instantly, one that takes years to form between humans.

However earlier in 2023, almost two years since our move, we received a letter from the council regarding a road expansion project. My heart sank instantly as I somehow sensed it could mean that they were cutting all the trees. Months passed by, and my husband and son reassured me that nothing might happen, that they might not go through with the expansion after all. While this brought me some relief, I remained sceptical whenever I spotted trucks or construction workers near my house.

Then, in a month, it all began. The construction work started, and they tied ribbons on the trees, green and pink. My tree was given a pink ribbon, a sign of its upcoming ill fate. Just as my intuition had warned, they started cutting down all the trees tied with pink ribbons.

Deep in my heart I knew it was time to say farewell. One weekend, I took a walk to my tree and said goodbye. I took a photo of it standing tall, gazing down upon me with what seemed like a sense of fulfilment. Perhaps it had been waiting all these years for this moment, to transition from being a tree to something more.

The following week it happened. They cut my tree, and it fell with a thud. The fall echoed both outside and inside my being ( I still have the video I took). I cried like I lost someone close, but I was more prepared on that day than I had been earlier in the year. I’ve grown accustomed to grief in recent months. In my head, it’s not gone but evolved, like all the souls who have departed from my life.

Sometimes I wonder whether my tree was cut down to test my strength, to see if I could weather the trial of letting go with grace which in two years I was to be tested again harshly, with my pet’s passing. Life has its own peculiar ways of teaching lessons, and I know this better now and I surrender to the teacher.

Adios amigo! Until we meet again, my friend.

I’ve experienced a lot of changes within me in recent years. My 20-year-old self would hardly recognise the person I am today. She might laugh at how my thoughts go, make very ‘intelligent’ arguments against my ideologies and even post on Instagram how weird I am. But both versions of myself are not wrong based on my respective phases of life.

What confuses me is, I’m unsure what people mean when they tell me to “be myself”, “be authentic”. I naturally absorb the behaviours and mannerisms of those around me. I “code-switch” though I’ve been doing this long before it had a name. I have different handwriting depending on my mood and what I’m writing. It might seem odd, but all of this is also me. My taste in music ranges from Dr. M.BalamuraliKrishna to Crosby, Stills & Nash. And then there are days I would only listen to “Tere Dar Par Sanam” by Kumar Sanu on repeat.

In many ways, I am a product of the people I interact with, the books I read, the music I listen to, the experiences, the places I live in and my whole state of mind at that time.

My current belief is that, as ephemeral as this body is, so is the illusion of who I am. This thought frees me from having to be one fixed thing. I’d rather keep becoming newer, better versions of myself and I will keep exploring that becoming.