Now

May 2026

I visited my home town back in Kerala, India and was able to spend a decent chunk of my time shuttling across two states here in Kerala: Thrissur and Kannur.

One of my biggest highlights of my recent trip to Kerala was the live performance of the Kathakali art form. I had witnessed Shree ramapattabhishekam, this depicts Ramayana end to end, the play starts at 12 am in the morning ending at 6 am in the morning.

This is a snippet from the entire play where the coronation of Lord Ram after vanvas is being shown. This was at the Koodalmanikam temple, probably the only known temple meant for Bharat, Lord Ram’s brother.

April 2026

This year, I wanted to challenge myself by picking up three difficult-to-read, but rewarding books. These are: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. In a manifestation exercise I did more recently, I was screaming with joy at the idea of finishing these three books, and I’m pretty sure it would mean something in the level of intellectual effort it would require.

So when I hopped around Waterstones recently, and found a paperback of Infinite Jest, I really wanted to reward myself, so I took the plunge.

I’m only 30 pages into it, and this book is far more complicated than I imagined. Even Wallace himself, and all the literary critics who have opined on the prologue, have called it a painful but enjoyable crawl. There are still 1,000 pages left, and bringing Infinite Jest onto the London Underground grabs eyeballs with a slight highbrow disdain, almost as if people think I’m conducting some cringe-pop version of performative reading.

I also want to take a quick segue into agentic coding, which I’ve written about at length in the recent past. I have found that the topic of agentic coding has stopped feeling speculative. The broad thesis held true: this really has become the period when agents entered ordinary work.

For me, that shift was personal too. I moved from casually testing prototypes to using Claude Code, Codex, and related tools as part of how I actually build, think, and work. What used to feel like AI for demos now feels more like a new literacy.

That change spilled into both my side projects and my day job. I spent much of the past year building and shipping a small cluster of N=1 apps, mainly for exploring what the bleeding edge of tech looked like: I built Signify, a writing platform built around proof of human authorship; Dicto, a voice dictation tool with diarization and custom dictionary support; Papercup, for placing international phone calls from the browser; an Obsidian plugin to help me identify the roughest essay draft worth improving next; and a rebuilt personal website that feels far more like my own taste.

Doing this repeatedly gave me much sharper opinions on how to steer AI-assisted software instead of merely admiring it. At work too, AI stopped being an abstract trend report and became part of the texture of product conversations, workflows, and future-facing decisions. The bottleneck feels less like technical syntax now, and more like taste, judgment, and knowing what is actually worth building. For instance, now I know how best to whisper to the LLMs, to make them do things the right way.

Outside of that, London feels less like a temporary backdrop and more like a real home now, complete with routines, furniture, errands, visitors, and its own emotional weather. Praphulla and I also celebrated Vishu at our home. I did feel guilt-tripped as I couldn’t contribute to preparing some of the dishes, but she made them quite well. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Writing has also come back to the center of things. I still think writing is thinking, but now I also have better tools to search my note archive, recover old threads, and turn them into essays with less friction. So the mood these days is to build more, publish more, and stop hesitating at the edge of the work I already know I want to do.

Jan 2025

2025 is the year of AI. I’m aligning my professional goals to get ahead on this S-curve.

My thesis for product management is that it would become more like prototype management. There would be a lot more experimentation and quick validations, which product roles would handle much more than we do today. Product management and product building would probably fuse into this new, undefined role. We can call this AI product management for now, but I suspect that it would become something else entirely.

In this earlier essay, I’d written at length about the tools I’m currently experimenting with: Idea in the shower, testing before breakfast.

I’ve also observed myself follow this strange law of inverse prioritisation: What I know to be the most important, I do the least of it.

The perils of breaking these goals are so deeply embedded in my subconscious that I’d rather avoid them. It might have a lot to do with how vulnerable I feel when I break something which I consider to be my most important goal. To break free from this pattern, I’m announcing my learning goals in a semi-public fashion here on this site. This is how my 2025 learning list looked:

1. Founder / Hacker: Foundations for building SaaS apps using Ruby on Rails.
2. Cursor / Claude: To become better at the bleeding edge of technology with AI-native tools for local development.

Oct 2024

I’ll miss you dad. I’m not able to get over this shock. Even today, I tried calling you on your phone, even though I knew deep down that you wouldn’t pick up. I’ll miss the fact that I will not be able to call you again and share my heart out.

Losing you has been the single most concentrated point of pain that I can recall. Perhaps this pain is a vestige from the love I’ve received from you.

I’m supposed to man up, cope with this pain and not cry as much. After a few days of barricading my emotions and acting strong in front of others, I let myself cry my heart out. Crying has been my emotional release valve, and I’ve had enough of this pretense of manning up. I’m annoyed by the fact that you are not around.

As I circle around the five stages of grief, I’ve started to accept the situation slowly. You’ll continue to live with us in our memories. They are as real as it can be, and you’re very much alive this way. Like you always used to say, I’ll continue to see education as an investment.

I’ll continue to make you proud, dad. We’re still one, just you and me, one mind, one soul, one being.

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July 2024

On July 19th, everything, everywhere, went haywire, all at once.

Two weeks prior to this day, the student protests in Bangladesh had just started. The controversial quota system for government jobs reserved 30% of positions for descendants of those who fought in the 1971 Liberation War, 10% for women, and 10% for residents of specific districts. These sparked a huge round of debates around meritocracy in the country, and it was at this junction that I landed in Dhaka.

I had come here as part of my work at Noora Health. We were preparing for a launch of a national health program centered around patients with hypertension, stroke, and diabetes.

After arriving in Dhaka, I was situated close to our office at Banani and wasn’t moving around much. In my first week, I didn’t really feel the effect of the protests happening around me. It was only in the second week that I started feeling their reverberations. Restaurants closed, cards stopped working, and a nationwide shutdown began. There was no internet.

I was advised to stay indoors. I still had my flight back to India and was thinking of a way to reach the airport. The roads were blocked, especially the ones to the airport.

My flight was cancelled. In hindsight, this was the same day when the entire world witnessed one of the biggest IT disruptions in recent years due to the CrowdStrike error. The outage impacted sectors such as banking, trading, media companies, and hundreds of airliners, including my cancelled Air India flight.

After a period of confusion and chaos, I secured an alternate flight to Chennai and landed home the day after that. I somehow reached home safely, and I sincerely pray for the safety of my friends and colleagues in Bangladesh during this period of emergency. I hope normalcy is restored soon.

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