Beer on the Mekong - Growth, Discovery and Creativity in 2025

It’s easy to dismiss New Year’s Day as just another revolution around the sun - an arbitrary checkpoint which carries no inherent meaning. But then all checkpoints and milestones are arbitrary. Who’s to say that 17 year and 11 months old teenager is significantly less mature than an 18 year-old adult? We have milestones because they’re convenient. So in the spirit of benchmarking convenience, perhaps it is not such a bad idea to stick to resolutions, goals and plans.

I have absolutely no idea what mine are at this point in time - and frankly, I don’t care that I don’t know.

I’m just back from a lovely trip to Laos and Cambodia. The trip was long enough that I reached a point of detachment - from everything that has been plaguing me for the last few years. I did not worry about work or studies for a second. I did not worry about family or relationships. I did worry a bit about my dog - she has separation anxiety. Staying away from me for ten days isn’t the most pleasant experience for her. I worried that she may not be eating or sleeping well enough. She’s back home now, and in a couple of days will have made a full recovery - as if I’d never left her at a boarding centre for ten days. The folks at the boarding centre kept sending me daily videos of her trotting about the yard - she certainly didn’t look her playful self, but mostly she looked okay.

All in all, I was carefree enough that the whole trip felt like a long and deep meditative experience. It was just me and the Mekong. It was just me and the grand sunlit spires of Angkor Wat. It was just me and bustle of the night market in Luang Prabang.

So that’s one resolution right there - find more such meditative experiences (preferably without international travel). A big reason why I haven’t had more such experiences is because of the tyranny (or perhaps the convenience) of routine. Routine is easy, we’re creatures of habit. The obvious, and perhaps healthy antidote to routine is controlled randomization and experimentation (I wonder what it would take to do that).

The thing about sublime experiences is that there’s something elemental, something ineffable about them. Mountain-gorges, oceans and dense jungles have that quality - as if one should fall silent in their presence. Checking your phone is an affront to the deep, still river - it demands, and manages to obtain the toll of singular, unflinching attention. That is the key to deep experience. You can only watch, listen, hear and smell. Trying to find the right frame for a picture, or trying to think of the right words to caption that picture, even pausing to point out a unique feature of the landscape to your co-traveller - all of this is blasphemy. You can only be still and soak it in. Any worldly or manifest deviation from this trance like state is irreverent. The only acceptable indulgence is fish, bananas and quiet swigs of chilled beer.

It’s a state which can only be induced by a true force of nature. So there’s the second resolution - find more forces of nature. Find stuff that makes you feel like you’d better keep quiet. That would need travel. But travel takes it’s toll - and I’m not young anymore. And there’s the third resolution - to be healthy enough to travel. To be healthy enough that 15000 steps on the first day of vacation doesn’t look like a big deal. To be healthy enough that a ten-day trip (even if it’s to southeast Asia) doesn’t induce a fever at the end.

A huge chapter of my life - one that began with the pandemic, one that included a lot of personal and professional upheaval - drew to an end in December 2025. I graduated from IIT Madras and around the same time, took a sabbatical from work. The four years of the BS Degree Program have been a turning point - I’ve discovered that not only am I a good student, I actually have a good flair for teaching as well. I’ve taught many courses over the years, most of which were very well received - but now I know that I can pull off a sustained and tangible long-term teaching and learning. My six-year stint at Gramener also came to an (albeit temporary) end. That’s the longest I have spent in any one place since I left my childhood home 18 years ago. I learnt most of what I knew at Gramener - and I did some of the coolest work of my career there. I doubt if I’ll ever be able to pull that off again. It’s no wonder that breaking free of these anchors, heavy with a history of passion, feels liberating. When I told Anand, my boss, that I wanted a break, he agreed, and said that it was time for me to “spread my wings”. It feels good to be a feather in the wind.

Then there’s the usual resolutions about reading, learning a new language, eating and sleeping better, etc. I’ve made and broken them so many times that calling them resolutions is embarrassing. For instance, it’s not like I don’t read enough, but all I have to show for my reading resolution in 2024 are two brand new bookshelves and a hundred fresh, unopened books. I also got three books signed by their authors but I’ve read none of them beyond the first few chapters. Reading, in and of itself, can be a sufficiently transcendental experience. But for that I have to work hard to turn my living room (or my veranda, when the is out) into a fortress of solitude.

It is instead easier to leash the dog and walk off to a nearby park with a book under my arm. Unfortunately it’s still cloudy (and cold) in Delhi.

I recently met Amitava Kumar at a local bookstore. He was there to launch his latest book. When we spoke, I told him bravely that I was going on a sabbatical to “write more”. He asked me what about, and I said that I’m going to write about walking my dog. I was only half-truthful. Drafts upon drafts of about Cookie’s daily walks are lying around, and I haven’t finished a single one of them. Cookie hasn’t eaten my homework either.

And then there are unfinished drafts about so many other things - about my conversations with friends about the impostor syndrome, about how different authors end an essay, about technical debt, about teaching and learning data science and programming… (all of these phrases better be hyperlinked with the finished posts by the end of the year, I tell myself). So writing needs to be a resolution - much more than reading.

Finally, there are resolutions about hard skills, vocation and career capital. I decided to take a break from work because it had become increasingly apparent that I was spending more time solving people’s communication problems that their technical problems. “Welcome to management!” said SVS when I told him this. Moreover, technical problems that emerge from bad communication are the worst of the lot - and I don’t get paid nearly enough for solving them. Anand says that communicating clearly in code and in English is a rare skill. If that’s the case, perhaps crafting a niche role for myself is in order, and that’s going to take some work. My sabbatical could not have been timed better.

I started by saying that I didn’t know, and didn’t care, what my resolutions and goals were. But taking the time to ruminate upon and discover resolutions (in no small part by writing this) seems to have illuminated at least a few lighthouses on the horizon. The fortitude and discipline needed to sail to them in time - that remains another matter entirely.

But here’s to the first steps…

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden