A year-end review is a lazy way to wipe the dust off this blog, but I feel like it needs to be done for the sake of propriety at least, since I had done something similar last year. It is a good time to look back at the year, before I get too far into 2022.

As I try to look back, I can remember only bits and pieces of events and some threads of thought that persisted in my mind for a long time. From this end, 2021 only seems like a bland continuation of 2020. So much was spent at home, seeing the same four walls everyday for months on end. And yet, it was also somehow the year when I had both, the worst times of my life and the best times of my life. The ever-present danger of COVID kept me from traveling or making any long-term plans. Towards the end of the year, the situation improved, which led me back to college and better times. Now as I write this, I am staring at the possibility of a third Covid wave, more lockdowns, more isolation and more of this dystopian nightmare that has since long lost its mojo.

Now that I think of it, it is quite impossible to compress all that happened in a single, readable blog post due to two reasons. Firstly, there is so much of it. Secondly, a lot of what happened is personal, which I am still figuring out for myself. Still, I think it is worth trying, at least in the form of a disorganized list.

Stuff I did (in no particular order)

1. Did a corporate internship in software development.
2. Got involved in a research project for the first time.
3. Fell into a depressing existential crisis after the second wave of Covid (like a lot of other people), got out of it through lifting weights, spending time in nature and lots of support from family and friends.
4. Started lifting seriously. Deadlifted 130 kgs, aiming to lift double my body weight (almost there- 140 kgs).
5. Developed a love for writing haikus. You can find some here.
6. Lived in Bangalore for a month with three of my friends. Learned to cook. Had a ton of fun overall.
7. Organised and published my notes. Wrote TILs fairly regularly through the year.
8. Started investing.
9. Finally learned to ride a motorcycle.
10. Returned to KGP after a very long time. It was better than I had imagined or hoped for. Traveled for the first time in months when I made a short trip with friends.

Learnings/things I thought about

1. Hope and love make life worth living. Probably the most banal, obvious thing ever, but it took me a long time to really get it.
2. Pessimism can be a hedge against circumstances ruining optimistic hopes. However, too much of it prevents the effort required to make the most of any situation. Wrote more about this in my last blog post.
3. Exercise is the stupidest, easiest way to be more happy and peaceful.
4. The only takeaways from college have been people (friends, network) and exposure to the bigger world. I am a completely different person than who I was in my first year, but that is another thing altogether.
5. Insight from experience > information from study
6. Everything boils down to incentives.
   • Teaching at colleges doesn’t improve because professors don’t have enough incentive to improve their teaching. Service in government and bank offices doesn’t improve because they don’t have incentive to do so. The solution in these cases might be to introduce incentives that directly map to the desired behavior.
   • This usually happens in monopolies, with people secure in their financial/social status.
   • Competition creates necessary incentives (or maybe it is the other way around?). It gives people at the top negative incentive of losing their position and people at the bottom positive incentive to reach the top. If it is a positive sum game, it ends up creating value through innovation and raising the status quo.
   • There is some vague notion of how this points to capitalism being a better engine for human progress as compared to socialism, but I am not sure of it yet.
   • Building a good system means aligning incentives of all the involved parties as much as possible.
7. Flat vs Hierarchical organization structures
   • Some discussions with my friends at KOSS led me to make some comparative observations about the hierarchies of the different organizations operating in the campus.
   • It seems to me that the organizations like cells that are result-centric (event organization, etc.) are closer to companies and usually exist in a strict hierarchy according to seniority in year of study while the creative organizations like societies are closer to communities and have a more or less flat structure.
   • Decision making is a big difference I noticed in both places. In a flat structure, people have a more or less equal say in the decision. This leads to long discussions due to differences in opinion. Consensus is hard to reach. In a hierarchy, power is unequally distributed. Decisions are faster (not necessarily better).

As with every year, the new year doesn’t feel any different. The future is still uncertain in a million different ways. But I believe that I have gotten a tad bit better at handling the uncertainty at least. At this point though, I could happily take a completely boring, uneventful year.

Wishing for a relatively normal new year, cheers!

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