karma police

on evening walks

The pandemic cocktail contains its fair share of anxieties, insecurities, and worries, but over the last year, I managed to find a special ingredient to soothe it over – long evening walks. I’ve been on countless evening walks over the past year, and they’ve repaid me generously – in stronger bonds with my friends, and in a clearer headspace.

Over time, I’ve tried to hone in on the art of the perfect evening walk. There are a few crucial rules – they have to be timed right around sunset, you have to invite one friend, all “serious” topics like school, college applications, or projects are off-limits, and we have to walk in a slow, ambling pace, not a hurried, exercise pace.

There’s something about the sunset – about plunging into the hues of deep violet, orange and lavender with those you love. On these walks, I’ve learned about childhood anecdotes and present day passions. Sometimes the conversation leads us to exciting places – I’ve discussed on walks the explosion of k-pop, the future of chess in India, and how the NBA draft system works.

Look, the pandemic has been tough, but the one consistent societal message we’ve received is to lean into the ones we love. In situations like the ones we’ve just experienced, love and laughter can feel like rebellion.

In her spoken word poem, “The Hill we Climb”, Amanda Gorman writes, “So while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?”.

Evening walks mean so, so much to me because they have been the strongest evidence of this assertion. They have been the most tangible assurance that I will heal, that I will make it out of the pandemic and that I will prevail.

nanaji

Chaotically typing out these words on my laptop, I sit in a room that has been left unoccupied for the better part of a year. It’s full of dusty volumes of physics research, cardboard boxes of personal belongings, and some bank statements. A room that used to be inhabited by my characteristically serene, dignified grandfather has now become my quiet retreat for thinking or simply resting.

The story starts with a disease that went undetected because it was too risky for my grandfather to visit a hospital during the pandemic. Over the next few months, he would be in and out of the hospital. During this period, my entire family (myself included) contracted COVID – news that hit me the day before my Euclid exam. I also took my final school exams in a secluded flat, where I was self-quarantined. Being away from my parents or not knowing what the next week held was thoroughly disorienting – and my memories of this period are just as haphazard as this room.

I wrote my AP exams a month after he passed away.

While I learned to be calm, resilient, and pragmatic all at once, I honestly cannot paint this experience as a positive. What can be said about my microcosm of a COVID experience can be said about our collective pandemic experience – it is what it is. We love, we hope, and we care – and it may seem to whittle away at us forever, but it’s also what defines us.

the kobayashi maru

A sunny afternoon on the school grounds, and six children lined up to run what was the most important race of their seven-year-old lives. Our heads bobbing up and down, elbows crashing into each other, and our panting breath. Amidst it all, me, laughing, then my knees clashing against each other in a misstep, falling, tripping, and then crying. Some blood flowing from my scraped knees, the dust being wiped from my perfectly white PE clothes, and the scenes of a Sports Day injury.

In Star Trek, the Kobayashi Maru is a test that every Starfleet Cadet must take. This test is unwinnable.

I soon learned that this wasn’t about a misstep. This was about a condition called knock knees – where your legs bend inwards at the knees even as your ankles stay apart. Today, I have very little recollection of this period. I have only bittersweet tales collected from my parents, who rushed from clinic to clinic, and my grandmother, who insisted on tagging along to every visit.

It is meant to ensure that each cadet faces the fear of certain death and can maintain their calm in such a no-win scenario.

I am told that back then, I wasn’t particularly cooperative with well-meaning adults. When warned of surgery, I balled my fists and shouted back “NO NEED!”. When provided leg braces to correct my posture, I whined and cried an entire night and vowed to never wear them again. I finally compromised and settled for what seemed like the least drastic action – physiotherapy. James Kirk doesn’t believe in no-win scenarios. The captain believes the test itself to be a cheat. It wasn’t easy. Back then, there was just one doctor in the entire city we trusted to help us – except he lived 4 hours away and all his appointments were booked a year in advance. I soon realized that this would be a years-long process. I didn’t have to nurse a fracture or bandage a bleeding wound – my still-developing bones had to be bent back into shape. There was no way out of it. It had to be done.

He hacks the mainframe responsible for administering the test, becoming the only Starfleet cadet in history to have passed the Kobayashi Maru.

Once again, I am told that I made some dramatic choices. For me, physiotherapy meant dramatic recreations of Johan Cruyff and Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi, my favorite footballers at the time. I would waltz through my cramped apartment – dribbling through doors and tables – the space between the two legs of a chair serving as my goal. Outside, it also meant cricket coaching, falling and tumbling frequently, but loving every second of it.

Don’t get me wrong – I did the doctor-recommended exercises. I went to a local physiotherapist and did my hamstring stretches and I took my calcium supplements – but rabonas, Cruyff turns, and rainbow flicks just had to be part of it too – it was who I was. The words the doctors were saying weren’t for me. This period of time wasn’t real, and this wouldn’t define me.

Captain James T. Kirk rewrites the rules to win a no-win scenario. Ultimately, it faded away. I stopped stumbling when I got up, stopped falling in cricket coaching, and the visits to the doctors became less frequent. There was no single defining moment where this ended – instead, it just slunk away into the distance like a wounded wolf, never to be seen again.

I fell in a curious love with unwinnable scenarios. The audacity to refuse braces and surgery or the audacity to colonize Mars. The audacity to write a research paper or even wriggle out of a complex math problem – I chased it, wide-eyed. Words like audacity, gall, and grit came to the forefront of my vocabulary, violently displacing all the stumbling and tripping and falling.

thank you and fuck you!

thinking about this ted lasso quote, where ted says: “Thank you for flying all the way here to come see me. And fuck you for not telling me you were coming. Thank you for all the small, silly little things you did for me as a kid, you know, like hiding notes in my lunchbox or putting googly eyes on the fruit at the supermarket just to make me laugh. And fuck you for not working on yourself or seeking help after we lost Dad, and for not talking to me about it, either. Just glossing over the whole thing and acting like everything was all right.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klatVv37f7E, Mom City, S3E11)

and how this framing is so empathetic and fuzzy-warm (and everything else ted lasso is) to intersperse kindness and resentment, because that's precisely how complicated parental feelings are so often. it's one thing to sandwich the negative between the positive. it's another thing to put out all the bad stuff together. but neither capture just how incessantly nuanced decades-long relationships can be. in most case, both intense gratitude and bones-deep bitterness can AND WILL exist simultaneously, and this is perhaps some of the best writing i've seen that's able to represent that.

the thank you and fuck you! framing services the nagging part of your brain that thinks neither thanking your parent nor yelling at them is the full story – on a compulsive level. “fuck you for not telling me you were coming” cue internal voice: but hey, she did fly all the way, she probably misses you “THANK YOU FOR FLYING ALL THE WAY HERE TO COME SEE ME!”. it's so silly but it's so powerful.

part one: why debate at all

If anything should hint at how much I absolutely love and adore debate: it's that I still remember the first three motions I ever debated. The first was about the ethics of gene editing, the second was about the cultural significance of baggy jeans, and the third was whether India should fund space research. I even remember the cases I ran, as horribly underdeveloped as I now consider them. “Baggy jeans don't even make you look cooler, you just look like a waddling penguin”, and apparently that was funny enough to win the debate.

All of this started in a seemingly unrelated after-school class I loved. It was a safe haven from the intellectual rot and mindless cruelty that defines the Indian education system – we learnt about Picasso's Blue Period and Bruce Springsteen's protest music and engaged in the yearly tradition of re-writing Shakespeare using modern-day slang. But we also got to talk and express ourselves – we wrote science fiction thrillers and rom-coms and we wrote scripts for plays that we acted horribly in (but always feeling like we were Rami Malek reborn).

It was also the first time I ever participated in a debate. And it's here that I discovered the thrill of debate. It's the single reason that I fell in love with debate. It's the closest I feel to being alive. The five seconds JUST before I start my debate speeches are the absolute worst. But the 5 minutes that follow are the absolute best – the feeling of absolute composure and control. The desperate rush to quickly come up with refutation, the playing with words in your head to find the most decisive phrasing, and the deep, smug, petty, primal satisfaction when it all works and the audience showers you with applause.

It's this feeling that has driven my love for debate since. It's when I begin to fall in love with argumentation and the crux of debate itself – and started tuning into what passes for “debate” on Indian news channels, or immersing myself in the world of Model UN to a wild and irrational degree, or converting every real-life decision and conversation into a kind of grand debate that I had to win (my mom makes the dubious claim that I still do this).

Having since moved to Canada and seen the well-developed culture of high-school debate gives me mixed feelings then – on one hand, I can't stop thinking about how much better I would be by now – if I redirected all of this effort in ways that were channelled appropriately, with real structures around me supporting this hobby. But I similarly shudder when I think about that life – being shepherded to debate academies and highly-competitive tournaments across the country and strategically optimising debate strategy would've likely made the whole thing seem less magical and exhilarating. I doubt I would've sustained the passion for as long.

The other thing debate made me do is be forced to consider “the other side” on an almost instinctual level. This is something that originally just served me to be less dogmatic in my thinking and have a more nuanced understanding of big, global issues like feminism, but in the long run permeated into my daily life to just make me a more generally empathetic person. This obsession with generating both “for” and “against” arguments became the lens through which I saw the world, and for a slightly socially stunted young me, I began to understand those around me a little better. I generated little cases in my head for their behaviours and actions – and began to see why they did the things they did, in ways I could fundamentally not see before.

Maybe my teachers didn't deeply hate me, or maybe that friend wasn't just being an asshole – perhaps there were deeper, underlying things – like upbringings, educational systems, and different ways of thinking that came in the way, and that their actions had to be necessarily interpreted through those lens. Everything I'm saying right now may seen like just Empathy 101 to an older, emotionally well-adjusted audience, but it's something that at least I had to actively cultivate at a young age. Debate gave me the tools to understand the world, the people in it and the systems that made it up, far before it taught me the intricacies of social justice or International Relations or philosophy.

For a more nuanced take on how debate and empathy interplay in the real world, check out this excellent episode of the Structural Reasons Podcast with Ashish Kumar.

All of this is to say that a lot of specifics change through the course of this series: the formats I debate in, the places I debate in, even the people I debate with – but the two things I've described above remain adamantly unmovable. They continue to serve as lampposts that underpin anything I talk about when I talk about debate – and the day these two don't hold true anymore, is the day I quit debate without looking back.

on mothers and fathers

When Sue Zhao said, “Thank for you for the recipe I say – I mean, thank you for raising me. Don't forget to do the dishes, she replies. Sometimes life I simple, I think. I am happy. I have a mother and she calls me and teaches me how to cook tofu”

or when Jessica Au said, “I knew that if I had a daughter, she would live partly because of the way I had lived, and her memories would be my memories, and she would have no choice in that matter.””

or when Mitski said, “Mom, I'm tired Can I sleep in your house tonight? Mom, is it alright If I stay for a year or two? Mom, I'll be quiet It would be just to sleep at night And I'll leave once I figure out How to pay for my own life too Mom, would you wash my back? This once, and then we can forget And I'll leave what I'm chasing For the other girls to pursue Mom, am I still young? Can I dream for a few months more?”

or when Ted told his mom, “Thank you for flying all the way here to come see me, and fuck you for not telling me you were coming. Thank you for all the small, silly little things you dod for me as a kid, you know? Like hiding notes in my lunch box, or, uh, putting googly eyes on the fruit at the supermarket just to make me laugh. And fuck you for not wanting to work on yourself or seeking help after we lost dad. And for not talking to me about it either.”

or when Ted told his therapist “He was a good dad. And I don't think he knew that. I think if he would've known how good he was at stuff he didn't really care about being good at, he... I don't think he would've done what he...

And I wish I would've told him. I wish I would've told him more. I was just so angry at him. 'Cause he was always gone at work and just out with friends or something like that, and then he was gone. And I knew right then and there that I was never gonna let anybody get by me without understanding they might be hurting inside, you know. 'Cause life, it's hard... it's real hard...”

or when Jamie's mom told him “Jamie... your father, he is who he is. And he is never, ever, ever gonna change. And like it or not, you've ended up being who you are so that you can prove him wrong.

And you are amazing. You are. When you came on for England.. Oh. Jesus, Jamie, I wept. I bawled me fucking eyes out. And yeah, your dad will be in the stands tomorrow, pissed out of his head, rooting against you.

And it won't matter. You don't have anything to prove to that toerag. You're not lost, my sexy little baby. You're just not sure which direction you're going in ... yet.”

or when Ted asked Jamie, “Ted: If you could talk to him now, what would you say? Jamie: I'd say “fuck you.” (sighs) ... Jamie: Yeah, I'd say “Thank you.”

and Ted told him “You know, Jamie, if hating your Pops ain't motivating you like it used to, it might be time to try something different. Just forgive him. .... You ain't giving him anything. When you choose to do that, you're giving that to yourself.”

or when Kyung-Sook Shin said, “To you, Mom was always Mom. It never occurred to you that she had once taken her first step, or had once been three or twelve or twenty years old. Mom was Mom. She was born as Mom. Until you saw her running to your uncle like that, it hadn’t dawned on you that she was a human being who harbored the exact same feeling you had for your own brothers, and this realization led to the awareness that she, too, had had a childhood. From then on, you sometimes thought of Mom as a child, as a girl, as a young woman, as a newlywed, as a mother who had just given birth to you.”,

or when Michelle Zauner wrote in Crying in H-Mart, “Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial-strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn't care if it hurt like hell in the meantime. When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction. She was guilty only of caring too much. I realize this now, only in retrospect. No one in this would would ever love me as much as my mother, and she would never let me forget it.”

or when Sufjan told Carrie, “Sitting at the bed with the halo at your head Was it all a disguise, like Junior High Where everything was fiction, future, and prediction Now, where am I? My fading supply”

or when Carrie replied to Sufjan, “Did you get enough love, my little dove Why do you cry? And I'm sorry I left, but it was for the best Though it never felt right My little Versailles”

or when she went on, saying “Shall we look at the moon, my little loon Why do you cry? Make the most of your life, while it is rife While it is light Well you do enough talk My little hawk, why do you cry?”

or when Tare Zameen Par told us all, “Main Kabhi Batlata Nahin Par Andhere Se Darta Hoon Main Maa Yun To Main,Dikhlata Nahin Teri Parwaah Karta Hoon Main Maa Tujhe Sab Hain Pata, Hain Na Maa Tujhe Sab Hain Pata, Meri Maa”

Course Reviews – 1A @ uWaterloo CS

Here's an honest review of all my courses: MATH 135 – by far my favorite course this term – I somehow enjoyed math more than CS – which for me is saying something. This course was especially rewarding and played right into my strengths. The concepts introduced in this course were not inherently complex, and solving the assignments required very little working memory. However, it was extremely rewarding because it's inherently a proofs question – and solving each question was its own dopamine rush. I appreciated how you had to think and innovate for each question, and loved that the assignments were only a few questions per week, but each would take time. Overall, it changed how I think about proofs and mathematical rigorousness, and was really fun to do in a group when chasing a particularly difficult problem.

CS 135 – my second favourite course. Am still miffed that we spent 4 months learning a language that will have no professional utility whatsoever. However, I do appreciate the arguments in favour of actually doing it the way Waterloo demands. Regardless, I think I found nothing challenging in the work given to us in the first three weeks – but boy, did the course pick up after that. I can confidently say that I have never been more challenged in CS in my entire life, and figuring out for the first tie how a lot of these concepts worked was a real pain. Just like the Math course, it has definitely changed how I view CS forever, and what challenging means. It has also given me a serious reality check in terms of how good I am at CS. Understanding a lot of this “logic” and coming up with the solutions and algorithms on the spot is genuinely challenging, and it's mind-blowing seeing how fast some other kids can come up with it and how easy an intimidating problem can become if you have clarity of thought and the patience to “think it through”.

The other three courses will have shorter reviews, because eh talking about academics is boring after a point. PHYS 121 – had organisational issues with this – was really hard to figure out how to prepare – and just grinding the assignments ended up not being enough. Was the same concepts as high school but just a higher level of questions, should have planned better.

MATH 137 – again the same CONCEPTS as high school, but explored deeper. Got lulled into not studying for it as much, because it had quizzes instead of assignments. Would have done just fine if I spent time on the course. SPCOM 223 – a fun enough course with decently interesting classes. Gained a slightly different perspective on public speaking, and definitely accepted that I was not hot shit, especially not anymore in Canada where English is everyone's first language. Also never really understood the grading scheme, feel like everyone just scored between 16-18 on each assignment. Huuuhhhhh??? (lmao throwback)

Leg press – level 14 (110kg) Squats – 17.5kg Lunges – 7.5kg each Inner thigh/outer thigh – level 6/7 Leg curl – level 10 (83 kg) Calf raises – 80kg

• Gym – leg day! Treadmill – 80 calories (10 minutes), followed by inner thigh/outer thing –> level 4/5 each, leg curls – level 7, Bulgarian Split squats (no weights), calf raises – 30kg (15kg X 2). Went in the morning, and probably didn't sleep enough, so everything was lactic acid and horrible form. But it's a good time to go in general, minimum crowd.
• Laptop – gameplan finalised. Will discuss in detail when it's finally happening.
• Cybersecurity – took notes for another section under Network Fundamentals.

• Cybersecurity – made notes for the Linux Fundamentals part of the Tryhackme learning path. Figured it would be best to store them on Notion so that they're searchable.
• Laptop – figured out my specifications and asked around on a bunch of forums. Is going to be a confusing process to finalisation but I have to figure it out in 2 days max... ugh!
• Media – The new Neal Brennan: Blocks special is the hardest I've laughed at stand-up in the longest fucking time.