At the core, there’s rage. rage about a lot of things.

Master Plan #

Our ancestors and fellow humans did a lot  for us. The infrastructure we have today is nothing less than magic to me. But there’s always something to do, something important to work on.

Following is a list of goals divided into buckets of 5, 10 and 15 years which I believe are worth pursuing for me. Some of these blue-sky long-term stretch goals are overly ambitions but these give growth to independent secondary goals which are shorter, less ambitions and easier to estimate for. I am constantly dreaming, thinking, experimenting and learning more about the spaces these goals are set in.

I am open to all kinds of changes to these goals as I become more aware of what’s up. Things are expected to fail. Whether to accomplish these time-based or goal-based depends on the goal itself. All of this is just a rough outline  and I do not intent to make this too granular as I feel that will make it less useful.

Building blocks #

These are ideas that are directly/indirectly are the building blocks of the goals. I am not sure if these are my projections.

• Quality of life : People deserve better, if it can be improved, it should be improved. Work at individual and community levels. Changes need to be at social fabric level by raising the lowest common denominator directly.
• Curiosity, Freedom and Creativity : Freedom and curiosity are precursors to doing great creative work. We must allow people to take creative risks. Pay the price of freedom for the people who can’t afford it.
• Call out : Stupidity that harms others must be called out and flamethrowed at. Fuck casteism, fuck these scammers calling themselves ed tech giants.
• Beautiful imagination that works : It has to work, that’s the point but beautiful imagination is not secondary. Bigger beautiful things happen when people contribute beautifully at their individual levels.
• Proper resource allocation : Allocate the right resource to the right thing at the right time. It’s important to decide whether we allocate humans to problem spaces or solution spaces. I think most problems we face today is because we fucked this up. Should take care of it proactively and yet keep room for experimentation.
• Common knowledge : Make common knowledge  actually  common. We have this wealth of human knowledge and history that we’re not able to pass down to the next generation effectively. Education should automate this. Education will not solve everything but I’ll be damned if I do not try.

1 Year #

• Lay the groundwork for research and experimentation
• Study relevant areas in cs, se, math, economics and education
• Build the required pipelines for note-taking, execution and money
• Agenda:2022

5 Years #

I’ll be experimenting with one single city/town/place. If things work, I’ll try scaling it whenever I feel like we can scale. It’s harder in a city like Guwahati because people are not so much online in the right places compared to a city like Bangalore. But I guess I’ll be experimenting with Guwahati.

• Generate enough capital so that I can go on for the next 10 years without having to look for a fund to support myself personally. The way I plan to do this is listed in Gandhi ₹
• Start a 24x7 local community library not confined to books. Anchor for promoting discussion of the futures  we want for the locality, and how we might achieve them. A home for all kinds plausible creations in the space.
• Seed the Hyperlocal  + Low Tech  + Offline  first movement
• I’ll need to navigate and lobby institutions to get what I want. Be aware of all the legal aspects/permissions, government bodies, established private institutions for it.

• Work towards shifting the focus areas of local schools and colleges to what matters. I am not 100% on the NEP'20 but it’s a step in the right direction, but it is just the specification. The implementation and support for the implementation is lacking severely.
• Extend the work on open access information and publication in general
• Do long term research  in education and have a way to experiment with it  at the same time. At the end of 5 years, I should be able to define the problem of the Indian education system based on my research.
• Do knowledge experiments 
• Work towards making public information more structured and accessible and pave the path with which the information itself flows to the people who need it the most.
• Monitor the state of the education system and see what is making things worse, what is making things better etc. Build custom systems and frameworks, leverage existing infrastructure.
• Lay the groundwork for building an evergreen system  that catalogues everything education, with proper taxonomy and discoverability.
• Make archival of local things mainstream than ever. At the least, I’ll archive shit lot of things myself.
• I have no idea how to deal with the climate crisis  and I’ll probably not be able to contribute directly in proper ways, but I am probably some good at  information management. So I think I can make effective information more accessible for the general public and people working in those areas. Work on how to make things more proactive, work with organizations  to channel their funds etc.

10 Years #

Not too many new things to do. But will collaborate a lot because I think I might have something to offer by then.

• Reflect on the work done in the last 5 years. Decide if this masterplan should be burnt or extended. Continue working on it, if all good, else kill self.
• Now that I have a better idea about the problem of education in India, start working on describing possible solutions
• Extend the library if it works out
• Start a education research lab if any of the research done was significant and demands a lab
• Start an alternative education system
• Start the computer science museum eventually
• Collaborate a lot

15 Years #

I feel so stupid trying to write my task list for 40yo me. Brave of me to assume that I’ll even exist. But just will roll with it for completeness sake. I think my interests will shift totally, but we’ll see  .

• Keep working on improving what was built previously or gracefully shut things down.
• Do a lot of drugs
• Work towards making research less dependent on institutions. Power to the people doing independent research.
• Fuck the narrative of you can’t help everyone. There are people who don’t need help that’s fine. But if there are people who need help, it’s our collective responsibility as humans to help them kickstart
• See how we can accelerate fast science  .
• Following is Bret Victor’s  long term goals. See if I can contribute to any of them:
  • Revolutionize how people learn, understand and create
  • Give scientists the tools to diagnose and cure world’s ills
  • Give artists the tools to create and share beauty in ways currently impossible
  • Reform our infrantilzed society
  • Give people tools to resist and destroy consumer culture
  • Give people tools to resist and destroy the corporation’s oligarchical control over employment, entertainment and creativity
  • Return power, dignity and responsibility to the individual

Operation plan #

This section is about how I plan to execute all of this. I spent time understanding how my brain works and how can I make it do what I want. I must say my brain is a sneaky mf who likes to do all the things I should not do and a world champion at forgetting things.

Anyway, I plan to work on all of this using two frameworks:

• Framework to organize information
  • Helps me think and prioritize.
  • Has pipelines for different kinds of information
  • Organizes itself by design. See notetaking
• Framework to execute experiments

  • Helps me experiment things easily and quickly.

  • Lets me ship, test, track and tear things in a graceful manner.

  • Allows me to scale things if required.

  • This is mostly the infra and local tools that I use. I’ve not build this framework properly yet hence no document about it exists at the moment.

  • Allows me to work on multiple projects at once

  • Idea is to make the system such that, even though I haven’t worked on something for a while, when I come back to it, the efforts put into getting back into it should be minimal. In other words, tries to simplify what jvns  mentioned in her talk.

    “When you use a system very infrequently and it’s full of a lot of weird trivia and gotchas, it’s hard to use the system correctly.”

Personal #

Travel goals #

• 🇮🇳 Take a picture infront of Gateway of India
• 🇺🇸 Attend a John Mayer concert
• 🇺🇸 Sit in the middle of times square
• 🇮🇳 Take a picture infront of Taj Mahal (fall in love first)
• 🇧🇷 Visit Christ the Redeemer early in the morning
• 🇮🇳 Visit all states in NE
• 🇮🇳 Visit Majuli, sneak KF ultra
• 🇲🇹 Sunset in Malta
• 🇮🇹 Stay 1 week in Italy
• 🇯🇵 Visit japan as a tourist
• 🇦🇶 See penguins
• 🇳🇱 Visit Tulip fields
• 🇳🇴 Northern lights
• 🌍 Visit all computer science museums on the planet

Long-term stretch goals #

• Become a massage specialist 💆🏽
• Learn the guitar 🎸
• Learn to dance 💃🏽
• Publish a real book 📖
• Do Vipassana Meditation (10 days)
• Become a champion in understanding “anything”  . Exaggerated, but in other words, learn how to process complex information and how to deal with different kinds of information.
• Build a treehouse 🌴
• Get a diploma in cartography 🐣
• Learn 10 magic tricks ✨
• Become infinite source of calming energy
• Start a duck farm 🦆
• Be in a position where I can help myself and others easily 🤝
• Brain capabilities maxxing (calculation, memory etc). 🤕
• Be content with life. Like for real. 👼
• Become part time data journalist and internet detective 🔍
• Start a:
  • Computer Science Museum
  • Education Research Lab
  • Library
  • Summer School for kids in a farm
• Keep a coin with two heads inside my purse 👛
• Open a small corner light shop 🎊

How to approach mentioned goals #

When picking any goal, do the following:

• Ask:
  • What exactly do I want to achieve?
  • How can I measure success?
  • Am I actively seeking out information about this?
  • Can I break this down into more manageable parts?
  • Is this really my goal? Or is it just some projection, am I constrained by fears or uncertainties?
  • What’s awesome/dope about this?
  • What would this look like if it was perfect?
  • What is that you want to add/change here?
  • What are some questions I return to related to this area  ?
• Don’t(s):
  • Assume nothing will go wrong
  • Make long term goals if possible
  • Estimate time on long term goals
  • Assume you know exactly what to build
  • Implement anything without thinking real hard
  • Plan more carefully if it’s a long term goal  .
  • Add a larger margin of error on timed tasks
• Do(s):
  • Try keeping things simple

Resources #

Links #

• Emmanuel Quartey | Writing 
• Future 
• Great Green Wall — The Great Green Wall 
• List of common human goals - LessWrong