kshanam

Anthony Bourdain: LIBYA

Sat, 18 May 2013 08:33:27 +0530

I’ve made a lot of hours of television over the years, but I think I’m proudest of Sunday’s Libya episode. I believe it is the best piece of work I’ve ever been part of. Some of that pride comes from recalling how difficult it was. My crew and I are not exactly seasoned veterans when it comes to…

"After returning to the US, I asked a senior engineer how he’d rank this question on a Google..."

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 13:35:09 +0530

“After returning to the US, I asked a senior engineer how he’d rank this question on a Google interview. Without knowing the source of the question, he judged that this would be in the top third. The class had 45 minutes to design a solution and implement it in Pascal. Most of them finished, a few just needed another five minutes. There is no question that half of the students in that grade 11 class could pass the Google interview process.”

- CS in Vietnam

Festival of Colors , India Holi

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 21:46:16 +0530

Festival of Colors , India

Holi

Trekking Himalaya – List of 50 top treks

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 20:20:30 +0530

Trekking Himalaya – List of 50 top treks:

List of top 50 Treks in Himachal, India

Shree Ram

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 09:21:48 +0530

Shree Ram

Thought provoking

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 12:43:00 +0530

Thought provoking

Hum Achche hain :)

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 12:42:41 +0530

Hum Achche hain :)

Why Aaron died

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 17:55:24 +0530

tarensk:

Last week, I awoke to find Aaron with me. He was sitting next to my bed, grinning his cheekiest grin, holding my hand.

For a few minutes, I savored a sweet uncertainty: Were the last few weeks all a nightmare, and Aaron was still with me? Or was I awaking inside a dream state, and in the real world Aaron was actually dead?

Then Aaron started trying to read a book to me, but he was having trouble deciphering the sentences. He said he was forgetting how to read for lack of practice. It became clear then that he was dream Aaron — real Aaron would never forget how to read. And that meant that everything I remembered about him killing himself must have been true in real life.

So I asked him why. Why did you do it? What was going through your mind when you killed yourself? I would have done anything for you. Anything at all, if you’d just told me what you needed.

“I’m dream Aaron,” he replied, after a long pause. “It’s not my job to tell you why. You see, as dream Aaron, I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know.”

As sadness enveloped me, I forced myself awake from the dream nightmare, only to confront the real-life nightmare. I will never have all the answers I crave. But I do have answers that no one else has. And that is why I’m writing this blog post.

*********

I believe that Aaron’s death was not caused by depression.

I say this with the understanding that many other people would not have made the same choice that Aaron made, even under the same pressures he faced.

I say this not in any way to understate the pain he was in — nor, for that matter, the pain that clinically depressed people are in.

I say this despite the fact that early on in our relationship, I had read and discussed with him his infamous blog post about suicide written years before — so I was not unaware that he had struggled with mental health in the past.

I say this because over the last 20 months of his life, Aaron spent more time with me than with anyone else in the world. For much of the last 8 months of his life, we lived together, commuted together, and worked in the same office — and I was never worried he was depressed until the last 24 hours of his life.

I say this because, since his suicide, as I’ve tried to grapple with what happened, I’ve been learning. I’ve researched clinical depression and associated disorders. I’ve read their symptoms, and at least until the last 24 hours of his life, Aaron didn’t fit them.

And that makes it hard to read, in so many articles, that “Aaron struggled with depression” — as though the prosecution was just one factor among many, as though, perhaps, he might have committed suicide on January 11 without it.

Depression is characterized by low energy and inactivity, withdrawal and isolation, feelings of low self-worth, trouble concentrating and remembering detail, and an inability to take pleasure in everyday life. Not all depressed people feel all of these things all the time, but those are the recipe. And, indeed, Aaron’s blog post about his own depression years before had alluded to many of these things.

But let me tell you about the Aaron I knew—the Aaron Swartz of 2011, 2012, and the first few days of 2013.

*********

The Aaron I knew was active. He worked out most days until he got the flu two weeks before he died. Just a few weeks before that, when I was out of town for the weekend, he had surprised me by taking himself on a day-long hike outside of New York. He came back glowing that evening, describing how he had scrambled up a steep rocky “shortcut” with some other hikers watching (and in the process lost his Kindle down a crevice).

The Aaron I knew was sociable and excited to spend time with his favorite people, right up to the very end. He had plans and ambitions — huge ones. On January 9, two days before he died, he spent hours deep in conversation with our Australian friend Sam about the new organization Aaron was in the early stages of building. Sam asked him whether he had support, and Aaron replied that everyone who was competent enough to support him was, in fact, supporting him — classic Aaron pessimistic arrogance, but also a reminder that he knew his friends were standing with him. Sam gave Aaron a quick overview of Australian politics; Aaron expressed astonishment at how easy it would be to “take over Australia”, but concluded that a country of only 20 million probably wouldn’t be worth it.

Self-esteem, needless to say, was definitely not Aaron’s problem.

The Aaron I knew had no trouble concentrating or remembering detail. Up through the week before he died, he was devouring all the scientific literature he could find on drug addiction and effective interventions. Not, to be clear, because he had any drug issues himself (he almost never even drank alcohol), but for a consulting project he was working on for Givewell, his favorite charity. He related to me with deep intellectual excitement his conversations with the top experts in the field, the interventions that had shown the most promise at combating alcoholism, his developing theories about what types of policy changes might be most politically feasible. We debated the cultural constructs that allow our society to treat almost indistinguishable chemicals as differently as we treat heroin and morphine.

The Aaron I knew had profound capacity for pleasure in everyday life. He did, of course, have problems with eating — within the range of normal symptoms associated with his ulcerative colitis. But when he found truly great food — or for that matter, truly great anything — he reveled in it. He had a finely honed aesthetic sense. He could get deeper, truer joy out of a perfect corn muffin, a brilliantly constructed narrative arc from Robert Caro’s LBJ biography, a beautiful font, than anyone I’ve ever met.

And maybe most impressively, he sustained all of these qualities for almost two years, in the face of an ongoing ordeal that threatened to ruin his life.

*********

Aaron was human: He wasn’t happy every moment, and I’d be the first to say he could be a real pain to live with sometimes. Aaron could be moody and introverted. Aaron was often in substantial physical pain from his stomach. Aaron was hard on himself (and equally hard on others). And Aaron obviously, at the end, was suicidal.

But I say it again: Aaron’s death was not caused by depression. This is an important point, because many people are arguing that it was, and that the appropriate response to his death is better treatment for depression, better detection of suicidal tendencies. This country absolutely needs these things — Aaron would have been the first to agree — but we need them because they’re the right thing to do, not because of what happened to Aaron.

I don’t know exactly why Aaron killed himself. I don’t know exactly what was going through his mind. If I had known those things on January 11, if I had even known the right questions to ask, maybe I could have stopped him. Since January 11, I think about it every hour of every day.

But as dream Aaron reminded me, I can only know what I already know. And with the knowledge I have — from watching, listening, asking, next to him on the bed, over meals, talking on the subway, from our adjacent desks at the office where we worked on separate projects — from our lives together, I believe that Aaron’s death was not caused by depression.

I believe Aaron’s death was caused by exhaustion, by fear, and by uncertainty. I believe that Aaron’s death was caused by a persecution and a prosecution that had already wound on for 2 years (what happened to our right to a speedy trial?) and had already drained all of his financial resources. I believe that Aaron’s death was caused by a criminal justice system that prioritizes power over mercy, vengeance over justice; a system that punishes innocent people for trying to prove their innocence instead of accepting plea deals that mark them as criminals in perpetuity; a system where incentives and power structures align for prosecutors to destroy the life of an innovator like Aaron in the pursuit of their own ambitions.

Ask yourself this: If on January 10, Steve Heymann and Carmen Ortiz at the Massachusetts US Attorney’s office had called Aaron’s lawyer and said they’d realized their mistake and that they were dropping all charges — or even for that matter that they were ready to offer a reasonable plea deal that wouldn’t have marked Aaron as a felon for the rest of his life — would Aaron have killed himself on January 11?

The answer is unquestionably no.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

"The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or..."

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 21:41:42 +0530

“The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours. It is an amazing journey, and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins.”

- Bob Moawad (via kari-shma)

rcruzniemiec: Living Architecture: India Images from the book...

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 00:26:28 +0530

rcruzniemiec:

Living Architecture: India

Images from the book by Andreas Volwahsen published in 1969. [via]

speechless!

"The road hasn’t been easy. It took over 16 months to bring a product to market. When we launched no..."

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 10:20:34 +0530

“The road hasn’t been easy. It took over 16 months to bring a product to market. When we launched no one cared and 24 months after starting we had only 10 paying customers and revenues of $99 per month. We moved into my parents’ basement for 3.5 years. But despite all the evidence pointing to our failure, we carried on. Why? We loved our customers, our company and working together, and we’d discovered a passion to serve others. Since those humble beginnings, over 5 million people have used FreshBooks to send and receive, print or pay invoices.”

- An open letter from FreshBooks founder Mike McDerment (via jonathanmarcus)

This has been a few months since this letter was first posted. However, I thought it a good reminder to counter the growing myth that one can “hack” your way to fast growth. I have discussed the idea of the “Slow Startup” in the past and I was reminded of that post earlier this week when I read a post about this very concept by my dear friend Poornima Vijayashanker, better known as the Femgineer.

It takes awhile to build a business that can last. Do not be swayed by quick fiix methods that purport to accelerate your growth. Focus on building a superior product that helps customers and delivering superior customer service. Everything else is simply a cheap gimmick.

(via marksbirch)

The new Incredible India campaign video

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 20:05:23 +0530

The new Incredible India campaign video

Live Young, Live Free

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 20:02:35 +0530

Live Young, Live Free

Advice, by Entrepreneurs for Entrepreneurs

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 12:35:44 +0530

Advice, by Entrepreneurs for Entrepreneurs

"The humiliation of a highly professional Army of two centuries’ standing, with an outstanding war..."

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 22:26:29 +0530

“The humiliation of a highly professional Army of two centuries’ standing, with an outstanding war record in battles, stunned the world in 1962”

- The guilty men of ’62

photojojo: We hereby name this portrait technique: Portrait...

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 10:07:32 +0530

photojojo:

We hereby name this portrait technique: Portrait Inception! Next time your family asks you to take portraits with your fancy camera, try stacking the generations like this!

A Photograph For The Generations

via Pinterest

allthingseurope: Soča river, Slovenia (by rmaltete)

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 15:56:41 +0530

allthingseurope:

Soča river, Slovenia (by rmaltete)

"Give me control of a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes its laws."

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 15:56:27 +0530

“Give me control of a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes its laws.”

- Mayer Amschel Rothschild

Bitcoin: Monetarists Anonymous | The Economist

"The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by..."

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 15:54:42 +0530

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”

- Margaret Atwood

"Facebook makes you hate the people you know; tumblr makes you love people you don’t know."

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 15:53:43 +0530

“Facebook makes you hate the people you know; tumblr makes you love people you don’t know.”

- @amandalynferri (via nickgrossman)