Author: SK

Anxiety and computer viruses

I think, and hope, that I’ve been cured of anxiety, which I was probably suffering from for over six years. It was a case of Murphy’s Law taken to its extreme. If anything can go wrong, it will, states the law, and in those six or seven years, I would subconsciously search for things that could possibly go wrong, and then worry about them. And worry about them so much that I would get paranoid.

Let me give you an example. Back in 2008, after a four-month spell of unemployment, I had signed up with a startup. Two days after I signed, which was three weeks before I was going to start work, I started worrying about the health of the startup founder, and what would happen to my career in case he happened to croak between then and my joining the company! It had been a major effort on my part to try and get back to finance, and that job was extremely important to me from a career signaling standpoint (it played a major role in my joining Goldman Sachs, subsequently, I think). So I started getting worried that if for some reason the founder died before I joined, that signaling wouldn’t happen! I worried about it for three days and broke my head about it, until sanity reigned.

This wasn’t a one-off. I would take ages to reply to emails because I would be paranoid that I had said something inappropriate. When I landed in Venice on vacation last year, my office blackberry didn’t get connected for an hour or so, and I thought that was because they had fired me while I was on vacation. It would be similar when I would look at my blackberry first thing in the morning after I woke up, and found no mails. I needed no real reason to worry about something. It was crazy.

When a virus attacks your computer, one of the ways in which it slows down the computer is by running “background processes”. These processes run in the background, independent of what you intend to do, but nevertheless take up so much of your computing power that it becomes extremely hard to function. Anxiety works pretty much the same way. Because there is always so much going on in your mind (most of it unintended, of course), a lot of your brain’s “computing power” is taken up in processing those unwanted thoughts (the brain, unfortunately, has no way of figuring out that those thoughts are unintended). And that leaves you with so much lesser mindspace to do what you want to do.

So you stop functioning. You stop being able to do as much as you were able to. Initially you don’t recognize this, until you bite of more than you could possibly chew a number of times in succession. And then, having failed to deliver on so many occasions, you lose confidence. And lesser confidence means more worry. Which means more background process. And means diminished mental ability. Things can spiral out of hand way too quickly.

I’ve been on anxiety medication for over seven months now, and the only times when I realize how bad things were are when I happen to miss a dose or two, and there is relapse. And having been through it, trust me, it is quite bad.

On the positive side, the impact a well-guided medication process (administered by an expert psychiatrist) can have on anxiety is also tremendous. For the six years I suffered, I had no clue that I was under a cloud of a clinically treatable condition. I didn’t know that it was only a virus that had attacked my CPU, which could be got rid off with sustained dosage of anti-virus, and I had instead thought my CPU itself was slowing down, maybe rusting (at the ripe old age of late twenties). After I started responding to my medication, I was delirious with happiness, with the realization that I hadn’t become dumb, after all.

It was sometime in March or April, I think, when I realized that my medication had come into effect, thus freeing up so much mind space, and I started feeling smart again. When I met the psychiatrist next, I told her, “I feel exactly the way I felt back in 2005 once again!”.

moving north

After spending a little over three years here I’m moving out of my current residence just off Bangalore South’s K R road. I’m moving to rajajinagar, to live in the house above my in-laws’ house. It will be the first time ever that I’ll be living in the north of bangalore, having spent my twenty five years here in jayanagar, banashankari, kr road and bilekahalli.

The packers and movers are here, and I write this sitting on this lone chair in my drawing room – everything else has been moved to the truck. I’ve just had a lunch of muesli and yoghurt, and it will take a while before we completely pack up from here.

I feel nothing, and am mostly blank, contrasting with my wife who has been crying over the last few days saying she’ll miss this house – our first marital home. Part by part the house becomes empty, but this feels nothing like the last three times I moved out of a house.

Since I’m blogging this from my phone I’m not able to put the link here, but I was indeed a broken man the day I left iimb. I simply didn’t want to leave, and I knew that I was leaving a part of me behind as I quietly moved out. I still feel weird when I visit iimb, which is not too rare nowadays.

It was similar when I moved out of ‘deepa’, our family home in kathriguppe (banashankari) in 2008, to move to gurgaon. I wasn’t there the day the packers and movers came there, but did quite a bit of the preliminary work as we prepared to leave the house. Though I’ve never gone back to live there (first my mother, and then my wife, expressed reservations about moving to kathriguppe so that house remains on rent), it is still ‘my house’ and I still feel sad having left it.

It probably has to do with the fact that I don’t remember the process of moving in (the house was constructed when I was a baby). So it was always ‘my house’ and the place to go to when I came home from college. It hurts when I’ve to go there to meet my tenants, to see someone else living in ‘my house’.

The last time I moved home was from gurgaon back to bangalore and that time I had ecstatic. I had endured a rather torrid 10 months in gurgaon, and has absolutely hated most of it. It was a day of excitement and relief when I finally moved back. It was a hectic day, though, as the packers packed through the day, the landlord arrived early evening to collect the keys and we caught a late evening flight back to bangalore to end my gurgaon stint with a bang.

This time, though, it’s hardly sunk in that I’m moving. I see the house mostly empty now, but had seen it in a similar state before I moved in. And having had the experience of personally observing a move in the past, I’m less concerned and worried about that also.

Most of the things are packed now. One chair isn’t and I’m perched on that, observing the men in green uniform.. I don’t know how I’ll take to north bangalore. I don’t know how it will be living so close to my in-laws. I work from home so there’s no commute, but then it does take me farther from Bangalore’s network of data scientists that is concentrated in the south and in the east. I’ll be away from jayanagar and basavanagudi but the new nearby malleswaram excites much. After four years in apartments I’m excited to be living in a ‘house’ again,

I hope this is a change for the better. I still feel indifferent about the move, though.

Archery tournament design

Over the last couple of days, I switched on the TV in order to “jinx” two of India’s more promising archers in their respective games at the Olympics. On Monday evening, I switched on the TV to see R Banerjee (forget his first name) lose a close game in the round of 32. Yesterday, I watched Tarundeep Rai shoot well but still get well beaten by an absolutely in-form guy named Kim (from Korea, where else?). As I watched these matches, I was thinking about the nature of competition in archery.

Archery is a fundamentally single-player event. You are competing against yourself, and how well you do is not supposed to be affected by how well someone else does. There is no direct opponent you are playing against who tries to prevent you from scoring. In some ways, you can consider it to be similar to running. The only element of competition is the pressure that is exerted upon you be opponents competing simultaneously. In this context, it is indeed surprising that the archery event has been designed as a one-on-one knockout, like you would expect for a direct-opposition sport like tennis.

An event directly comparable to archery in terms of fundamentals is shooting – there again, there is no impact of one player on another’s performance but for the pressure exerted by means of simultaneous competition. Shooting, however, goes the “races” (running/swimming) way by means of having heats where only one’s absolute performance matters in terms of score matters (there is no limit on the number of the number of finalists from one heat; the best 8 or 10 participants across heats make it).

Then why is it that archery, which is fundamentally similar to these sports in terms of fundamental concepts, relies on head-to-head competition, and that too with no repechage? Yesterday, I watched Tarundeep Rai come up against an absolutely inspired Kim – Kim was in such imperious form that irrespective of how well Rai would have done he wouldn’t have qualified. Rai didn’t play badly, “against” any other opponent or on another day, he would have definitely done better. In a “direct combat” sport (such as tennis), one can point to the luck of the draw and similar matters. But in a distinctly non-combative sport such as archery why should artificial tournament standards be designed and that extra bit of luck be introduced?

I hope the archery administrators realize the stupidity of the curent format and move to one that is similar to what we see in shooting today.

time lost in traffic

I’ve spent the last two hours traveling to itpl (whitefield) for a meeting. Thankfully I’m not driving – the volvo service from banashankari is ‘efficient’ enough to avoid that. It doesn’t seem I’ll reach for another ten minutes. Or maybe I will – just got past a monster traffic jam.

The bus is full. Mostly IT types with dogtags around their necks. I imagine that unlike me, most of these people do this ‘trek’ daily. A total of four hours every day spent traveling. I don’t see many laptops out, not even smartphones. So we can assume that most of these people aren’t working.

Think about the number of people who make such treks and you begin to wonder if someone has done some analysis on the total cost of lost time thanks to time lost in travel. It’s been a long time since I stopped doing something like this, but I don’t know what employers are doing to save this time.

A former employer of mine recognized this problem early and encouraged us to work from home – it helped that it was an accepted practice at the parent office in the US also. When I bring this up with friends, they point out that the motivation of the labour force is a problem, and if not supervised they’ll not work at all. An unproductive day is better than that, they say.

IT parks in bangalore are situated in an arc around the eastern edge of the city. Immigrants try to stay close to their workplaces but thanks to job switches and roommate switches, most of them, too end up traveling significantly. As for long-time residents, they prefer to stay in their ‘native’ areas and do a longer commute than shifting to an unfamiliar area and still doing a commute.

Now the question arises – whose responsibility is it to break this deadlock and improve Bangalore’s productivity? Both employees and employers seem resigned to the high commute time and consequent loss of productivity. The government has much to gain from increased productivity, but the causality there is not very apparent.

I’m about to reach my destination so I’ll close the post here with the question still open. However, what do you think needs to be done to enable bangalore to break out of this high commute time deadlock?