To 2025
01:42am. As always, this post is also impromptu. 2024 ends today. What an awesome year this was, phew! I cannot believe I actually survived the last two years. The last two years were hectic but fun. What's more is that these two years were when I made good friends, rediscovered an old friend, and learned more than I ever had. I learned so much in these two years which would otherwise take me another ten years to learn.
Frankly speaking, I don’t know how to start. For other posts, I usually have my thoughts organized. But, for this post, I barely know what to say let alone how to say. Therefore, I think it’s best to start chronologically. As far as I remember, I could not celebrate my last new year at all. My coaching classes were off only on 1st January. So, even though I wished to see the first sunrise of 2024, I was out of energy. Tired … rotting like a sloth on my bed for the whole day. That’s it! That was my new year. This time I promise myself to see the first sunrise.
January passed at the speed of sound. February at the speed of light. Grade twelve syllabus is not a joke. Although I liked my physical chemistry teacher. I have a distaste for any person who is crazy for an exam. But, well, I cannot expect Kota teachers to treat exams like exams. They are the showrunners of the city. They must stress upon it, so much so that the whole class seems like a battlefield – a battlefield where half the students were forcefully drafted, and apparently quitting makes you a “traitor”. This is not an exaggeration; my own physics teacher once juxtaposed the Kargil war to JEE.
It was also the time when I finally grasped the importance of chemistry. Until now, I believed chemistry could only find applications in the pharmaceutical industry. That is not true. Even though at a fundamental level it becomes difficult to distinguish chemistry and physics, there are some places where chemistry acts as an abstraction of concepts in physics and that is how it solves problems. For example, nowadays a lot of work is being done to develop hydrogen fuel cells. Basically you utilize solar energy in the day to perform electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen. Then this hydrogen can be stored until later needed. This works as a perfect plan for places where ad hoc generation of power is a requirement. Moreover, hydrogen has an extremely high calorific value. The problem with this setup is that electrolysis works best with distilled water. Now acquiring distilled water makes the whole process loss-making in terms of energy. Hence, there has been good work to create certain salts and complexes which can suppress impurities. This improves electrolysis. I don’t wish to get into more detail for now, however this is a fascinating issue. I too have been following it for a few months now. Maybe I will write a blogpost on this.
While I was trying to keep myself together, a good friend of mine decided to change paths. He prepared for JEE for a year in class 11 with me. Then he changed paths and went on to study business. I am not so sure how, but most of my predictions surprisingly turn out right. I had full faith in him. He was a business guy from the start. He just was not cut out for JEE, let alone engineering. So, I too supported his decision to leave engineering. I have seen this multiple times. People do their best only in things they like. That is when Monday mornings won’t feel like another painful day to go back to slavery, but another exciting day to learn something new, do something new, create something new, and so on. I came into JEE by accident – I thought IITs are the best places to get into research in mathematics and physics. And you know what? He cracked his first, paid internship in just a few weeks. Now that’s what I was talking about! From struggling with JEE PYQs to competing against literal MBA students by your side in an internship is what I call progress. Though this is not the first time I was right with my predictions. Few years back in school, I warned a classmate not to get into a relationship (although I prefer to call them relationshit) at that age, and that too with a girl younger than you. Welp! Hahaha, he did get into a quite problematic mess. I don’t know how he is doing now – friendship is inversely proportional to distance, and Kota is a thousand kilometers from where he lives.
Then I could feel the Kota summer kicking in. I can testify that this year’s summer was the worst summer of the last ten years. It just does not feel like so as most of my time is spent in air-conditioned classrooms only. I guess that’s worse off. It just increases my chances of falling sick. Going out of a chilled room to suddenly have a gust of scorching flames on your face?! Nah, definitely not a fan! However, this was my peak pivot time. I met a junior here who was studying to join the NDA (National Defence Academy). A tall, slim guy. I believe even the best kids of his age would think twice before challenging him in athletics. As I saw everybody pursuing various fields of their own interests I thought maybe changing paths is not a problem but a part of life. And that’s when I finally made my biggest pivot.
By the end of June, I was convinced it was time to do what I like. Anyway I was becoming more and more annoyed as I talked with IIT students. No matter the branch, everybody was doing the same thing: solving LeetCode problems, cold emailing alumni for internships, and completing Google Summer of Code. I thought it’s time for a litmus test. Is IIT really worth it? Because I can do these three things from even my mom’s basement. I read projects of some IIT students. I even read the code posted by IIT Bombay’s placement ambassador on her GitHub profile. I was disappointed. I have been learning computer science and programming for a little more than six years now. I am also a self-taught programmer. I have learned everything by reading books and documentation, and watching other programmers live streaming how they code. I followed the most eccentric approaches: “f*ck around and find out” and “Google is your friend”. These two methods demand the highest effort and time but are guaranteed to work. So, I am one of those programmers who cares more about getting things to work rather than following all the “philosophy” behind code like Agile, DevOps, and Scrum. C’mon! It’s computing. All you have to do is teach a silicon rock in a circuit to follow some logic. Getting shit done should be the utmost priority in any field. Even in programming, I work in the programming languages C and Go-lang. That is why I chose to work on Redis, an in-memory cache database. After some effort, two of my pull requests were finally accepted. So I consider myself qualified enough to comment on what other coders write – your opinion won’t stop me from writing this blog, so stop tweeting – unless they have also, like, worked for six or seven years in the industry.
What I finally realized is that people are crazy for IITs only and only because of the “IIT tag”. Well it’s time for a litmus test: the CTC of computer science engineering at IITs is seventeen lakhs per annum (shout out to Chaitanya Awasthi). Really? Is this a joke? You are destroying the best years of your teenage life when you could have upskilled yourself so much, and improved your personality by ten fold by breaking your back solving previous year problems? And that too when the eight thousand PYQs of JEE (Main) you are going to practice are solely based on memorization? Also you probably believe after these two years your life will be set, right? Well, let me repeat … the CTC of computer science engineering graduates at IITs is seventeen lakhs per annum. It’s better to upskill yourself through Coursera, MIT OCW, and creating projects in some area of computing you are confident about for these two years while attending school. You can do internships. Then you may apply to jobs which do not even require a degree and start earning right away without attending college. Imagine! You are already earning. After five years of experience, you would have easily doubled your first salary. The private sector does not care about your degree as long as you can get shit done. If you are brave enough, maybe kickstart your own start-up or do freelancing – although freelancing does not have a very good career growth in India for now. The risk aversive mindset instilled into us by our middle-class nature has locked students in a very peculiar kind of trap.
Enough of the career guidance. I know my aim. I am interested in how to approach computing problems from a highly mathematical approach, which basically boils down to optimization and analysis. I am equally interested in quantum physics. Thanks to quantum physics, we are going to witness the advent of a very new side of physics – just how Huygens developed the first principles to deal with waves and Faraday made the first electric motor that made it possible for us to get things done just with the flip of a switch. Moore’s law is failing. Quantum computing is the dawn of a new era of high performance computing. So, I planned to pivot my whole career towards institutes that can train me such advanced, cutting-edge technology. Unfortunately IITs are not yet ready to do this. Also, I must go to an institution because unlike programming it is not possible to study such advanced science from the internet. With this, I concluded my pivot.
With this new filled spirit and motivation to finally pursue my aim, I was (still am) unstoppable. So not much happened until September. Being one of those kinds who keeps his honest feelings to himself, I am not so open to many people. It’s not that I am an introvert. I keep different personalities to suit each person. Makes it easy to deal with others and get work done. A good example for this post would be that while I tell everyone else that I am pursuing research because it is an urgent need of the country, the genuine reason is that I wish to do it just because I am good at it. It’s pointless to explain to some people that you are doing something because you like it. We do not do what we like. Instead, we do what we hate to earn money and spend that money to do what we like. During my school years, I think there is only one person I could get close to. That would be a new Telugu girl in town. It’s just that I was, you know, finally understood. I heard that she underwent a surgery in the third week of September. I was worried. I already do not have many people to lose, so naturally the few I have are immensely dear to me. Fortunately it was not that serious, plus the surgery was a success.
As an anxious September passed, my dear NDA friend also parted ways after he was done with the coursework in Kota. Ah, what a guy he was! He was younger than me, nonetheless taught me that in friendship a social hierarchy does not matter. Any two people can be friends as long as they have the desire to do so. It all depends on intentions.
Months passed just studying. I had to redo everything as the JEE syllabus is different from what research institutes want to check. So I have been busy with that. 2025 will be a good year. Wish you a happy new year if you made it till here and kudos for not having the attention span of a goldfish. Also, I am hopefully going into college in 2025, so this blog will get a big makeover. The first thing I wish to do is finally release the first version of my interpreter, and then probably pick some new projects or do some machine learning course. See ya and a Happy New Year to you and your family!