I am on vacation this week and couldn’t sit down and spend some time to write new content. I thought I will take this opportunity to re-share a post that I had written two years ago.
This is account of what I felt is common between astrology and data science. Let me know what you think.
You may have predicted by now where am I going with this post. Hold your horses. May be you are right, may be you are not! After all prediction is only a only a hopeful choice until it becomes a fact. Just like a theory is a hypothesis until proved.
The whole IT world is like one big fashion show. Every few years there will be a new technological trend and everybody would try to hop on just to stay relevant. Companies adapt to the technologies to show they are trendy even though it is of no use to them, developers start reskilling themselves getting ready for the next wave and the non-IT companies will be trying to pick their vendors based on who is following the current trend. Few years back it was cloud, mobile etc.,. And currently the trend is data sciene, predictive analytics, machine learning, Artificial Intelligence…
“Are you suffering from thinning hair? We can help you!”
A middle-aged man with a baritone voice whispered in my Airpods with real concern. I startled and I almost dropped the glass bowl I was holding. I had put on some minimalism video on YouTube and was doing my dishes when this man spoke. It took me a few seconds to realize what was happening.
He was from an orthodox brahmin family from South India. [A politically incorrect statement at many levels to start a post with]. He was not too orthodox or religious himself but he did believe in half of the stuff that was preached by his family and elders. According to the house rules, there were many things that could attract the maximum punishment in the after-life. The most common yet important violation is eating non-vegetarian food. One may think this is a trivial issue. It is not. Nobody understood his everyday battles.
Yesterday, when I had lost myself in the emptiness of the universe, not knowing who I was or where I was, and completely losing the sense of “my-self”, I was woken up by the alarm piercing through my eardrum. Tuned to the routine, my hand involuntarily moved to turn it off and my mind had already started preparing for the next 10 mins of a blissful power nap. Then, I noticed the red battery indicator on my phone. I had to get up and charge the phone or I risked not getting up on time, forcing my daughter to skip school. I desperately tried to find a plug point in the surge protector. All the pins were already taken by my other gadgets. I started wondering about the number of gadgets that I own. The mind is a monkey and it jumps from one thought to another. In no time, I found myself questioning if the Amazon Kindle Unlimited subscription that I had signed up for, is valuable or not. My gut feeling was that it is valuable as both myself and my daughter use Amazon Kindle to read books.
I have an interest in minimalism. I say I have an interest instead of I am a minimalist is pretty obvious. I want to follow minimalism and intentionality in everything I own and do but let’s be honest, this is pretty difficult. Marie Kondo asks you to hold the object in your hand and ask yourselves a question “Does this spark joy?”. I almost always get a yes for this question.
There was a time when the wedding date used to be fixed based on the date dictated by an almanac, when the stars of the bride and the groom were aligned well. Then a few decades earlier, the trend changed. One had two or three different options for the wedding date. The final deciding factor was not the alignment of stars alone. The deciding factor was the availability of the wedding hall. Out of the three options, the date when the wedding hall was free became your wedding day.
2019 is over quickly before you could blink and 2020 is already here. 2019, like any year in the past or like any year will be in the future, had its ups and downs. There are many great people, things, and experiences that I came across this year that I am truly grateful for.
