Opinion

The annual awkwardness is around the corner. The birthday is here. I was not celebrating birthdays since by 10th grade. I couldn’t recall the reason it could probably to avoid the spotlight. However with passing years I find more reason not to celebrate it in the conventional way.

What’s the “conventional” celebrations?

1. Cake Cutting
2. Throwing party to your dear ones
3. Getting content with the spotlight

What’s wrong with that - a list?

Fake wishes thanks to social apps

Before the advent of Social apps, the birthdays used to be very personal. Only the people who really remembers my birthdays wishes me. Thanks to the reminder from the apps and social wishing it just compels us to wish the birthday. The wishes evolved into a chore.

Few years ago, I was working in a Chennai, 500 KM away from Coimbatore, where my family resides. The usual trip between the cities is on long weekends, so does the large crowd settled in Singara Chennai. With a huge crowd looking to travel back on long weekends, reserving a seat was not easiest thing to do. I booked my ticket a week back and in relaxed manner went to boarding point. While checking the ticket I noticed the booking was for previous day. There was no way to travel back on that day.

.. in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes

&mdash Benjamin Franklin[1]

Tax

I came across a meme - Tax is a subscription fee to the state we live in. In a way the statement is true.

You owe some money to the land where you live. Most of the countries collect it income tax, some countries do survive without collecting income tax[2]. Having said that Income Tax is not the only tax the state can impose. It charge us via some other means too - corporate tax, Value added tax or Service/sales tax.

Osmosis

Osmosis is term all of us come across during our schooling days.

In biology, osmosis is the movement of water molecules from a solution with a high concentration of water molecules to a solution with a lower concentration of water molecules, through a cell’s partially permeable membrane.

Water purification through reverse osmosis is one of the popular application in our day to day life.

Do we see anything similar to Osmosis in real life?

One of the major difference between developed and developing nation is the way we treat the labours. Usually when a nation grows it concentrates on creating wealth. The wealth, once gets generated it tends to flock together and the rich gets super rich at the cost of vulnerable populous. Once this gap gets too large, the society becomes unstable.

Scene 1: During school days

Teacher : Why didn’t you finish your homework?

Student : We experienced powercut all through the evening. And so, the home

T : Don’t say unnecessary reason in your age we were reading under the street lamp.

Scene 2: During college days

College student : I need a bike to commute to college.

Parent : In your age we were walking n Kilometers to catch the government bus to college, your generation needs private vehicles at this young age?!

From co-founder to CEO, Jack Dorsey was carrying Twitter’s identity for sometime now. He is not without controversies. Twitter and Facebook came to prominence on somewhat same time. Yet, Facebook became a cash-rich poster boy among the social media, Twitter lagging behind Facebook, unclear how to monetize the Twitter as a product. As a CEO, he was blamed for being CEO on Square and not concentrating on Twitter.

+ Fun fact: Argawal joins the growing ranks of powerful US tech executives of Indian descent. Google, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, and now Twitter are all run by people who grew up in India.

In this write up, the hostel is used to indicate not only limited to the boarding school but also staying away from parents.

TL;DR You must live in a hostel.

All through these years since your arrival, you’ve a safety net named parents. They cleaned your shitty bums, they fed you with the food that are handpicked for your well-being, they were there when you tumbled down, they taught you how to walk, eat, pee et al.

Social Media is a petri dish, culturing cultured and uncultured humans in real time. Based on your followers and taste you develop your own bubble, reinforce the bubble’s collective thought and at some point of time you’ll start believing it.

One way to not get lost in the rabbit hole is to think the collective thought (trending topic) is wrong and trying to justify it. Then I came across this ‘-pride’ posts. We are blindly getting proud of nation, the mother tongue, the city we line; heck, the caste we born to.

Emails became so much intertwined in our daily life. Whatever the internet service it be, eventually it comes to identifying you only through your email¹. The newsletters used to be my source of information. I gradually unsubscribed to newsletters and marked the providers as important in my everyday feed of Twitter & Facebook.

There is a couple of first order effects,

1. I inadvertently started following so many users related to the news feeds
2. The email inbox, once used to be zero inbox turned out to be filled with spams and filths

Beyond First Order²