Satyajeet Kanetkar

Moon

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 07:45:55 +0000

You asked me one day,
if I looked at the moon.

Maybe I’ve found my answer:
The Moon belongs to the heart,
and mine’s not in its place.
Oh how I’ve tried to put it so,
but it’s the same old dog,
just new tricks.
Perhaps one day
I’ll look at the moon,
and let you know.

– satyanash

Yearnest

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 07:51:58 +0000

Tell me love,
Where are you these days?
Do you not yearn to meet me,
As I do, you?

There are two of I,
the one that loves
and the other desires.
And now I wonder
if it is time,
I end the latter?
Maybe you already have
put yours to rest,
and just haven’t
had the heart to let
me know of the passing.

If that were true,
fear not! for my
heart is stronger than
before and can take
a punch or two after
what I’ve been through
this past year without you.

– satyanash

Verifying Chaayos Customizations

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 07:37:44 +0000

Chaayos is an Indian chai brand that boasts “more than 80,000 customizations”. That number seems surprisingly large, so I did some basic math to see what allows them to make such a tall claim.

Looking at the menu and selection, it quickly becomes clear that constraints on ingredient selection leads to these many combinations.

Here is the breakdown of the options, that are mutually exclusive:

Size: Mini / Choti / Badi
Sugar: Yes / No
Patti (Leaves): Kadak / Regular
Milk: Full / Regular / Doodh Kum / Paani Kum

Since you can only pick one option from each of the above, we arrive at the following calculation:

\[3 \times 2 \times 2 \times 4 = 48\]

This is nowhere close to the 80k number. Plus the three options related to size stretch the definition of customization. The real number blowup comes from the the list of addons, from which you can select as many (or as little) as you want:

Tulsi (Basil)
Adrak (Ginger)
Elaichi (Cardamom)
Saunf (Fennel)
Laung (Cloves)
Cinnamon
Masala (Spices)
Kali Mirch (Black Pepper)
Mint
Ajwain (Carom Seeds)
Hari Mirch (Green Chilli)
Moti Elaichi (Black Cardamom)
Haldi (Turmeric)

Unlike the previous options, these are not mutually exclusive, this means that you can potentially order a chai with all the thirteen addons. I’m not sure how that would taste or whether they would actually add all of them if you did order it. Regardless, let’s look at the math. Each addon is two possibilities since it is a “checkbox”. This allows us to simply use a power of 2:

\[2^{13} \text{addons} = 8192 \; \text{choices}\]

That’s a large number! Multiplying it with the previous number, we get:

\[3 \; \text{sizes} \times 2 \; \text{sugar} \times 2 \; \text{patti} \times 4 \; \text{milk} \times 2^{13} \; \text{addons} = 393216 \; \text{choices}\]

Which is much larger than the 80k figure. Even if we remove the size based ‘customization’, it comes down much closer to the quoted figure:

\[2 \; \text{sugar} \times 2 \; \text{patti} \times 4 \; \text{milk} \times 2^{13} \; \text{addons} = 131072 \; \text{choices}\]

Some people would not really call “sugar” a customization, so we can get rid of that too:

\[2 \; \text{patti} \times 4 \; \text{milk} \times 2^{13} \text{ addons} = 65536 \; \text{choices}\]

This is much closer to the 80k figure we see quoted. I’m still not sure why they claim 80k+, when they can claim any of the nice powers of 2 as the possible customizations.

I personally prefer No Sugar, Kadak, Regular with Adrak and Elaichi. Although I sometimes miss a jaggery option, which would make the sugar option take three possible values.

Diffluence

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 14:15:58 +0000

My love for you is conflicted,
not in its intensity
or in its surety,
but in what it would do to me.
For I have come undone
in ways far more than one.
It seems that only my love
or I will survive,
in this tussle to a certain demise.

I never thought loving would be easy,
but who would’ve thought that you’d be so lovely.
There is latent fear and anger some,
not just at you, but others fromme.

There are words, and then there are actions,
but sometimes even the most selfless,
cannot survive large enough infractions.
Either I end it or it ends me,
my love for you isn’t benign,
dont know if I’ll ever be free.

–

What doesn’t make sense,
(and maybe it doesn’t have to)
Is how two people who,
love each other so,
find it so hard to be together more.
Is it me or is it you,
who’s afraid of truly meeting you.

– satyanash

Lilies

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 05:32:40 +0000

The lilies wait in full bloom,
held in place by a vase.

Their heads yearn for the sky, hoping
a bee or fly will choose to drop by.

They stare through the grille,
reaching for the world without,
Until of course, the petals dry out.

There’s something sinister,
‘bout trimming a plant’s nether.
Keeping it indoors,
a perverse pleasure.

It will wither without
any fruit or seed.
And we will still keep doing so,
quite on repeat.

– satyanash

Ode To Ocho

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 07:26:33 +0000

Before you found me,
I didn’t know what caring was,
I had only felt it in glimpses and in parts.
Before you found me,
I didn’t know what a woman was,
Someone so gentle, yet a force to call.
Before you found me,
I had given up hope,
Of ever feeling a lady’s dote.
Before you found me,
I was a child with a whine,
Alone in the open wilderness of time.

Then in a coffee shop you found me,
with my eyes shut in a moment of insanity.
It started with a tap on my temple,
you left me speechless and were so gentle.
A new set of eyes you bought me,
what love might feel like, you helped me see clearly.
I knew then, that this was something special.

Bits of our lives we shared,
All the while I kept thinking it was just in my head.
Making do with steaming mugs,
What I really wanted were your warm hugs.
A few detours here and there,
And the universe had had too much to bear.
The divine agents couldn’t help but implore,
They literally pushed us to the fore.
On a windy evening as the moon shone,
We realized what plenty baristas had already known.

Together, across the lake of life, a little bit we rowed,
Awed by the vast and depth of how well things flowed.
We lay in embrace under trees and stars,
I often thought of what went on in that head of yours.
There was distance and hurdles few, but we leapt over them,
It was special, that much we knew.
We sneaked in work, and found time in life,
It was slightly weird but it was no strife.
We left our marks on each other, in ways more than one,
You made me more of a man, if there ever was one.

Many bodies gathered evidence, some celestial others sapient,
Of what we felt for each other, when obscured behind a door or a tent.
Then an event that took its toll, on relationships and on mores.
You stood on your feet, still caring, gentle as always
and powered through all that got in your way.
We took long walks, and even cycled some,
But it wasn’t enough to cover all that we’d done.

It will take us some time, that security, but we’ll get there eventually.
Lakes are lucky for us, be it foggy or sun,
We seem to always have a witness in the form of one.
Rain too has some meaning, it pours when it wants,
Exactly at the right time, as if our prays were its wants.
This is not a farewell and I will find more with you,
For that, my Love, I will soon see you.

– satyanash

I Recommend Giving Up

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 18:07:00 +0000

Mon, 19th Sep, 11:41PM
I recommend giving up. Broadly speaking, it is one of the two options you have. And it is certainly the one with less pain or pleasure. If you can pull it off, make it quick, cheap and definite. Don’t get distracted, or you will linger on.

You will certainly fail, the first few times. Convince yourself otherwise. You must realize that the other way is harder, more painful. Think of it as hastening an eventuality. It is always a matter of time.

If you’re still not convinced, let me elaborate. Let’s say you choose to keep going. What happens then? You enjoy it? Maybe. You don’t? Quite likely. In all probability it will be some awkward combination of the two, at the end of which you will claim to have “lived”. If you’re smart (most aren’t), you may even try to reduce one and increase the other. Going down that route, try not to get the two mixed up.

If you’re lucky and have a leg-up, you may never face this question, in which case: Good for you! If you’re unlucky and oppressed like hell, you surely have real problems to deal with: Even Better! Regardless, if this question presents itself, seize the opportunity. For you don’t know how long before you get another chance.

If someone asks your opinion on the matter, be vocal. There’s no need to hide, or be afraid. What will they do? Kill you? Some may use flawed arguments like: “Permanent solution to a temporary problem” or “it’s a disproportionate response”. If you can’t tell why these are flawed: Congratulations! You live to see another day.

Now let’s say that you choose to be a smart-ass and keep on keeping on. What do you do then? Work? Eat? Sleep? Expect a significant chunk of your time to be spent either doing or in service of these three. You can’t choose to not do any of these, otherwise you have already chosen what I asked you to, albeit a protracted and more painful version. Even so, what do you do in the remaining time? You’re left with pain, distractions, pleasure, maybe the occasional euphoria? If through luck and skill you manage to delay the inevitable for long enough, you may claim to have “won”. But only for the time being. Winning is just giving up with extra steps. Call it whatever you like, it is a trap. And the only escape is death.

– satyanash

Hedonism is Not Easy

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 17:49:00 +0000

Sat, 17th Sep, 11:16PM
They say that you should “write drunk, edit sober”. Well I’m pretty sure I’m drunk. Not on alcohol. No. I’ve had enough of that over the past few days. I’m numbed by the pain of loneliness. It slowly but steadily chips away at my soul.

They also say that you can “stubbornly” refuse to make yourself miserable about anything, Yes! Anything! Well to me, it feels like misery is the default and there are only momentary glances of a mirage that keeps your hope alive. The proverbial carrot to keep you in one rat race or another.

One doesn’t really have much choice in such matters. It feels futile to complain about the obvious meaninglessness of one’s life. It is one of those truths that becomes impossible to unsee. A combination of distractions and platitudes seems like the only way ahead. It is either the uphill battle or the dark chasm. If you stay in one place you only have frustrations until your inevitable death.

Why can’t life be easy? I ask. Repeatedly. To myself. To others. In one form, or another. Knowing there isn’t an answer doesn’t seem to stop me from seeking one. Just another one of those self-similar fractals that appears in one’s life.

Sometimes out of the blue, a third way appears. Again it is “they”. Stop thinking they say. It will calm you down, they say. Focus on your breath. Meditate. Breathe. Close your eyes. Bah!!! It is all a myth. Intended to placate. A red herring. Another distraction. Unachievable nonsense to keep your hopes up. That there is more to life than the climb.

If anything, at least the distractions do their job well. Earn money, buy stuff, fall in love, eat food, feel high, have kids, teach them the same shit, make sure they don’t veer too off-course until you die. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll see a few interesting places, meet some interesting people. Stuff that gets old if you spend more than a week there. You might even keep switching, moving scenery, oceans, mountains, forests and cities. It’s all fun and games as long as you’re well distracted.

They say that it is all in “your head”. That it is just an interpretation of facts. Something that you control. That you can choose a more “happier” or “realistic” interpretation instead of wallowing in a “terrible” one like this. Well. Fuck them. Because that’s just another battle. Another hill to climb like the innumerous others. Just another rat race. Not for money, but for mental peace. Never-ending and unachievable by design. All to keep you from looking back, into the ever widening, gaping chasm of death behind you. Hopefully if you’re good at the races, climb uphill for long enough, distract yourself effectively, you will “feel good” until of course, the gap catches up. Your telomeres erode and you eventually fall back into the abyss that you successfully resisted for so long.

So go forth.
Pretend.
Distract.
Get lost.
Disappear.
Envelope yourself.
Whatever is your way.
Maybe if you’re lucky, and “get good” you might even forget that death exists.
Until of course it is time, and the illusion breaks.
Whoever said that hedonism was easy didn’t know what they were talking about.

– satyanash

Heaven's River

Sat, 06 Nov 2021 17:53:47 +0000

As the latest entry in the Bobiverse series, Heaven’s River is a departure in narrative and length. It picks up a tangent of the first book where a Bob descendant named Bender sets out to travel into deep space without any means of FTL communication.

Since the plot is decoupled from the events in the first three books, the author must spend some time setting up the concepts for any new readers. We then see Bob follow Bender’s subspace trail across the galaxy. After traveling for a few light-years, he comes across another solar system, an alien mega-structure around its sun, and the remains of Bender’s ship. Giving up the illusion of solitude, Bob immediately teams up with a few of his other descendants over the FTL communication lines. After some speculation, it is determined that Bender was ambushed and taken inside the large Dyson ring, dubbed “Heaven’s River”. The team starts hatching a convoluted infiltration and reconnaissance plan, complete with semi-autonomous suits designed to mimic the local sentient population. While all this happens, the Bobiverse itself is splintering. Directly transplanting the idea from Star Trek, a group of Bob descendants known as “starfleet” are campaigning for the prohibition of interference in the many civilizations discovered since the early days of Bobiverse. The remaining Bobs’ opposition to this “prime directive” serves as a source of escalating conflict, and subsequently prods starfleet to sabotage significant parts of the Bobiverse infrastructure.

The group of Bobs called ‘Skippies’ and their efforts to build a Matrioshka brain, form the interesting parts of the book. Finally we find someone who is actually interested in the reasons behind the evolutionary drift in the Bob cloning process. It mentions in passing, some interesting ideas and experiments around validating the no-cloning theorem, and how teleportation can be achieved only if the original form is destroyed a la Star Trek ‘beaming’. Unfortunately, none of this gets any real development, and is eventually amde to tie into arc on Heaven’s River anyway. In terms of writing style, the book moves away from the repetitiveness of the VR setting that plagued the earlier iterations. This is probably due to most of the book taking place inside Heaven’s River, where the characters amble around in their suits. Although, this too comes with its own problems, as we shall see.

While I am glad to have made it through all the books in the series, this last one leaves much to be desired. My biggest complaint with the book has to be all the meandering characters, once they infiltrate the Heaven’s River system. Bob and his team of replicants spend large parts of the book just sitting around towns, exploring rivers and jungles and old battered planets. All of this serves only to provide some random bits of information which actually hardly ever gets used and is mostly tangential to the progress of the story. It all could’ve been trivially compressed into some plot contrivances, and made for a more optimally written book. The middle part of the book is such a drab read that I almost abandoned it. I suspect it is this way because of the audiobook release, where such meandering is less punishing and you can basically easy-listen the book. It would also explain the undeserved 4+ rating the book seems to have across websites. Apart from the lengthy nature, the plot itself has non-trivial common-sense issues, mostly around the supposedly perverse instantiation of the Heaven’s River AI. As per the book’s logic, it was smart enough to run the entire Dyson ring, but still prefers breeding out intelligence to ensure species survival, instead of researching space exploration. Even harder to believe is that in the end, a simple chat convinces it of the new plan and makes it roll-back changes it has brought in over several centuries. I was worried that the plot would become inconsistent and make me hurl the book out the window in frustration, but fortunately that was not the case.

Heaven’s River still retains the Bobiverse trademark reliance on sci-fi pop-culture but I wouldn’t recommend it due to its incredibly sloppy length and suboptimal plot. There’s certainly better sci-fi out there that you could be spending time reading or listening to.

All These Worlds

Tue, 31 Aug 2021 06:31:01 +0000

Intended as a finale for the many plots that began and developed in the first two books, All These Worlds features an increased number of Bobs and Worlds, each with their own problems and personality quirks.

Marking a much-needed return to form, this iteration brings back all the things I enjoyed about the first book, while taking its time to present a reasonable conclusion. There are two major plots: that of the original Bob in Delta Eridani and the ‘Others’ invasion of the Solar system. The remaining stories feature the Bobs in other star systems, including those of Delta Pavonis, Eta Cassiopeiae and Omicron Eridani.

The book revolves around how the Bobs reconcile the death of humans and their own immortality. This is seen in the aging and subsequent death of Bob’s closest friend Archimedes, on Delta Eridani. He spends the last few years of Archimedes’s life helping, guarding and taking care of him, all the while dealing with tribal conflicts that are a indirect result of his own interventionism. Bob’s other clone Howard makes repeated attempts to convince his love Bridget to replicate, once her natural self has passed on. She faces a difficult decision as her children do not want her to come back ‘alive’, and Howard must fight a tedious courtroom battle in order to claim her remains. Bob’s second clone Will also has a hard time adjusting to the idea that all of Bob’s descendants are going to reproduce and eventually die of old age. Instead of forming bonds with individuals, he considers moving to a more ‘amorphous’ model of his lineage. This extended focus on the fragility of humans provides a nice groundwork for the idea of the ‘Others’, who think of humanity as a pests and plan to destroy the Solar System. It also serves to ground the reader, so that they do not feel detached from the high stakes nature of the final battle. As a result, the final battle is satisfyingly entertaining and does a decent job of wrapping up the book.

Some aspects of the plot, I feel, could’ve been done better. For example, the repetitive discussion of the logistical nightmare of getting a million people off the Earth and the gigantic proportions of the alien cargo ship made the Bellerophon a no-brainer and the book took longer than needed to reach the obvious conclusion. The Pav species receive little development conveniently owing to their displeased attitude towards the Bobs, which reinforces their role as a crude plot device. The Bobs also throw a Hail Mary when two Bobs by the names of Icarus and Daedalus literally smash a planet and a moon into a sun to destroy a surrounding Dyson Sphere under construction by the Others. While I don’t have a problem with the deus ex machina of it all, it might have made a lot more sense to attempt a takeover of the star system instead.

Some other bits of plot receive more attention and are better developed. This includes Marcus’s guerilla takedown of an authoritarian regime on a watery planet in Eta Cassiopeiae. Howard’s discovery of floating blimp-like organisms in a super-dense Jovian atmosphere is amusing for both for Bridget and the reader. Technologies such as the android-like ‘mannies’ and FTL communication are variably explored and allow the book to improve its storytelling pace and variety. There’s also the continued development of the unrest amongst the Bobs themselves, especially given the large numbers produced in order to fight the Others.

All These Worlds is definitely more enjoyable and less meandering than its predecessor and while the novelty of the whole Bobiverse idea is starting to wear thin the book still has a few interesting ideas to keep it entertaining.