28/Jun/2026
I have this hypothesis that every action we undertake is fundamentally motivated by one of these three pursuits: a. Signalling- pointed outwards at others b. Utility- pointed outwards in time towards the future c. Pleasure- pointed inwards and for the now
Perhaps its my beginner readings in evolutionary biology that have led me to this framework but I ask myself this question often, why should I be doing what I'm about to do?, and usually the answer is one of these.
Digression: This itself stacks well on another of my mental models: that at an even more fundamental level our actions are driven by one of: a. Inertia- Social mores, personal habit, failure of imagination or courage- basically doing without asking why its being done b. Incentive- Driven purely by self-interest, almost bacteria-like, in attempt to overindex on specific principal components c. Intelligence- To be able to take a much more holistic view, to the extent one's imagination allows but also keep pushing beyond, to see what is the right-est thing to do - and here I don't use the word right morally but in a sense I hope to make clear subsequently
Back to the reasons: While it would be great if those three aspects align perfectly, more often than not they don't and yet since it makes rational sense to balance them, one chooses, when there are multiple choices available, carefully. While this might sound like a compromise, I'd argue in a sense that makes us good, responsible, functioning, balanced adults. We want validation and favours from others, we want some things to persist into the future, and yet we also want what we want right now because of the succour and joy it brings.
However, a part of me believes that this list isn't exhaustive. I've lived through moments, infact long minutes/ hours, when what I experienced can't be communicated by a word as paltry as pleasure. Intensely-involving sex that's elevated into communion, incredibly affecting art (including this recent Karl Ove Knuasgaard piece which made me float for half a day and made everyone who encountered me during that time receive a bit of the magic somehow), that 28th kilometre of a marathon, a particular journey at dusk when all of one's life seems like a backstory to that moment, and now so much of the time I spend with the Noor!
All my aforementioned rationalist frames work on the assumption that there is me and there is the world and while its a rather porous boundary, there does exist a boundary. These moments seem to erase that separating notion and I end up becoming part of something far larger- if not the world/universe/existence itself. Its not just joy or happiness I'm feeling dialled upto 11. Its not just more, its qualitatively different. My instinct says its liberation/transcendence but I don't think that's the most accurate label. If anything I'm even more intensely involved than I'm usually capable of. Seeing Dharani grow up feels like a microcosm of all of life and evolution of the universe from the Big Bang. The moments I've described above are suprarational experiences where I'm the clear, conscious actor in both sense of the word- I'm the కర్త but I'm also aware my mind and body separate to me, an actor playing a role. With Noori I'm usually so involved that I don't even realise time flying or what's happening in the wider world. But there also exist these moments where I suddenly become aware of her and me and Sravani and others around us currently inhabiting this node in spacetime and I feel an electric jolt pass through and realise this little girl infront of me, my daughter, is like a portal to the immensity and awesomeness of creation itself, and I experience the sublime that Yashoda must've had when she gazed into Krishna's open mouth.
And here's the weird thing: I can't manufacture these moments. The time I spent in my early 20s reading/listening to Sadhguru seems to convince me that I can tune (or point better like an antenna) myself better to catch the signal more often/ for longer/ in a better quality but even then I'm just a receiver; This is beyond my ability to control or create. Like Amit Varma recently said, all I can try and do is increase the surface area of serendipity.
Ironically that makes me a deeply religious person going by the three-pronged definition Prof. Pratap Bhanu Mehta once gave on The Seen and the Unseen: a. A desire to annihilate the ego b. A fundamental trust in the order of things c. A longing to inhabit the superconscious
As weird as it is for a card-carrying atheist to confess to having religious inclinations, my religion is personalised, private, temperamental, and says Hi in the most unexpected of places.
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29/Jun/2026
Do not trust words for they deceive us way more than they reveal. One because I think they're the ultimate signalling capability- even more bonkers than the insane antelope horns that purely exist for reasons of ornamentation and fitness-signalling despite them actually being a handicap. Language is a tremendously powerful and dangerous tool that we can, and do, use less to identify and communicate some pristine, inert truth and more as a form of (virtual) reality manifesting tool to modify behaviour and drive action- both others' and ours'. When put together with Prof. Nicholas Humphrey's theory that conscious is an inner eye that initially evolved for us to predict others' intentions and possible actions by observing ourselves, and then perhaps imagining ourselves in those situations, its very easy to deceive ourselves with language use even more than others.
Second comes from the Structuralists who (apparently) posited that language is not just independent to individual humans but literally an independent structure that completely shapes and guides our lives and thoughts- "..we inhabit language". In his book Language Machines, Prof. Leif Wetherby makes the rather interesting claim that what LLMs have captured is not semantics as much as poetics, not cognition but culture. They have ploughed the billions of words secreted by humans over the last 3 decades (including copies of books from before) on the internet and now created a fertile top soil that reflects with great fidelity the contours through which most of our speech flows. LLMs are so damn effective not because they're smart but because we're not as smart and deep as we like to think. So much of our daily utterances are rhetoric and repetition - mechanical, commodified, derived, reified System 1 artefacts constantly flowing out of the brain factory - that its not too hard for a computational engine to respond by leveraging Statistics and Probability like we ourselves do. Venkat wrote a long time ago that people's intuitions, ironically, about LLMs were all wrong- they were actually all intuition and no analysis. Infact, even these two paragraphs are practically writing themselves (I've barely read most of the books/writers I'm mentioning to build my case) once I came up with a vague idea and a slightly provocative angle. What my brain is feeding me, and I have no clue what or where the distinction is, is not too different from an LLM writing a blogpost if I'd provided it the same premise. For all I know I will prompt this into ChatGPT one of these days for some meta-fuckery.
The reason for this tirade is me realising in my sleep after writing last night's entry that I went far too overboard with the Yashoda/Krishna analogy. Ofcourse I've felt awe and intense love for my daughter but I don't think its anywhere close to the cosmic magnitude that that picture portrays. I drank a little too much of my own Kool-Aid and today's entry is an attempt to both understand why I did what I did and an act of public repentance to absolve myself. So what happened- either I really felt like that but can’t remember/justify it now so I’m distancing myself; or I got carried away by the grandeur of that poetic turn and let myself be taken under by the unrelenting waves of not that emotion itself but the emotion of being able to feel such intense emotions. Kundera’s identification of widely prevalent kitsch is spot on- sentiment rather than emotion that is fuelled by the desire to associate one’s small, provincial life with something grander. Is this what happened to Don Quixote (I ask as someone who’s never read the book)?
I love and depend too much on language to truly distance myself from it but its been good to see what a dangerous sport I've been playing all my adult life- the kind of bullshit I've sold to others and more to myself - more often than not well-meaning but ridiculously naive - that I need to develop other capabilities to triangulate and find more solid ground.
It was not my intention to entirely misguide or create an impression of erudition but what I’m trying to communicate here is that words are at best markers/signboards to feelings and insights spread like ether. Sirivennela garu once said, and I paraphrase, "The emotion you're feeling is totally yours. I cannot make you feel something you've never felt. What I can do, however, is use words in the right fashion to guide you towards your own feelings". That explains why writing is tougher for a writer than for others- they have to think harder to create new neural pathways and bypass the ones jaded by overuse. The reason people like me were pissed off when ChatGPT landed with a splash is because we used to do what LLMs do better and in more interesting ways- ingest a large-ish amount of text and regurtitate it appropriate to a context. Ideally LLMs would simply be repeating those stock phrases but the fact that they're trained on ridiculously large datasets and, more importantly, are designed to be stochastic makes them surprisingly fun to hang out with- they really surprise you (but increasingly less so I'd wager).
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30/Jun/2026
In this interview on the A Book with Legs Podcast, Prof. Howard Gardner talks about multiple kinds of intelligences- musical, linguistic, existential, naturalistic, bodily etc. in addition to the straightforward IQ we are familiar with. Borrowing from that argument, I think language is simply one of the many "communicative avenues" available to us. Being in the physical presence of someone, watching a film together, playing a sport together, infact even making love- these convey information to the other person that cannot be as effectively or accurately be conveyed through words. In his doctoral dissertation తెలుగులో కవితా విప్లవాల స్వరూపం Prof. Velcheru Narayana Rao talking about the fact that many of us looking from the literate (as in those who's primary mode of education comes from reading and writing) perspective of the 20th and 21st century naturally assume that pre-literate societies are not just different but somehow inferior- "ఆ సాహిత్యాన్ని బేరీజు వేయగల్గిన ప్రమాణాలు ఇవి కావేమో అన్న ఆలోచన తట్టదు మనకి". I think it can be extended to apply to all humans who have, over their long duree evolutionary history, overindexed on language over other modes of communication. In his book Other Minds, you can see Prof. Peter Godfrey-Smith constantly try to cross the glass boundary of inhabiting a human consciousness, who's word-filled interior monologue never stops, to imagine what it must be like to be an octopus- a cousin who we once shared an ancestor with but now whose eight-limbed neural system is radically different to ours.
Language, in our modern setting, is not very different from money. For one it totally shapes how we see and interact with the world, and how it perceives us in return, with us hardly paying attention. And even more foolishly we want to accumulate more (prowess) of them because it is very easy to compare and signal and show-off and become insulated from uncomfortable/ unpleasant situations when you either have more money or a way with words. From that vantage point, Indian obsession with English and conflation of intelligence with proficiency in that particular language is not that bonkers. An English-speaker is the mental equivalent of a person who wears branded clothes and arrives in a Mercedes. The true intent is not communication but obfuscation, language instead of becoming a glass becomes a smokescreen. It exists to point to its own intricacy and complexity. Undoubtedly that facet has its uses but you can overdo it for your own detriment and I think we have arrived at that point.
I really want to reiterate this: speech is but one mode; A more complete human being should find and gain proficiency in others.
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01/Jul/2026
Many years ago, I read on Tim Urban's blog that one of the primary reasons Elon Musk wanted to create Neuralink was because he thought the capacity of the human brain was being constrained by the low throughput of converting "ideas" into language and then passing them sequentially to another being who had to attempt to use that low-resolution message to create a high-dimensional model.
I see both merit and foolishness in that idea.
First the merit: It's taken me this long to realise that versimilitude is not the same as truth. I spent a long bloody time trying to coax words into meaning "exactly" what I think/feel without understanding that 1. language is not necessarily the form my thoughts take, and 2. even with the most high-fidelity transformation there are bound to be losses, embellishments, noise, ambiguities etc. owing to the process of conversion from one modality to another. And this without even considering the context, state, capacity, parsing capability (intelligence?), and interest of the receiver. The image that pops into my head when I say elephant is (most likely) not going to be the one that pops into your head which means even with in simplistic example we've forked. So how can I ever truly build the exact same model/ picture in my head in yours.
Now to the foolishness: We don't really want it even if we could. Not just because our modern, liberal outlook gasps at the prospect of turning into a hivemind but even from a purely utilitarian/ eugenic perspective, replication without mutation leads to seeming robustness before turning into fragility. What is being sought by the Muskian ideology is not clarity but control- like most often aspirations for legibility are.
And recursively the same can be applied to the excessive use of verbal|written language itself. At the risk of anthropomorphising language ('How Wheat Domesticated Us!"), it's a memeplex(?) entrenching itself deeper into our individual and communal lives for its own propagation even at the cost of the host organism.
But all this talk of language is moot when two parties are not mutually inclined to engage. No crafty, inspired arrangements of words is going to have an effect on another person who is uninterested or incapable of receiving that information then. I know it sounds very depressing, and perhaps its a reflection of my mental state right now, but I feel that most of the time a. we are not in a state to listen and comprehend, so what we learn in quite incidental/ oblique to proceedings, and b. on occasions when we speak deeply and passionately, we are usually the ones who tend to benefit most from it - it feels like its nature's way of getting us to hear what we most need to hear - for the only thing that can affect us is what we're ready to receive, and being ready to receive means the words are almost entirely performative. Anand Gandhi's 'Is Enlightenment Googleable?' takes on a different connotation then: That language itself communicates nothing new. At best it reveals. And epiphany is not a thing to know but a state of being that's more primal than the linguistic layer. I suspect we still need language though atleast until we use it to climb beyond.
But no that can't be true because if it were true then we would never be able to learn or discover anything new since we'd be imprisoned in our own extremely limited concepts. A point Prof. Steven Pinker makes emphatically in the introduction of The Language Instinct. At the same time we can't understand/ comprehend most of what we encounter because we're not ready for it/ capable of receiving it. In his phenomenal review of Surfing Uncertainty, Scott Alexander writes about how people with autism can't stand labels on clothing (I highly, highly recommend the entire piece) because they can't get their brains to understand that what they're experiencing are not different phenomena but myriad, minor variations of one experience.
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02/Jul/2026
గోలీమార్లో ఒక డయలాగ్ ఉందిట- "అరేయ్, వేరేవాళ్ళని మోసం చేస్తే అంతో ఇంతో బాగుపడతావేమోగానీ నిన్ను నువ్వు మోసం చేసుకుంటే సంకనాకిపోతావ్!" నా పరిస్థికి ఇప్పుడు అలానే ఉంది. ఈ స్థాయి వర్చ్వల్ రియాలిటీలో (spun by words both mine and others') ఇంత కాలం గడిపాక ఎది నిజమైన ఫీలింగో ఏది అఫెక్టేషనో తేల్చుకోవటం దుర్భరమైపోయింది. One of the dangers of openly speculating and surfing on a tsunami of words is my internal compass feels untethered to "real" feelings.
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03/Jul/2026
The primary culprit, it seems to me, is mechanisation. 'టెక్నీక్ ఈస్ డెంజరస్', అని మెహెరన్న అన్నట్టు, చిక్కంతా పనిలో లేదు ప్రక్రియలో ఉంది. In an old piece, LM Sacasas writes about the preponderance of convenience in Late Stage Capitalism's marketing and asks why don't we ask what is all the convenience, that these products and services are repeatedly promising, for? Yes excessive friction is an hindrance but is all friction to be avoided? The problem I seem to have been circling over the last few days is not necessarily about language but of it being the latest service available to us on tap. And that need not be via a computer screen but simply produced by the trained, unthinking part of my mind that regurgitates, a particularly appropriate word, sentences purely as a lubricant for the same rote social interactions of my narrow, uninspiring everyday life.
I know this sounds like a perfect reminder humanism cliche but its not that LLMs have become more human as much as we've so mechanised language for most of our interactions over the last few decades that we are so easily stumped by a simulation. We have debased language so much, using it unthinkingly and unimaginatively, forsaking its vast potential for petty ends, parroting the same homilies as an ant might pheromones, neither looking deeper within nor without, hardly ever leveraging language to better understand and communicate intense, intricate thoughts and feelings, and now we're surprised at how easy it is for a machine to generate a piece of text that sounds like us.
I've always associated writing with the 'hard task' of rewriting - pruning, shaping, redrafting over and over again, finding the best way to communicate something true and essential to an audience - and blogging, what I tell myself I do, with simply transcribing words flowing out of my head and then dusting my hands off. And because I feel incapable of doing the former I've never been able to identify myself as a writer (no matter how minor). But when I read some of my older posts I realise that some of them are good, interesting, fun to read and many boring, self-obsessed, and ringing hollow. The difference, I think now, is not how long it took me to write exactly but how much churn had happened within before I sat down to write it. The 'writing' starts way before the first word is typed - though ofcourse actually sitting and doing it is a crucial part of the process that shapes it in unexpected ways - and happens in the background as I obsess over a feeling or a question caused by an incident. How much I sweat over it and what all I've read and imbibed before as a 'preparation' for the actual piece itself and the viewpoints I'm able to bring and the extent to which I can dig deep - unrelenting and clear-eyed in seeing the 'truth' to the best of my ability - and what I'm able to confess without fear or favour should also, I'm inclined to argue, count as the hard work I'm putting in to write. At the risk of sounding staggeringly immodest, it is my version of Picasso's "..took me a lifetime to do it in 2 minutes".
I've always balked at hardwork because I felt that hardwork is exalted too much in society, I didn't want to be told by anyone to work hard or strive to meet their expectations, and rhetorically there's something uncool about admitting that you work hard. Another reason being that most examples of hardwork don't interest or impress me. Working hard isn't sufficient, it should be towards a direction that enhances your aliveness. But I think I've done myself a disservice. I do work hard although admittedly not in ways that's easily legible to society at large; Especially in areas of my interest. What is important to me, a person, a subject, a project, a problem gets the full force of my attention and intelligence and ability. It is a personal choice and can be totally private except I'm stating it now because I think I finally understand that hardwork is the single most essential ingredient of a happy, fulfilling life. And that work going into every act, every relationship, every creation, every fucking sentence brings a kind of aliveness to the person. The enemy is the unthinkingness that's so pervasive, the shallowness of so many experiences, the culture of ubiqiutous consumption that kills the desire of creation.
The answer was right infront of me all along, in the epigraph of Anil Ananthaswamy's Why Machines Learn- "Whatever we do, we have to make our life vectors. Lines with force and direction".
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04/Jul/2026
So I took all the above words and asked ChatGPT to "Can you clearly and concisely articulate the content of this writeup". Its response, in that very LLMesque style, finds a coherent throughline that's buried behind the word-rubble but articulates in it in such a staggeringly bland way that my eyes glaze over and the will to learn/ understand/ reach and grasp is gone (Boy, do I seem to loathe them!). Because I don't want to post any AI-generated content on this blog, you'll have to repeat the experiment yourself if you're interested. Before just re-reading all that I've written above in the last 6 days, I spent sometime earlier today thinking of how I should close this post and arrived at a point of seeming realisation. But now not only does it feel unbuilt towards but also banal and trite and desperate and worthless and self-serious and authentic-but-in-such-a-way-that-no-one-asked-for-or-gives-a-flying-fuck-about so let me save it, if ever, for a later day. All that seems to have come out of this post is that I wanted to write atleast a few words everyday for a week that might add upto something and have been successful atleast in the first part.
Words, words, words- so essential and yet so inadequate.