Notation on vnykmshr

McKenna and the architecture of consciousness

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Terence McKenna never wrote a line of code, but he thought like a systems architect. His subject was consciousness, culture, and language. His method was the same recursive decomposition that engineers use to understand complex systems: find the abstraction layers, trace the dependencies, question the defaults.

Language as protocol

McKenna’s core claim: the world is made of language. Not literally – but in the way that a data model shapes everything built on top of it. Choose the wrong abstraction early, and you spend years working around its constraints. The same principle applies to the linguistic and conceptual frameworks we inherit.

ACCEPTed. COMMITed. RESOLVEd.

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I came across Adrian Hands’ story through a blog post. I don’t remember which one. The details stayed.

Adrian was a developer with ALS. By the time he wrote his last patch, his hands were gone. He built a Morse code input rig – a Darci USB emulator wrapped in PVC pipe strapped to his knee, paddles attached, tapping out dots and dashes with the last muscles that still worked. That was his keyboard.

Go Big or Go Home

Mon, 06 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Monday morning, early. The door to the meeting room is unlocked and the room is empty. I like getting there first – it lets me see the room before it fills with the people I’m about to sit across from.

There’s a poster on the wall.

GO BIG OR GO HOME.

Text on a silhouette background, designed in-house by a design team that took this sort of thing seriously. Tastefully done – not a free stock-photo print, not a motivational-mousepad cliché, just a line in a clean font over a darker graphic that someone actually thought about. It’s there because someone wanted you to see it.

11/12/13

Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today is 11/12/13. The last date of the century with three consecutive numbers. It’s also my birthday.

I don’t usually do resolutions. I don’t usually do oaths. Today I’m making an exception and taking A Programmer’s Oath – a Hippocratic-style pledge for people who build software, written by Dionysis Zindros.

Most of it is what you’d expect: respect the people who taught you, share what you learn, don’t claim expertise you don’t have, don’t use your power for unfair profit, keep learning.

Thank You, Sachin

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Two days after the speech. I can’t stop thinking about the list.

So I went looking for the numbers. Andy Zaltzman at ESPNcricinfo had done a stat dive the week before – he had them all.

676,693 deliveries faced, across 663 international matches. 41,113 minutes at the crease – 28 days and change. 4,062 fours. 264 sixes. 982 international cricketers played with or against, 842 of them on the other side.

Sachin at Wankhede

Sun, 17 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

He carried a list.

Sachin Tendulkar – who remembers every innings he’s played, who can tell you the field placement on a delivery from 1996 – carried a piece of paper to his own farewell because he was afraid he’d forget someone to thank.

That’s the part that broke me.

The speech itself was what you’d expect and nothing like what you’d expect. He started with his father, who told an eleven-year-old to chase his dreams without shortcuts. He thanked his mother for every prayer. He thanked Achrekar sir, his childhood coach – the man who never once told him “well played.” Not once. Because he was afraid the boy would stop improving.

Just Another Brick in the Wall

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Tired of being another brick in the wall. A cog. A faceless name. No identity. No purpose. No dream. Just output.

I want to break out of this. Soar. Discover what I’m actually worth. But the walls are tall and the chains are heavy and every morning looks the same as the last one.

I know I was meant for more than this. Everyone thinks that. Does everyone think that?

Flying Thru the Motions

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Three months in. Morning walk around the block with whoever’s up, ending at the tea stall. Tea at 7:30, maybe 8. Office by 9.

Delhi is already hot – April heat, the kind that sits on your chest when you step outside.

I write code. I take a call with clients I have never met. I ship a release in the afternoon. I debug something small and stupid by 5. I am a dev and a deployment engineer and the guy on the call at once, and it has stopped feeling strange.

Tangled Up in Blue

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Dylan does something with perspective that nobody else has figured out. First person becomes third person mid-verse. The timeline folds. You’re never sure who’s talking, and it doesn’t matter, because the feeling is consistent even when the narrator isn’t.

He said it himself – he was trying to deal with the concept of time, and the way characters shift between first and third person. “But as you look at the whole thing it really doesn’t matter.” That’s the line that made me pay attention differently. Most songwriters build a story. Dylan builds a space and lets you wander through it.

Naagin

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The problem with most Indian rock is that it’s rock that happens to be played by Indians. Western structures, Western tone, maybe a tabla dropped in for colour. Fusion as a costume.

Decibel’s “Naagin” is something else. It sounds like it grew out of this soil. The Lady Cobra – pulled straight from mythology, not as decoration but as the spine of the song. The riff has weight. The vocal has bite. It doesn’t ask permission to be Indian and it doesn’t perform Indian-ness for a Western ear. It just is.

Chandigarh

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I spent a few days in Chandigarh.

Everything about it was right. Wide roads that don’t choke. Clean streets. Greenery that wasn’t an afterthought. The kind of city that teaches you what your own city got wrong.

I felt nothing.

Not depressed, not unhappy – just disconnected from my own responses. My reactions were running a few frames behind whatever I was looking at. I was there with people I hadn’t seen in a long time. Even that wasn’t enough.

Ping from Noida

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Hello from a slightly chilly Noida.

I left Hyderabad on Sunday afternoon. Landed Sunday evening. Joined the team Monday morning. Five days in. Still finding the bathrooms.

Hyderabad runs warm. Delhi runs to extremes – both ends of the year. I landed in peak winter with nothing for it. The first thing I bought was a jacket. The second thing was a thicker one.

The office looks like the comp lab from college – fewer machines, full internet for once. I have a desk. I have a login. I have someone who wants me to ship something by next week. Everything else can wait.

The Cosmic Drummer

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A friend of mine – college senior, the kind of person who turns a chai break into a two-hour philosophy session – once reframed Lord Shiva for me in a way I haven’t been able to shake.

Start with the surface. Long hair. Snake around the neck. A drum. Followers. Performance art that shakes the cosmos. Lives outside every social norm. Shiva might be the original rock star, and I’m not sure anyone’s topped the aesthetic since.

Goodbye 2010, Goodbye Hyderabad

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

New Year. Half-packed boxes. I am leaving Hyderabad.

Six and a half years here. Four in college on the city’s edge, two and a half working downtown. The first job out of college. The first bike. A flat full of friends – like-minded, carefree, the kind you don’t need a reason to stay up with. Concerts that ran past midnight. The city where I learned what it felt like to be free.

Rare Pictures of Hyderabad

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I stumbled onto a Flickr photostream of old Hyderabad. Black and white. Nizam era. Half of it showing monuments I’ve never been to.

Two and a half years here. Some of those places are ten minutes from the office. I’ve walked past the turnoffs for most of them. I never turned.

It’s an ugly thing to admit. You can live in a place and not see it. You treat it like a room you’re passing through to get to the next thing.

The Chaos

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t remember where I first found this poem. Someone shared it, or I stumbled into it – doesn’t matter. What matters is that I tried reading it aloud and didn’t make it past the first stanza without tripping.

“The Chaos” was written by a Dutch teacher named Gerard Nolst Trenite sometime around 1920. It’s 800 lines long. Every line exists to prove that English pronunciation follows no rules, respects no patterns, and will humiliate you if you try to read it with confidence.

Fast Car

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

“Fast Car” landed on me this week, and it won’t leave.

I’d heard it before – everyone has. But there’s a difference between hearing it and having it land. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing concrete has changed. But the song has been playing in my head for days, and its sentence keeps finding me: you gotta make a decision, you leave tonight or you live and die this way. I don’t have a decision to make. Not yet. The song knows something I don’t.

Love, Life, Nostalgia

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I am writing this down because I’m afraid I’ll soften it later.

Coincidence. That’s all anything ever is. Nothing more than coincidence.

There are no miracles. There is no such thing as fate. Nothing is meant to be.

I have always known this.

I am sure of it now.

Monologue of an Idiotic Soul

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Some nights the code compiles fine and you still feel like a fraud.

Not the dramatic kind. Not the kind where someone’s about to find you out. The quiet kind, where you fixed the bug and shipped the feature and everyone moved on, and you’re sitting there thinking – did I actually understand what I just did, or did I just get lucky again?

I think I understand this system. Do I really, though. I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now. And yet I spent three hours on something that turned out to be a missing semicolon. That could happen to anyone. Could it, though.

Standing at the Starting Line

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I have a blank page and a working install. WordPress, on a shared host. The files are mine, the database is mine, the domain is mine. The first post should be written by now.

It isn’t. I’ve been picking fonts.

I struggled with what the first post should be. Prolific. Grand in nature. Broad in scope. I would spend another hour on themes, colors, the header layout – everything had to be perfect before I could write a single sentence. I struggled some more.