I attended my first ever track day at Okos Racing, Hyderabad recently. The instructors are from Motorsports Academy India and they’re about as hardcore as one can be in this field. I’ve been riding a two wheeler for years now but I only got my own motorcycle recently. And lately I’ve been having this itch to ride better and know more about the machines that I love. As a mechanical engineer, I understand these machines and how they work but I never had the chance to experience them to the fullest. But now with these guys, I can.

The day started with warm-up exercises, a track walk and few safety instructions. The motorcycles were fueled up, pressure checked and race ready in no time. For the first few laps I was asked to just take it slow and assess the grip as the track was a little damp as it rained the night before. Conditions got better after a while and we were allowed to push. I got feedback on my posture, braking and many other things that I had to change. It rained after a while and I made the mistake of testing my limits while leaning too much without maintaining the speed and lost the rear. It wasn’t a serious crash but that was the indication that I was doing too much. For the next few laps I took it slow, tried to learn as much possible instead of showing what I know. I know it isn’t much but its a first step towards riding better. I couldn’t get my knee down but I know I’ll get there soon. And huge thanks to MAI guys for conducting these events.

Grief and pain are weird. Pain can be experienced by almost every higher level organism but grief seems to be experienced only by a very few species like us, elephants and orcas etc. It’s like a curse that we’re forced to reckon with. I have always struggled to feel and express emotions. Except for grief. I’m constantly haunted by the grief of losing the life I’ve imagined but could never have. And pain is one of the most primary sensations any living organism feels. Its origin is not just emotional, but also physiologically related to how humans have evolved.

There are two parts of “Pain”. One is the reflex/reaction that our body feels, another is the cause itself. You can always feel a paper cut, but you don’t notice the torn upper epidermis. The reflex hurts us. But its actually the wound hurting us. This reflex seems to be present in almost every being that has life, regardless of its ability to communicate. It is surprising how such a primitive, emotional sensory reactions who’s primary function is to warn the being of danger makes is immensely difficult to express the same emotion to others.

I lost my grandfather recently. He was in his 80s. He had his health issues yes, but he was sharp, never idle and constantly had something to do. “I’m a busy man”, he used to say. He was a career bank employee, valued discipline over everything else and was a little gullible. What people don’t tell you about losing someone important is how empty your life feels after their passing. The conversations you wanted to have, the “things” you wanted to do together, the stuff you wanted to buy for them. Who will I talk to about the specific topics I used to talk to my thathagaru? Who will guide me about growing coconut, mango and jack fruit trees? Who will quiz me about the random topics shown on the news everyday? I don’t know.

He always had strong beliefs, both about politics and religion. His room is filled with the letters he wrote to government officials with his ideas and ideals. They’re not always great ideas but I used to appreciate the fact that he is at least thinking about doing something different than maintaining the status quo. “I gave RBI the idea of demonetization” he used to say, and then we used to get into a heated argument about it which usually lasted for an hour. The room is filled with bundles of documents, everything meticulously noted from the 80s. The bills he paid, the things he bought and also about the people he cared about.

Because grief is self centered by definition, what I felt about him is shaped entirely by the 20 years I’ve seen him. He has always been a bony, opinionated, short tempered man who lived the ideal middle class life of post independence India. He is inspirational in a way. At least was to me, when I was 5. But that is not what everyone felt about him. He made his mistakes, he’s human after all. But he was also a monster according to a few who have seen and experienced the earlier phase of his life. And their grief is going to be dramatically different from what I’m experiencing. And that is ok.

Almost every organism feels pain but when you go smaller, the definition of pain breaks down. Its not just difficult for any observer to understand the pain of other organism, its almost impossible. Pain stopped early humans from doing something that harms them or puts them in danger, and it evolved into our very own spider-sense. Whereas grief on the other hand, is so much more complex to understand and express. For me though, it is the flood of memories of him trying to teach me things and the sum of all the times I missed to tell him that I loved him.

2024 was rough. For everyone. I really don’t know how to explain but it felt like I had to endure a lot to get through the year. But thankfully with the support of my family and friends I was able to pull through. I’m doing a lot better compared to a few months ago. I drowned myself in work and surrounded myself with people who cared. It feels nice to be cared about.

And, this is the one year anniversary of this domain! Despite blogging for quite a while, I always pruned the previous one when I started fresh and would stop posting after a while because I either forgot or got frustrated with the platform. In 2023 I wanted to start for real and told myself that if I post 10 or more times through the year I would renew my domain and stay here. I think I reached that goal (barely) so here I am. The linkblog idea still exists, also a nownownow page and I’m glad I’ll continue to have this space for myself.

Simon Willison wrote/reposted yesterday about Jeff Triplett’s blog post called “Please publish and share more“. In their posts they ask everyone to write and publish more without overthinking about the content, analytics and other factors that usually unrelated to post itself. The modern age of Content Creation has forced us all to think of our personal memories and experiences as revenue streams and gave us all the impression that if it doesn’t generate clicks or views, it is not worth posting. This view has made us feel that our lives are worth a little less because there will always be another person’s “content” with better metrics.

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

Due to the WordPress drama I spent many hours researching about alternate CMS platforms and static site generators. At one point I was convinced that I need to move to Github pages with Jekyll. I was never able to follow up on that because it kinda felt daunting and I didn’t have enough time. Its still something I want to do in the future, but for now WordPress is the best solution for me. In the end Jeff says that blogging is not about writing the perfect essay or about sticking the landing. In February I wrote about how I was thinking about starting a nownownow page or a Notes page because I was not sure if I wanted to post only wall of text kind of posts and maybe the silly needs to be separated? I’m still not sure about it but one thing I have decided is to not look for a perfect conclusion or the perfect ending to my entries. My post ends when I stop writing.

There is an interesting post on Team-BHP by GTO posted on 13th June called “Maruti-Suzuki suffering an “Intel Chip-Like” situation? Out of tune with emerging market preferences“. I wanted to write about it as soon as I read it because the comparison between both the management and the target demographic of both companies is very interesting.

First a brief summary of the post. GTO argues that Maruti is in trouble just like Intel because both of the companies have been out of touch with the market requirements and customer aspirations. They say Maruti’s lack of innovation is evident because of stagnant and sloth-like product development and update cycle, excessive reliance on its “Kitna Deti Hai?” brand image and lack of product offerings for aspirational customers. They go on to compare Maruti’s situation with Intel because Intel has missed the mobile market, GPU market and also got beat by Nvidia in “AI Chips” by which they mean again server grade Nvidia A100s I think.

I want to first say that this is not a post in defense of Maruti or Intel, I don’t have a horse in this race; I’m just a guy on the internet with an opinion like millions of others.

I don’t think the comparison is unwarranted. Intel has failed to launch any new exciting product in the last, oh I don’t know, a decade. All the consumer end products from Kaby Lake have been iterative improvements at best and shameful cash grabbing re-brands at worst. Intel’s ambitious plans to Leroy Jenkins the 2020 booming GPU market doesn’t look like it has gone well (although their efforts to fix the bugs and listen to the feedback should be appreciated). From confusing processor nomenclature, recent rebranding to remove the ‘i’ and move to Core Ultra, shameful marketing campaigns like the Snake Oil incident, lack of any market presence of their arm offerings, it is very clear that Intel is doing a lot of things but still their bread and butter are their legacy x86 processors. Onto Maruti.

Oh how the mighty have fallen. Maruti’s best selling cars, the Swift and Alto regularly receive comments on the internet like “tin ka dabba” and their GNCAP results are certainly not helping them. They did not bring any new enthusiast offerings to the Indian market and the one product they did bring, the Jimny, flopped hard. Their recent product strategy seems to be to lease of their designs to Toyota to make badge engineered cars for the people who prefer the Toyota brand image over Maruti. As of now, they have no plans for any EV launch. They have increased the prices gradually to the point that now the top AT variant of Alto costs 6.5 Lakhs on road, why shouldn’t I jump to a Swift or a used Hyundai at that point? The lack of future looking prospects, lack of exciting product launches and being out of touch with the first time car buyer are real issues with Maruti and they don’t look like they want to fix themselves anytime soon.

All of these points about Intel and Maruti are very real. But, Intel is in this position because its Intel and Maruti is in this position because its Maruti. Let me explain. An enthusiast might complain about the iterative and boring improvements of Intel generations, be shocked at the horrible support for DirectX11 predecessors in their GPUs at launch. But if you go to Nehru Place in Delhi or CTC in Hyderabad, you ask the guy for a laptop there is absolutely no chance that he will offer you an AMD system. You have to choose between many models that have Intel processors but if you want AMD, you have to select the processor you want first and find that one obscure laptop that it comes in. If you look at Steam Survey Intel’s market presence is 65%. AMD is the exception in most regions and Intel is the norm. I’m glad the situation is changing and Intel has some competition but it does not look like their position as the market leader will be toppled anytime soon. I’m not going to talk about Macs here because they priced themselves out of the market. Similarly, the chances of a first time car buyer’s extended family having a Maruti and a mid 20s’ hand me down car being a Maruti are very high. Everyone’s favorite used car is an Alto, not Kwid, not i20, not the Altroz but an Alto. I do agree that Maruti’s future ambitions are confusing. Their EV prospects are non existent but an EV is not the practical choice for a first time buyer and that first time buyer is the biggest target of Maruti and for many years has been the only target of Maruti. The clock is ticking, and they needed a platform ready yesterday because Tata has beat them to a Punch (hehe). Intel’s future does look promising, their Arm variants are little bit better than what they were at launch and I hope they don’t fumble the Foundry project. I want to emphasize that both these companies have a complicated corporate management situation but their engineers are extremely talented and their present situation is not a cause of concern but a consequence of our economic structure and their past of being early market leaders in the beginning and conglomerates too big to experiment now. The market deserves better. The customer deserves better safety, better experience and better value than whatever these two companies offer. And I didn’t even go into detail about the scummy practices they’ve been involved in.

Enthusiasts and people with aspirations are often disappointed with the world around them because they are asked to settle down and be content with what they have. “No, you can’t have the Swift Sport or the Intel Arc in India” is what they hear. But they also need to know that they represent 1% of the customers and they are at less than the top 1% of the earners in our country. Their brand loyalty and nostalgia means nothing to the shareholder who will sell tomorrow or the middle manager who will jump to a different company 3 years from now. The world would be beautiful if we could have whatever we wanted, no?

But don’t forget. Its called Lord Alto. Maybe the Lord in its name is not about its miraculous presence in the most random Himalayan roads or its reliability despite being a tin ka dabba but maybe that its about a stubborn aristocrat who refused to listen to the people, whose presence slowly becomes irrelevant and will fade away from prominence when people eventually move on to a new leader.