In Pursuit of Wisdom

 My office has arranged for a virtual fun event called  Marqeta Talent Show  where people can demonstrate their different talents in a festive manner. I thought of hosting a simultaneous chess show with some of my fellow players of Marqeta Chess Club. When someone joins Marqeta, they need to say what is their superpower, usually something funny or some passion that they cherish. When I joined Marqeta, I claimed my superpower as the ability to play chess in 10 boards in parallel with 10 opponents, making each move in less than 10 seconds and win all the 10 games! Of course, I am not that good, specially if 1 or 2 of the opponents are seasoned players then I have no chance. But then, a superpower is supposed to be flashy or funny. So I gave it a try. Our SVP Brian Keilly was hosting the All Hands and told me he wants to test my superpower. Well, it's not easy to arrange a simul like this and we decided we will figure out a way later. I remember every once in a while Brian w...

  Last Tuesday Ahyan and I played the 5th and 6th round of Tuesday Night Marathon online over chess.com arranged by Mechanics Chess Institute. The games are live analyzed by FIDE Master Paul Whitehead and Abel Talamantez. After a nice win by Ahyan at 5th round he was jointly in second position with 4 out of 5 in the open section which is phenomenal at his age and rating. Ahyan and I joined the commentary by invitation from TD Judit Sztaray after the 6th round for a short time. Here are some excerpts from our games and the commentaries. The TNM newsletter for this round may be found here -  https://www.milibrary.org/chess-newsletters/931

  I have been thinking of learning Philosophy without going to a college or enrolling in Philosophy courses for some time now. Philosophy is such a vast topic that the biggest trouble for me was to figure out where to start, what are the major areas of Philosophy that I should focus on, and how to go about it within the limited time I have. Apart from my spiritual quest, I was very intrigued by  Jordan B Peterson 's mentions of  Friedrich Nietzsche  in one of the best books I have ever read  12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos . Some of my early attempts were watching the  Philosophy Crash Course  in YouTube (and planning to do these 47 videos another go in the next few weeks), reading  50 Philosophy Ideas you really need to know  by  Ben Dupre,  listening in audible  50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting, Seeing: Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books  by  Tom Butler-Bowdon , and r...

  I have been fascinated while listening to and reading about the Universe since my childhood. But most of those readings have been random, organic in nature just like my readings on everything else -   science fictions , detective novels, history, biography,   cricket , soccer, and so on. The notable exception is Chess and Software Engineering which I have done pretty significantly in terms of   method and volume .  In 2015 I started reducing my overall time spent reading, learning, and playing chess (it was not an easy decision, believe me). That gave me extra time to focus on my pursuit of knowledge outside of my day job and family responsibilities. So I picked up first to understand religions and particularly Islam as I felt it's my duty to know in detail as a Muslim.  About 3 years  of reading, watching videos, enrolling in seminars on topics related to Islam, Comparative Religions, Atheism, and relevant topics - I felt like it's good enough for m...

From the recommendation of my friend Ashfaq, I finished listening to the short story collection  Exhalation  by  Ted Chiang  yesterday. Ted Chiang has won four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and four Locus awards. His short story,  Story of Your Life , was the basis of the film  Arrival (2016) . In the 9 short stories and novelette of Exhalation, Ted Chiang brings out a fusion of science, technology, religion, philosophy, ethics, morality, relationship, fantasy with great mastery. He takes an idea and gives it a very human touch instead of just focusing on the core technical idea, exactly the type I like. After Cixin Liu's  Three-Body Problem trilogy  that I finished 3 years back, Exhalation is the book that is going to instill FOMO (fear of missing out) in me for the new breed of sci-fi books (I still can't come out of Asimov). The stories in this collection are listed below. The first two ar...

Gorvodharini is a popular and well-known book written by famous Indian Bengali novelist Samaresh Majumdar, published from Kolkata in 1986. It's a story of 4 revolutionary youth  Anand, Kalyan, Sudip, and Joyita who went to shake the  consciousness of  feudal society by taking arms in hand. While their small movement could hardly make a dent in the society, they ran away to Nepali underprivileged village in remote mountains and built a new society. It's the story of Joyita eventually turning into Drimit with the hope for a new society where they hope for equality, simplicity, and justice. When I was in school and college, books of  Samaresh Majumdar along with Sunil Gongopadhdhay, Shirshendu were things that everyone would read. I somehow couldn't read it at that time, but I am glad that finished it now to revisit those old days.

1. Positive mental attitude 2. Self/Achievement motivation 3. What is Communication? 4. Communication and Listening Skills 5. Conflict Resolution 6. Leadership 7. Relationship Building 8. Negotiation and Meditation 9. Teamwork 10. Work Ethics

Here is a convenient online audio and text translation of Al-Quran in Bangla - https://banglaquran.netlify.app/ I tried it out from both my mac browsers and iPhone safari to make sure I can clearly listen to the audio and read the text. This is particularly great as you can choose to read and listen to both Arabic and Bangla recitation and translation or just either Arabic or Bangla.

The author of  The World is Flat  Thomas L. Friedman  is another eloquent speaker and an optimist. In this interview he talks about the current COVID-19 situation and how we should prepare for the world once this pandemic is over. Friedman calls for a sustainable strategy  to maximize lives and livelihoods  with a moral/ethical trade-off. Because if you are all focused on lives, mother nature will kill every job; and if all you are focused on jobs, she will kill as many lives as she can. Then he touches on how we are reacting on the COVID-19 situation - Chinese model  - complete lockdown Swedish model  - partial lockdown, natural hard immunity US model  - tired of lockdown, opening up before it's safe He calls for humility, coordination, and strategy dictated by chemistry/biology/physics as that's the only logic mother nature understands. He points out the winners will not be those who are the strongest nor the smartest and nor th...

AHappyJob, an online portal for job-seekers, recently contacted me to ask a few questions around the challenges of leading engineering teams. They published a blog post with my answer about it here – The Challenges of Leading Engineering Teams What do you wish engineers understood the challenges their managers go through? My Answer:  When engineering managers are giving relatively high dev estimate for an apparently small task, they are not moving slow, they are adding time to account for the unexpected. When they are going to meetings after meetings, it’s so that you don’t have to. They can answer some of your questions, but they don’t have all the answers. Also, they crave feedback but rarely get it.

Earlier this week I finished  Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less  by  Greg McKeown . Essentialism is doing only what is important and essential while saying No to all the rest of the things that come to us. This book has made me think if I am doing too much with my limited capability and time. In fact, I am very sure I am doing too much and the book merely pointed out that to me in a crystal clear manner. The idea of essentialism is similar to minimalism, although I think essentialism has a more positive connotation to it. It's fundamental personal discipline and leadership quality. You may have also heard about doing smart work instead of hard work, which is also relevant to this. Greg tells us that the way of essentialists is to  (1) explore and evaluate, (2) eliminate, and (3) execute . With that in mind, I am thinking that I need to optimize my life for the following essential things -  family, health, profession, and knowledge . However, I am won...

I finished  Think and Grow Rich  by Napoleon Hill yesterday. This is arguably one of the most popular personal development books of all time. In this book, Napoleon emphasizes that success comes to those who are success conscious. He lays out 13 principles to get rich which can also be used for any other goal than money. Burning Desire  - Wishing alone won't bring money. fix your mind on the exact amount of money you desire determine exactly what you intend to give in return for the money establish a date you want it to achieve create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and putting into action write out the exact amount of money you intend to acquire and what you are willing to give in return for it read our your statement out loud twice daily Faith  - When you truly have faith in a desire and believe that it will come true, it starts manifesting its own physical self. Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve. Auto-s...

For the below picture, I would put it in the second box - not urgent but important for work.

Stanford University Psychologist  Carol Dweck tells us about the power of mindset in this fascinating book. She figured that people use one of two basic mindsets in their lives - fixed mindset and growth mindset. People with fixed mindset believe the abilities are largely fixed while people with growth believe that abilities can largely be developed with effort over time. If you think your capabilities are coded genetically and you can only vary to a certain degrees no matter what you try, you are applying a fixed mindset. On the other hand if you see that it's not just your gene but your environment, your overall context and how you utilize that will determine where you will end up, you are applying a growth mindset. Do you remember the Denim aftershave ad where it says  for men who don't have to try too hard ? This is a perfect example of fixed mindset. People with fixed mindset put themselves into an imagined box and think that is the overall boundary within which ...