vyanarma

[vyanarma]

I’m nothing without my Control Strip. Losing it after every macOS update is the closest I’ve come to understanding life. You grow, you update, and somehow the things that made you you disappear. The trick is knowing how to reboot in (a) Safe Mode and find your way back to yourself.

[vyanarma]

Sometimes life serves such nonsense problems, I don't even feel like opening my mouth to anyone about it

[vyanarma]

That bollyblindgossipsubreddit has been getting on my nerves. I get it, punching up, whatever but those people are so weird. Even on my worst day I wouldn’t go in on some actress like that. the energy in there is just mean for no reason.

But ig I understand cuz where else is all that frustration supposed to go? You can’t dish it on politicians. make one wrong meme and you’re in jail next week. So it just… trickles down to mayanagri. We in India have SO much pent up anger with the kind of inequality we have, that frustration has to go somewhere.

Understanding but still so annoyed by this circle jerk of vitriolic hate

[vyanarma]

bad interview

oml I did that interview that I was so excited about. Honestly, why did I even let myself be so excited? Because after 45 mins into the interview cto said "I don't think this will work out for either of us" fortyyyyy-fiveeeeee aaaaaaaaaaa 😖😖😖😖 There was still a whole half of the call left!!! and all I could do was to just sit there asking questions about metadata filtering like someone who had not just been told no. 😩😩😩

cto asks me what vectorization is. I knowwww what vectorization is. I have a ML specialization. I read about it. And when he asked me I said 'conversion of chunks into numbers' aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhrrrgghhhh. 😖😖😖😖😖 Why couldn’t the earth just crack open and swallow me whole then zip itself back up like in Dune but less icky and more like a courtesy exit?

the worst part, theee worst part was the design problem. He drew a scenario, thousands of PRs, how would you handle it. And he asked me TWICE. aaaaaanddd was basically handing me the answer. I could see in retrospect he was holding the door open and saying "walk through it." And I said it might be out of scope. in an interview. for an AI engineering job. Where the job description said RAG is must-have biatch atch atch 😖

i'm more angry me for not catching the lifeline.

I feel so ashamed by this that any person who even has just 1 bullet point about this on their résumé could've probably held a conversation. But not this biatch atch atch 😖

And I have a degree in this 😭 I did internships. I built agents. have GitHub repos. and I don't know what to do with that information? What an uncomprehending biatch atch atch 😖

The thing I keep not letting myself say is that I'm scared. Not about this interview specifically. About the next one. About the one after that. About whether I am going to keep walking into rooms and getting told nicely that this isn't going to work out.

It's not something that I can’t fix. I can fix the research gap in a few weeks. the fear is what i will invariably have to sit with

i graduated six millionn months ago. There are graduates who have graduated or are soon graduating probably already know this. Time isn't the variable. They did the thing and I didn't do the thing. Priorities are a biatch atch atch 😖

or atleast I'm constructing them in my head as fully realized engineers. They might be just as scared as I am. They might have bombed a different interview last week. I'm comparing my insides to their LinkedIn outsides, which is the oldest mistake in the book, and I'm still doing it.

The interviewer was kind tho. said he'd stay in touch, gave me real advice.

it would’ve easier to be a victim of a cruel interviewer than to be a person who got a fair assessment and didn't measure up. What a victim playing biatch atch atch 😖

What is this. it's not failure exactly because the interview is one data point. It's not shame exactly because I didn't do anything wrong. It's like. grief? for the version of today where the interview went well and I texted people. that version existed in my head for like a week and now it doesn't and I have to be in this version instead.

okay. I think that's enough for today. Have another interview tomorrow for which I'm a complete mismatch but what else can we do? What a people's time wasting biatch atch atch 😖

[vyanarma]

i was always skeptical of arms exporters like Lockheed for selling F-16s to Pakistan and sliding a somewhat similar F-21 to India. just saw a slightly old article that their advanced f F-35 "supposedly undetectable" got shot down in Iranian airspace. karma don’t miss this is what you get for playing both sides of war that could get millions of people killed and pocketing billions while doing it. hope the stocks take a hit 👅

[vyanarma]

WHY HAS THE WORLD BECOME TABLOID LEVEL DRAMATIC?

There's a Devil wears Prada sequel coming out.. few years ago it would have excited me so so so much. I probably would've gone crazy watching the cast interviews, trailer launch ANYY press junket. Simply put I would've cared. I do not care. I mean, I watched the trailer. It was OK, but I don't think it's completely the film's fault. I don't judge or put high expectations on movies that are more event driven, and tentpole -ish. I used to be a kind of person who would flip through blind items, page 3 news, who's dating who, whose PR is spinning what. That stuff used to LIGHT ME UP. Then, as I got older, somehow geopolitics fully replaced Celebrity gossip as my poison. tbh who wouldn't when geopolitics plays out in a way more dramatic way that no screenwriter could pitch. I mean, they probably could but the fact that it's real obv makes it more interesting.

case(s) in point: Ayatollah strike (Hella interesting. the way they hacked into their security system, using Israel's intelligence, tapped their phones, coordinated the attack for so long, learned peoples daily life like a machine learning model.that is mission impossible level crazy. wtfff aaaand when at the last minute they also apparently postponed the strike by a day because they had a chance to kill even more cabinet ministers besides the Ayatollah) SEAL rescue mission: I closely followed the Osama raid too. I think it was such a well done operation. US has the best everything best chopper flyer best land Navy, whatever army. You name it. With the iran war going on, the way they rescued that pilot by spreading a little rumor early on. this stuff is too riveting to ignore. wow 🤯

Trump's cabinet shuffle: mildly interesting, but still has my attention Every morning I wake up and the world has rearranged itself a bit. Isn't it like a political thriller that updates every few hours? And I cannot put it down. Not just globally, in India too, for instance, Modi introduces a woman's reservation bill which can’t actually be implemented until after a census and a new delimitation exercise which is not until after 2033 but he would still like credit for introducing it. This is the level of political drama I am operating at daily. To be fair, I find this entertaining because right now, today, it’s not directly burning down my life. The women who’ve been waiting years for actual representation in Parliament aren’t scrolling through this for fun. I wouldn't say that news is more important than fiction because obviously doomscrolling any drama from my couch while unemployed is not exactly a productive use of my nervous system. But my God, the pull is real. It has gossip it has intrigue. sevvveral shocking reversals. To put it it bluntly, fiction is losing on its own turfff Not gonna lie though movies like project Hail Mary find their audience because it's a genuinely good film. But I think it could've done bigger numbers in a world where people had more mental bandwidth left over after absorbing whatever actual news cycle they are exposed to. Maybe I'm projecting. I have too much time too much access and an insatiable appetite for geopolitical rabbit holes. If I had a job, I'd probably be too tired to do this and just occasionally socialize on the weekends like a normal person. Instead, I'm on my phone at 2 AM reading threads about things from countries that I've never visited, about operations i don't fullly understand details off. And yet I am riveted. Until then: I have no notes for Hollywood or Bollywood or Tollywood or Kollywood or Lollywood I just have no attention left to give

[vyanarma]

So I just survived a "job opportunity" that was somehow both completely legitimate and completely unhinged.

Me: I can't accept this. The pay is too low, I can't relocate without assistance and I thought housing would be included. Maybe remote could work?

Recruiter: You have NOTHING in your hand

Me: ...ok

Recruiter: Great. So. 2k per month. No housing. No relocation. 5 days on-site. Sign this declaration noww. Send your visa copy. And after onboarding just go with the flow 🙂

Me: I mean I know I have nothing but this job would give me LESS than nothing. This flow leads directly off a financial cliff

Recruiter: Yes but at the bottom is a full time offer

Me: this will put me in a very difficult lifestyle

Recruiter: That's the spirit! Just go with the flow!

Me: no

Recruiter: you can adjust. That shoud not be a problem. You can find a shared flat. Ask your friends or family in Virginia! its just a matter of 3 - 6 months

Me: I don't have friends or family in Virginia

Recruiter: We already told you the stipend. We have wasted so much time on you. We were counting on you.

Me: i know you were counting on my unemployed desperation to get me to accept a 2K stipend. And I was also going to use your cheap labour greed to flip it into a remote offer. ---------------------------------------------------------------

Honestly? I went into this process to push myself becuase these interview rounds were a good practice for my tech skills and if an offer came out of it I thought I'd try to flip it to remote.

What I did not sign up for was a recruiter telling me I have nothing in my hand like that was supposed to motivate me. bruh I know my situation. You don't have to rub it in to sell me a 2K relocation to Virginia. Let a girl live. 🙂

[vyanarma]

Do Indian tourists ever get shocked by not finding a Duggu Dev Ji mandir anywhere in Greece?

4 people in the world will get the joke.

[vyanarma]

They binned me at 8:30 AM. My interview was at 3 PM.

I sat through an AI interview. I memorised that this company's values spell STOKED like Speed, Trust, Ownership, Kindness, Excellence, Dream Big, had my whole ownership mindset arc ready to go, prepared to be the most STOKED individual in the entire Zoom call. And then at half 8 in the morning the CEO emailed me that position's filled, cheers though.

I now know what STOKED stands for for absolutely no reason whatsoever. It's just up there in my head living its best life, completely for free. Stoked to use it down a pub. Nonetheless, i get to carry this experience like a little monument from a startup in Utah that really believed in moving fast.

[vyanarma]

bunch of thoughts on Bollywood, dhurandhar, cinema, politics, democratic backsliding and Recall value

I watched both parts of dhurandhar and came out with a lot of thoughts.

will start with recall value. It's not the same as box office success. It's not critical acclaim either. Recall value is the simpler, harder question. do you want to watch this again? does it have a life beyond the week it released?

Think about Pathaan. It was a massive success: SRK's comeback, Bollywood crawling out of the pandemic. I get it. But honestly, who's going back to rewatch Pathaan? The film rode the wave and when the wave died, so did the reason to return to it. It was an event, not a film.

I think Dhurandar is headed somewhere similar. Maybe worse, actually.

Part one genuinely had something

What frustrated me a little about the whole experience, whis is that part one actually worked in stretches. The Lyari gang war material was compelling. Aditya Dhar was clearly working from a place of real curiosity there. It's a world with its own texture and weight. I was so absorbed in that part that I honestly didn't even care much about Ranveer Singh's character's backstory which, in an action film built around a hero, is saying something.

That's the version of this film I wanted. That's the filmmaker I was interested in watching.

But then there's Madhavan's character. And that's where I started feeling the other film pushing through. Almost every piece of obvious political messaging in part one comes through him. It's so concentrated in one character that it stops feeling like a creative choice and starts feeling like a script intervention. Like something added, not written.

The moment you have a character essentially explaining why something is bad and who's responsible in a very pointed way, you've lost me.

Part two made it worse. The use of real footage, the way it was cut and shaped, it crossed a line for me. There's a difference between interpretation and revision. Every filmmaker interprets. But when you're using real historical footage to reshape what people remember is weirdly a bit muchh.

The money trail: my conspiracy theory

some of this is partly rumour, partly inference. But I don't think it's paranoid.

From what I understand, the production had a rough journey. Ronnie Screwvala stepped away at some point. Aditya Dhar and Ranveer Singh reportedly worked for free. There was personal investment involved. And then well, i saw the Ambani wedding and which male celebrities were most enthusiastically dancing. And i saw which films ended up getting Jio Studios backing as distributors. I'm not saying there was a contract signed in a room. I'm saying the atmosphere of expectation is real and people make calculations within it. 🤷‍♀️

The Ambani-BJP connection isn't hidden. These are public relationships. Following that thread isn't a conspiracy theory it's just reading what's in front of you.

Financial desperation mid-production does something to a film. You start making decisions not for the story but for the people now keeping the lights on. And I think that's visible on screen in Dhurandar.

Hollywood does this too but it's different..

The CIA literally has an entertainment liaison office that reads scripts and offers notes. That's not a rumour, it's documented.

What I see happening in Bollywood and more broadly in India feels different. It's not propaganda in a noisy room. It's propaganda in a room where the noise is slowly being turned down. The financing structures, the platform relationships, the quiet threat of regulatory inconvenience, none of it issues a direct order. It just creates an atmosphere where people know what's safe and what isn't.

India's democracy, honestly

India is not a simple authoritarian state. There are courts that push backkkk, regional governments that hold real power. The scale and diversity of the place creates friction that a smaller country wouldn't have.

But there are ceilings. The Kejriwal arrest is the example I keep coming back to. Whatever you think of him or AAP the timing, the charges, the way it all unfolded right before elections. Even people who can't stand Kejriwal had to sit uncomfortably with what that sequence of events looked like. A chief minister of the capital, someone who was genuinely accumulating popular support, going to jail on those charges at that moment.

That's democratic backsliding. It doesn't show up as a coup. It uses real legal processes. Basically the form stays intact while the substance quietly shifts. And because the form stays intact, it's very hard to point at a single moment and say: that's when it broke. Which is exactly the point.

You can't really piss off the important people. That's not democracy as an idea, it's democracy as a brand.

thoughts on America

I genuinely appreciate what America represents as an idea, the protest freedom, the ability to be loud and publicly dissatisfied without an income tax raid showing up at your door the next week. That's not nothing. Atleast I don't take that lightly.

But 2026 America has the ICE situation, people being picked up, the fear that's spread through immigrant communities. All of that is not the America of its own self-image. The protests are still happening, which matters. But you can feel them being tested. You can feel the edges of what's permitted being quietly renegotiated.

I think both things can be true. America can be genuinely more free than most places I know and also be in a moment where that freedom is under real pressure.

So will Dhurandar last?

I don't think so. Not in the way that matters.

Recall value requires something real at the center. You return to a film because it gave you something true moved you.. When the intention behind a film is misplaced, when it's trying to reshape memory rather than illuminate it, that falseness has a half-life. It expires.

And streaming doesn't save it. In a theater you're in a bubble no distractions. The manipulation that a darkened room can absorb becomes visible and annoying on a laptop at home. People will pause. They'll feel the gap between what the film is showing them and what actually happened.

I shoukd repeast that Lyari material shows a filmmaker with genuine range and curiosity. The fact that it's sitting right next to the other film - the pressured one, the compromised one, makes the compromise more visible, not less.

[vyanarma]

Ram Navmi

My grandfather built a temple for lord Ram. It was right at the front of our gali and growing up I was spectacularly unimpressed by this fact. Festivals would come and go ...Ram Navami, dashmi, ekadashi...and I would find some quiet corner of the house to disappear into, perfectly alright to let mummy and the elders handle the sacred business of it all. All I had to do was shower and dress modestly.

Now I'm in the United States, mid-job search and apple calender reminded me it’s Ram Navami today. No temple at the end of any lane or any loud bhajan leaking through the walls. No one to ignore or hide from. And somehow that’s what gets me. The absence of something I never fully showed up for. I moved an ocean away and here I am, thinking about a temple in a city where nobody else knows it exists. Turns out you can't really leave a thing that was never asking you to stay.

[vyanarma]

The Moral convenience of hating the Right enemy

There's s strange thing happening in how the world (by that I mean the podcasts and news articles I'm seeing) is watching the US-Iran situation unfold.

People who would never, under any other circumstances, minimize a government that shoots protesters in the street, that executes people for being gay, those same people are able to find reason to soften their language about Iran.

This is happening because some (youtube/print/tv) journalists have stopped evaluating the situation and started to pattern-match. let me explain. The pattern right now, for a large part of the commentariat, is: Trump bad, Netanyahu bad, therefore their enemies get a kind of a moral credit they haven't earned.

The Iranian regime killed way too many of its own citizens during the protests. Young women, mostly. Shot in the street for taking their headscarves off. That didn't become less true when Donald Trump got re-elected. It didn't become less true when Israel did things in Gaza that many people find deeply troubling. Moral arithmetic doesn't work that way. Human rights abuses aren’t like numbers you can cancel out.

Here's the harder thing to sit with though.

Journos and podcasters making this error aren't stupid. Many of them are reacting to something real, which is that American foreign policy has spent decades earning distrust. Iraq. Libya. The long history of propping up convenient dictators. There are people in the global south for whom "American-led world order" is not an abstraction but a lived experience of being on the wrong end of it. Their skepticism isn't irrational.

But skepticism of American power and active sympathy for its opponents are not the same thing. That gap is where a lot of honest thinking might be currently falling through.

The world is not improved by Iranian theocratic influence replacing American hegemonic influence. It is not improved by Russian or Chinese regional dominance stepping into vacuums that American retreat creates. These are not hypotheticals. It doesn't go well. Not for women. Not for minorities. Not for the press. Not for the ordinary person who would like to live without being managed by an authoritarian power.

You can think Trump is a bad president making serious strategic mistakes, particularly in how he's eroding the alliance structures that actually help American power and still think that American primacy (:/) is somehow worth preserving. You can think Netanyahu has made catastrophic decisions and still think Hamas and the IRGC are also bad. I don’t think these are contradictions.

Trump/Netanyahu haven’t changed. But Iran hasn’t either.

[vyanarma]

try: eliminate(event_from_mind) except ImpossibleTaskError: redefine_goal("less spike, not zero thoughts") if triggered: say("this is a memory, not a current threat") breathe() let_it_pass()

[vyanarma]

Instead of: “I need to stop thinking about this” Try: “I want this to stop spiking me every time it comes up”

[vyanarma]

my life is cooked and I'm watching Mahabharat all day

My life is in shamblezz. And somehow, inexplicably, the thing I've ended up turning on at the end of the day is Mahabharat and Ramayan - the old tv serials.

I'm not religious. I grew up in a family where incense/pooja/hawan/rituals.. the works.... And somehow most of it didn’t feel true to me in the way it seemed for almost everyone else. Nothing too odd. Most people don’t take mythology as history, but are able to have a faith in a superior driving force uuuup there.

I'm probably watching mythological serials because I'm in one of those stretches of life where you start asking the kind of questions that don't have clean answers. Like why is this happening to me? I'm not a bad person. So why does it feel like I'm the one absorbing so ,uch friction?

I’ve never really been a big fiction-TV person. Usually I only watch something if there’s something specific pulling me in -actor/director or something topical behind it. Like I watched Succession because I was curious about the American news ecosystem. That’s usually my lane: news, reality, stuff that has buzz. And I still see these epics as over-the-top, sometimes even ridiculous, heavily fictionalized stories. But for some reason, lately, I keep ending up back there. Like something in me is looking for something in them, even if I don’t fully know what that is.

And I think that's exactly why these epics sneak up on you. Not because they answer the question but because instead of answering those questions they sit with it. (current episode i'm on has a monologue of krishna highlighting the inequalities in the world..so ok.. checks). These stories are built around the very questions I'm circling at from 1 AM TO 1PM. They give me a framework. A way to look at what's happening and go, "okayyy, maybe this is just what it looks like when you're in the middle of something."

My mind knows this isn't history. I'm not suddenly convinced these events literally occurred. I know I'm watching a dramatized retelling of stories that were themselves passed down and shaped across centuries. But the metaphor hits different when you're actually going through something.

Draupadi somehow forgives her five husbands and I mean, respect, because that's a lot to forgive. she also goes with them into exile, keeps her composure and just... waits 🫨😔😶☹️. She holds onto the grief but doesn't let it destroy her ability to function and move on.

And then there's Duryodhan, who is evil in a cartoonish sense but he’s also strangely relatable because he genuinely believed he was wronged. Pandavs lost the kingdom fair and square in a dice game they agreed to play. From his view, giving it back was just weakness. And everybody around him was practically begging him to just hand over five villages not even the whole kingdom, literally five villages and the war would have been avoided. He couldn't do ittttt. Only because his sense of having been wronged had become bigger than his sense of self-preservation (something like that, I couldn't think of a better word). He burned his entire future to hold onto a feeling.

The uncomfortable thing is that both of these characters are doing something most people would struggle with in ordinary life. Draupadi is practicing a kind of forgiveness that isn't really forgiveness in the release-everything sense. It's more like a decision to not let her pain make her irrational. And Duryodhan is doing something most do sometimes, which is choosing the feeling of being right over the choice that would actually make our lives better.

The reason it's so hard to apply any of this to real life is another reason why these stories feel almost unfair as moral templates. Draupadi had some sense through Krishna, through the shape of events that justice was coming. She wasn't letting go into a void. She had something to hold onto. Most of us don't get that. We're just asked to release things without any guarantee that releasing them leads anywhere good, without knowing whether the people who wronged us will ever face any consequences, without a narrator telling us this is the part where it gets better.

And that's genuinely hard. I hope it’s not a weakness to find it hard. But it is probably pathetic to want consequences/tragedy to befall someone who hurt me. I think it would be much easier to have a good natured way to forgive anyone once good things happen to me too. But it won't matter then. I have to make that decision now. To not harbor any ill will, hope the best happens to me and everyone else. It's just the difference between living inside a story where the moral arc is written in advance and living an actual life where it isn't. (and various other hard hitting things that I forgot, but they hit hard enough to prove effective)

So yeas. I'm coping by finding just enough in the symbolism to take a breath and keep going in my life. PRANIPAAT!!