about me
Hi, I am Atharva. This is my writing dump site.
some of my core beliefs
- A life worth living is one that is mindfully observed.
- The world is fractally interesting and surprisingly malleable—look for the levers.
- Live with playful sincerity and a strong belief that we can always do better.
things that I do
I spend most of my waking hours as a member of nilenso, a tech cooperative. Through nilenso, I get to work with various organisations' software systems—my favourite one that I got to tinker with so far is one in which we add feedback loops to help countries prevent millions of deaths caused by heart disease.
I also write and make art for fun. Some old digital art stuff is here, sometimes it's weird outsider music like this.
I find that there's always lots to write about. At any given moment I might have 20-30 unpublished drafts of things I could write about scattered across all my digital dumpzones. If you want to write too, I found On Writing Well to be a big motivator and unblocker for me that eventually got this site going.
ideas that have a deep influence on how I think
- Antifragile made me sensitive to uncertainties and non-linearities that drive the world.
- Thinking In Systems: A Primer is perhaps secretly the most optimistic book I have ever read—because it revealed to me that every important thing ever is a system that we can't impose our will on, but one we can dance with and lovingly redesign into a better one.
- There are many “instantiations” of systems thinking where we see this—here's one about designing society through architecture and here's one about your role in policy.
- Mindfulness practices have definitely changed how I perceive the world and think in a way that I haven't been able to satisfactorily describe yet—the best I can do is implore everyone to give it a solid attempt.
- I Am A Strange Loop, a book about how animate beings can emerge from inanimate matter, made me appreciate the fractal depth of abstractions and why we need them.
specific interests
- Food, flavours, and the craft of cooking.
- I like most things, but I'm partial to Karnataka Thindi, Sichuan Cuisine, Konkan coast flavours, Japanese Cuisine, Ethiopian Cuisine, Thai Cuisine... (as I type this I realised this list will soon morph into a paragraph so I'll stop here)
- Home-brewing coffee.
- Writing.
- Want to do more of: Photography and Bouldering