As some of you may already know, I recently decided to move back home to Bangalore, India (I’ll be leaving on August 19th, 2013). This is an attempt to state why I’m making this rather large change in my life.

I recently came across the transcript of a speech by J.K. Rowling at Harvard¹. The speech is titled The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination and I highly, highly recommend reading the speech (it’s not very long).

I’m a little late to the party in putting one of these out, but here goes anyway. 2012 turned out to be a fun year. In the grand scheme of things I didn’t do anything that’d blow anyone’s minds away, but I did a lot of small things that have made me a much happier person. Overall, I’m pretty happy with what I got done. Here’re the highlights:

What Happens When A 35-Year-Old Man Retakes The SAT?

I came across a blog post recently that got me thinking. If you haven’t read it yet, take the time to go read it ^{1 2}. I’ll wait…

If you follow the cricketing world at all, you’re aware that Rahul Dravid recently announced that he will be retiring from test cricket. This has been written about endlessly all over the internet. People have had a lot of great things to say about him, and that goes to show the kind of person he is. There have been pictures, videos etc. of his career, matches he played and so on. I’ll leave it the task of documenting the high points of his career to more knowledgable people than myself.

Around a week and a half ago, I was at lunch with some people from my team. I’m not sure what path our conversation took, but somehow we started talking about using alarms to wake up in the morning. Specifically, I mentioned that I had been using Sleep Cycle to help me wake up. I said that I’d been using it for a few months and had found that I had indeed been waking up feeling less groggy, but I wasn’t sure if the app was really working or if I just wanted it to work. It could well be that it’s all in my head, and the app has nothing to do with it beyond being a placebo.